Campaign structure and account setup

Use a company email address that will still exist next year. When Google offers a guided campaign, skip it and choose to create the account without a campaign. The guided flow makes choices for you that you want to make yourself.

Set the currency and time zone with care. You cannot change either later, so pick the ones your invoices use. Add billing, then give access to one other person so the account does not depend on you alone.

Link Google Analytics so you can see what visitors do after the click. Link Google Search Console so you can compare paid and organic queries. Turn on auto-tagging so each click carries its click ID.

Install the Google tag, preferably through Google Tag Manager. Create one conversion action for the outcome you care about, such as a qualified demo request. Test it with Tag Assistant by submitting the form yourself.

Switch on enhanced conversions, and plan to import won deals from your CRM later. The reasoning is in If you cannot measure the right outcome, you are flying blind.

Split campaigns by intent, because intent drives budget and target cost:

• Brand: people searching your name. Cheap, high conversion, small.
• Solution: people searching for what you sell, such as "invoice automation software". This is where most of your budget goes.
• Comparison: people searching for alternatives or competitor names. Smaller, with its own message.

Each campaign gets its own budget. A single campaign mixing all three hides which one works.

In campaign settings:

• Choose the Search network only. Untick the Display network for a first campaign.
• Target the locations where you sell, and choose the option for people in or regularly in those locations, not people who merely show interest.
• Choose the language your buyers search in.
• Set a daily budget. Google may spend up to twice that on a single day, but over a month it will not pass your daily budget times 30.4.
• Pick the bidding strategy by the guide in Bidding strategy.
• Switch off automatic extras you did not choose, such as final URL expansion.

An ad group holds a cluster of 5 to 15 keywords that share one intent, and one or two ads that answer it. If you cannot write a single headline that fits all the keywords, split the group. Finding the keywords is covered in Keyword research and match types, and writing the ads in Ad copy and extensions.

Write the rule down before you create the first campaign. A workable pattern is country, network, intent, theme:

• Campaign: "NL | Search | Solution | Invoice automation".
• Ad group: "Invoice automation software".
• Shared negative list: "Negatives | Jobs and free".

Six months from now, a filter on "Solution" shows every campaign of that type in one go.

Before you enable anything, go through this list:

1. The conversion tag fires on a real test submission.
2. Every final URL loads fast on a phone and matches its ad group.
3. The negative keyword list is attached.
4. Billing works and alerts go to a monitored inbox.
5. Every ad is approved, with sitelinks and callouts attached.
6. Each campaign has a name that follows the rule.

• Building one ad group per product feature, so ad groups hold mixed intents.
• Launching with the Display network on and wondering about odd traffic.
• Starting with ten campaigns, each with too little budget to learn.
• Skipping the naming rule and renaming everything later.
• Sending every ad to the homepage.

You can answer three questions in under a minute: which campaign produced qualified leads last month, what each lead cost, and which ad group spent the most. If you cannot, the structure is hiding your data. Fix the structure before you add budget.