Creating a Google Ads campaign takes seven steps, and the most important one isn’t on the platform: deciding what counts as a conversion. Without that defined beforehand, the campaign goes live optimizing for the wrong target, and you pay to find out.
Step 1: define your conversion
Before you open the dashboard, write down which action is worth money. A WhatsApp conversation started, a form submitted, a completed purchase, a call answered.
This definition becomes the algorithm’s target. If it’s wrong, everything else works efficiently in the wrong direction.
Step 2: choose the campaign type
Search captures people who are already searching. Performance Max distributes across all channels. Demand Gen creates demand among people who aren’t searching yet.
For a service business’s first campaign, Search is almost always the answer, because it delivers data you can interpret. Performance Max without conversion history becomes a black box.
Step 3: split your ad groups by intent
Each group should have a single theme, with keywords that call for the same answer. Someone searching “refrigerator repair” and someone searching “buy a refrigerator” can’t see the same ad.
A group with twenty keywords on different subjects forces you to write a generic ad, and generic ads convert worse.
Step 4: choose your keywords and match type
Start with phrase match and exact match. Broad match is where your budget disappears, because Google interprets it generously.
Build your initial negative keyword list right at setup, with the obvious terms from your industry, and review it every week.
- free, no cost, download
- course, study guide, certificate
- job opening, salary, exam
- how to, DIY, when you sell a service
Step 5: location and budget
Set the area to exactly where you serve customers. If the service is in person, uncheck the option that includes people who merely show interest in the region, otherwise you’ll pay for clicks from another state.
As for budget, Google’s minimum is R$5.00 a day, but too low a budget leaves the campaign limited and off the air part of the day. The minimums by industry are in our guide on how much Google Ads costs.
Step 6: write your ads
Use the same word the person typed in your headline. Add a verifiable differentiator, like turnaround time, neighborhood, or warranty. Fill in the extensions, because they take up more space in the result and improve your click-through rate.
Write at least three ads per group, so Google has something to compare.
Step 7: set up tracking before you go live
Google Tag Manager installed, GA4 receiving data, the conversion event firing and imported into Google Ads. Only then go live.
When the sale closes outside the site, the data needs to flow back from your CRM to the platform, which is what our page on conversions and CRM integration explains.
And if you’d rather have someone handle this first setup with you, that’s what our Google Ads management delivers.
The 5 settings Google’s setup wizard turns on by default
The guided setup flow turns on a series of things by default, and none of them are usually explained on screen. It’s the same five settings in almost every new account.
Display Network turned on in a Search campaign. It shows up as a reach suggestion and mixes two completely different auctions in the same report. Turn it off and create a separate Display campaign if you want Display.
Search partners turned on. Your ad starts running on third party sites with performance you don’t control and can’t separate cleanly. On a new account, turn it off until you have enough volume to compare.
Automated ad optimization. It applies variations on its own. In an account that’s still learning, this gets in the way of figuring out which creative actually worked.
Automatic targeting expansion. The system shows your ads to audiences beyond the ones you chose. It makes sense once conversions are tracked, not before.
Maximize Clicks bidding without a cap. It spends your budget on volume, not results. Set a CPC cap for the first few weeks.
None of these settings are a trap in a bad-faith sense. They’re the default for accounts that already have enough data for the system to learn from, and a new account doesn’t. Reviewing these five before you publish takes five minutes and usually changes your cost per conversion in the first month.