Google ads Basic for beginners & Adwords Quality score

Google Ads for complete Beginner

Google Ads, formally Adwords has been designed for the hotelery industry. It’s core understanding is the relevance  between your ad content, your keywords and your landing page. As such there’s a direct link between the time you spend optimising your website (Technology / content / data layer / Tags) and the cost per click you will get to advertise it. 

introduction to online advertising – if you want the broader picture.

Google Ads Structure 

The structure in google ads is based on multiple layers. 

• Account level (billing / access / report / tagging / Legal / account linking)
• campaign
  • Ad Group
    • Keywords / ads

You will find one more level available in a form of an MCC which allows an access and management of multiple accounts. Usually used for large corporations or agency.

It follows a structure similar to a website taxonomy 

• Website
  • Category lvl 1
    • Category lvl 2
      • Category lvl 3

What is doing what ? 

• Campaign : define a budget and targeting for all your ad group defined into it.
  1. Daily budget / monthly budget 
  2. Bid strategy (Google will force you into an automation, if you are a starter, look for advance options and setup manual CPC) 
  3. Geographic targeting 
  4. Device targeting
  5. Schedule targeting 
  6. Campaign Type (in the following notes, I ll be using the campaign type : Search) 

• Ad Group : Contains a set of ads & Keywords, if you are a starter, setup 1 or 2 responsive search ads, and a max of 15 to 20 keywords.
  1. Keywords default CPC 
  2. Audience targeting
• Ads : That’s the only part that will be publicly visible by your customers
  1. You can currently only do responsive search ads
     • 3 mandatories headlines (max 25 characters)
     • 2 mandatories descriptions (max 90 characters)
     • 1 mandatory final url 
     • 2 optional paths (max 15 characters) 
• Keywords : A list of keywords linked to your ads 

How to Structure your data in Google Ads

If you just start with Google advertising, you should mimic your website structure to your google ad account, But you can also takes no risk and build your first campaign offline in Adwords Editor.

Ie. I own a website selling Shoes segmented for simplification in two parts, women and men, each of them have 3 more level down

Website level 1	Website level 2	Website level 3	Website/ product level 3
Women	High heels
		Casual	Attribute 1
			Attribute 2
			Attribute 3
		Evening	Attribute 1
			Attribute 2
			Attribute 3
		Party	Attribute 1
			Attribute 2
			Attribute 3
		High Standing	Attribute 1
			Attribute 2
			Attribute 3

Website level 1	Website level 2	Website level 3	Website/ product level 3
Men	Leather Mocassin
		Casual	Attribute 1
			Attribute 2
			Attribute 3
		Evening	Attribute 1
			Attribute 2
			Attribute 3
		Party	Attribute 1
			Attribute 2
			Attribute 3
		High Standing	Attribute 1
			Attribute 2
			Attribute 3

Entity type		Name
Campaign 1		non Brand – high heels – casual
	Ad group 1	AG – high heels – casual
	Ad group 2	AG – high heels – evening
	Ad group 3	AG – high heels – party
	Ad group 4	AG – high heels – high standing

Campaign 1		non Brand – Leather Moccasins – casual
	Ad group 1	AG – Leather Moccasin – casual
	Ad group 2	AG – Leather Moccasin – evening
	Ad group 3	AG – Leather Moccasin – party
	Ad group 4	AG – Leather Moccasin – high standing

In that case it allows you to converge a high correlation between your list of keywords inside one ad group and the ad associated with it. 

Another Scenario – Getting more granular

If you wanted to, you could also get down one level to allocate a higher budget to one category of your product. 

Campaign 1 = LVL 1 + LVL 2 of a website 

Campaign 1		Non Brand – Women – High heels – Casual
	Ad Group	Attribute 1
	Ad Group	Attribute 2
	Ad Group	Attribute 3

Why Do you need to plan before creating a proper structure for your Advertising campaigns ?

A campaigns needs traffic to work, 60 % of the job will consist at finding the right balance between :

• No traffic / Low search volume / too many exclusions
• Too much traffic / Broad request / Bad quality traffic 

Keeping in mind that The daily budget is generally set at the campaign level (you can actually create a group budget for a set of campaigns but I don’t recommend it), it’s important to figure out first how much money you went to focus on your main product or services. 

Let’s take an exemple : 

You want to shine bright to your boss and tell him, no problem, I’ll cover all your website in one campaigns in 10 minutes : (DO NOT DO WHAT IS FOLLOWING) 

You build 1 campaign : type Search 

Because the keywords is very broad, the ads very generic, and the homepage usually not much full of specific content, your quality score is probably gonna be low : “wait what did you just say ? There’s a quality score ?” 

It’s about time to understand the famous keywords “Quality score” 

Définition : Quality score is the relevance between your keyword, your ad and the landing page linked to your ads. FAQ

Keywords = Shoe + text ads = great shoe + landing page = Welcome to shoeland.com = score 1/10 

Keywords = High heel casual red shoe + ad = headline Buy High heel red shoe + landing page = High heels red shoe collection = score 9/10 (let’s say between 6 and 8 on average)  

Why is it important ?

Quality score is the primary criteria that will define your rank on google. Higher the score better default ranking lower the cost per click. 

Google judges that more you are relevant, less you need to pay per click to be in the top positions. 

Before you get any traffic, the Quality score is hidden, but however exists (you can add the column to check it at the keyword level tab), this quality score will define another metric : Estimation first page bid (how much min bid I would need to appear on the first page of google) 

Once you get traffic, the quality score is double checked by humans, users… The rate of click compared to the number of time when your ad add an impression (CTR) will refine the quality score, and thus impact your ranking again. It also impacts another metric : Estimation top page bid. How much it would cost you on average to get to the first top 3 – 4 positions. 

Not all the platforms actually use the correlation system, but it will work for Bing, and Adwords. If you use Yandex, it’s more easy, higher bidder, higher ranker… who pays win. 

Advancing in your knowledge into advertisement you will understand more and more the notion of “signals” the amount of micro data that google will use in its automation bidding to improve your performance. To build that history you need a proper foundation, and the quality score will help you get there on the long term. However if you do not care about it, you will get there eventually, It’s just gonna be much more painful in cost and traffic cleaning time. 

Google Ads 1.01