4 Simple Steps (Plus a Bonus Step) To Get Your Google Ads Brand Campaign Running
One of the quickest, simplest and least expensive wins (for your business) is to bid on your brand. Anything digital can be a challenge for a lot of companies but for any digital marketer worth his or her grain of salt, this would be one of the first things they setup. With that in mind, I am going to try and make it as simple and painless as possible for you or your business to setup. Not only will I discuss the setup, I will also add in the pitfalls you want to avoid. To show you all of this I will use the “Happy Monday Marketing” brand (my company) as an example.
Here are your 4 easy steps (plus a bonus one) to get your brand campaign up and running.
1. Create Your Campaign in Google Ads:
Here you want to add a “New Campaign” and select “Search” and then “Website Traffic.” We are using both of these settings to ensure we get all of the traffic for our search keywords as we do not want Google to optimize for sales or leads just yet. Lastly, we need to add our website into the page.
2. Enter Your Campaign Settings
Here is where we are creating the specifics of your campaign: Name, Networks, Locations, Languages, Budget, Bidding, Flight Dates, etc. The most important settings are in the Bidding Strategy and the Network settings which are both below:
Network Settings:
We deselect both, “Include Google Search Partners” and “Include Google Display Network” to ensure we are ONLY showing in Google search results and maintaining high quality traffic.
Bidding Strategy Option 1:
We select Maximize clicks to ensure Google is listing us for as many searches as possible while maintaining control over what we will spend on branded terms.
Bidding Strategy Option 2:
We would use this setting if you want to rank #1 for your search terms no matter what. Downside is that it gives us less control over our costs.
3. Setting up Adgroups and Keywords
This step really is specific to your brand. Using “Happy Monday Marketing” as the example, we want to phrase match and exact match both searches like this:
At this point in time, there are not a lot of searches happening for “Happy Monday Marketing” nor are there other businesses which share that exact name. Meaning there is zero competition for either of those searches.
Your business or brand could be in a completely different competitive position. For instance, you may be a realtor, a doctor, a dentist, or in sales where your brand could be your name. What if your name is common and you have multiple people you need to compete with. The question is: How do we not list for companies who share part of our brand? In this case we want to use “Negative Keywords” to ensure we do not list for the longer tail searches of the brands, people or keywords you are competing against.
What that means in practice is if we are competing against a doctor then we want to use “DR,” “Doctor” and “MD” as our negative keywords. That will prevent your ad from showing to anyone searching for your name “John Doe” + “MD” or “John Doe MD”.
Example:
If your brand is something generic and really competitive then you may want to think about re-branding. If that is not possible than you may want to add long tail searches to your brand. Like “[Brand Name] in [City] or [Neighborhood]” or “[Brand Name] + [Service(s) you offer]”.
You could approach this a different way and build a negative keyword list to show for your generic brand terms minus the negative terms you do not want to list for. But, using basic generic keywords plus a negative keyword list way has more pitfalls than benefits. Depending on the brand I would advise against this setup.
4. Creating Ads — The Fun Part!
Lots to unpack in writing ads, but the most important thing to do for branded ads is to ensure a couple of things. First, confirm the person searching has found the right ad or listing they were looking for. How do you do that? Well, in the “Headline 1” bar we confirm the search. Like this:
After that, you want to state what you will do for the people searching for your brand: Your USPs, offerings, qualities and provide a call to action. Here is our final product:
After you have written your ad, confirm the details and start the campaign. Now, if you haven’t added “Search Impression Share” to your campaign reporting, you should add that as well.
Here is where you find it:
5. (Bonus) Post Setup Optimizations & Monitoring
The hard work is done! Your campaign is live, getting lots of traffic and is converting amazingly well. You are also getting 100% of the search impressions you want to list for. This would be the perfect outcome for this campaign. If not, then you need to ensure your negative list of keywords is up to date, potentially need to change your bidding strategy and maybe even re-write your ad to make it more compelling/engaging. If you are happy with the results of the campaign, depending on the level or amount of traffic, we can use the brand campaign as a barometer for the following things:
1. How well your site or funnel is functioning, i.e. are your conversion rates rising or falling?
2. If your other online or offline efforts are having an impact, i.e. is the traffic growing month over month?
3. A way to check on your brand, i.e. if using the brand name you trademarked?
These are just windows into these issues, but at least having this campaign up and running gives you another starting or check point. So, keep a close eye!
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