Google Ads Search Certification Study Guide

MGMT 310

Relevance

Google Ads helps you connect with the right people, at the right time, with the right message. Your ads can appear on Google Search, YouTube, and more, just when someone is looking for products or services like yours. You can also customize options, such as keywords and location, to get in front of the most relevant customers.

Control

Google Ads gives you complete control over your budget. You choose how much to spend per month, per day, and per ad. Based on your settings, Google Ads uses a lightning-fast auction to determine which ad to show. If you want to change your strategy, you can easily adjust your ad, modify your budget, or pause and restart a campaign.

Results

Pay only for results, like clicks to your website or calls to your business. Our measurement tools make it easy to see how your site, apps, and ads are performing. Plus, smart technology lets you create, manage, and optimize your campaigns so you can get the most out of your investment.

Search, Display, Video, Shopping, App

Google Ads campaign types

Display

Increase brand awareness when users are browsing content they're interested in online.

Shopping

Promote your products, share details about your inventory, and boost traffic to your online or physical store.

Search

Drive action on your site when users are searching for similar products or services.

Video

Reach your target audience at scale and bring your business story to life.

Local, Hotel, Discovery

Specialized campaign types

Local

These campaigns help you drive important offline metrics — like store visits or in-store sales — by advertising on multiple platforms. Let Google Ads optimize how your ads appear on Search, Maps, Display, and YouTube to maximize your offline performance.

Hotel

These campaigns display hotel prices and availability on Search, Maps, and Assistant to connect you with the millions of travelers actively searching for you.

Discovery

You can easily engage customers across Google's most popular properties with a variety of rich, unique ad formats. Reach your users across the YouTube Home Feed, Gmail, and Google's Discover Feed — all with one campaign.

Device Targeting

Reach your customers on any device, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

Locations and Language Targeting

Your campaign's ads are eligible to show to customers in particular locations, or to customers who've chosen your selected language as their browser's language setting.

Bidding and Budget Settings

Your bid strategy controls how you pay for users to interact with your ads. Your bid limit is the most that you'll pay per click for ads in an ad group, and your budget is the average amount that you're comfortable spending each day on your campaign. The budget that you choose is entirely up to you, and you can adjust it at any time.

Ad Extensions

Include even more information with your ads, such as location details, links to pages on your website, and your phone number.

How can Google Ads help you advance your business goals

By driving online, in-app, in-person, and over-the-phone sales, By building awareness of your brand, By influencing consideration of your products and services

Search

These ads show up next to Google search results and on other Google partner sites, like YouTube, when people search for products or services you offer.

Video

These ads appear on their own or within other streaming video content on YouTube and across the Google Display Network.

Shopping

These ads promote your products by giving users detailed information about what you're selling. They appear on Google Shopping and next to search results.

App

These ads drive engagement, app installs, and in-app purchases. They appear across the Google Search and Display Networks, as well as on Google Play and YouTube.

Campaigns

Are created around a marketing goal and set up based on the actions you'd like customers to take.

Marketing Goal

Should be the main thing you want to achieve for your business and can be changed at any time. Search campaign marketing goals can be set to Sales, Leads, or Website Traffic. (Display, Video, and App campaigns have additional goals to choose from.)

Google Search Network

Includes, by default, Google Search partners. Your ads will show on Google Search, but also extend to the hundreds of additional sites partnering with Google.

Networks

Setting indicates where you want your ad to appear, based on the campaign type you select.

Devices

Includes desktop, tablet, and mobile. You can also choose to customize ads for different devices.

Geographic Location

Your campaign's ads are eligible to show to customers located in, or who show interest in Geographic Location.

Language Targeting

Allows you to restrict where your ads may appear, based on the user's language settings and the language of the site.

Budget

Is the average amount you're comfortable spending each day on your campaign. You can adjust it at any time.

Bid Strategy

Controls the manner in which you pay for users to interact with your ads. Once you choose the metric you'd like to focus on for your campaign, you'll see different bidding options to help you optimize for it.

Web Traffic

Get more customers to learn about your new products.

Leads

Gather contact details through a signup page.

Sales

Encourage customers to complete a purchase.

How to get the right customers to see your ads

1. Create ad groups 2. Create a unique list of keywords 3. Create a set of text ads for each ad group 4. Dynamic search ads

Keywords

The words and phrases that will prompt ads to show up. It's best to create ad groups around themes or products.

Bid Amounts

The maximum amount your company will pay when a customer clicks on their ad.

Text Ad

The 3 required parts of a text ad: Headline, Description, and URL.

Start and End Date

This sets a campaign start and end date.

Ad Scheduling

Allows you to choose certain days or hours of the week for your ads to show.

How ads end up in front of customers

1. A person performs a search 2. An auction starts 3. The Google Search engine ranks all the ads 4. A search turns into a sale

Broad Match, Modified Broad Match, Phrase Match, Exact Match, Negative Match

The 5 match types for your keywords

Broad Match

Shows ads if a keyword (or any variations like misspellings, synonyms, or related searches) are included in a user's search terms. (default match type)

Broad Match Modifier

Adding a + sign in front of a keyword. This prompts your ads to appear only if the keyword or its close variations are in any part of the search terms.

Phrase Match

Placing quotation marks around the keywords. Prompts your ads to appear only if the keywords within the quotation marks or close variations of them match a user's search term.

Exact Match

Place brackets around the keywords. Your ads will only show if the search means the same thing as your keyword.

Negative Match

Adding a minus sign in front of the keyword. Means ads won't show if someone includes that (-) keyword in their search.

Dynamic Search Ads Process

You specify the pages of your website, daily budget, and an ad template. The customer enters their search term in Google Search. If you have content relevant to the search, Google dynamically generates an ad headline and destination URL to the best matching page on your site.

Dynamic Search Ads Benefit

Use Dynamic Search Ads as a complement to your existing keyword strategy. Requires little effort and ensures good coverage without complex implementation or campaign management.

Incremental Search

"I want to make sure my ads appear for more relevant user searches." — Use Dynamic Search Ads.

Long-tail Automation

"I want my users to find me even on my long-tail products." — Great if your website content is large and dynamic.

Rapid Expansion

"I want to enter new markets quickly." — Dynamic Search Ads help you broaden your current activity to new business areas or countries.

Hiroko - Increase sales of kids' bikes

She can create a new ad group for the end-of-year sale.

Suitcase Company - Broad Match Benefits

They won't have to create an exhaustive keyword list of every type of suitcase they sell. They can reach potential customers that haven't yet heard of their brand.

Exact Match Keyword Example

If your exact match keyword is [running shoes], searches like "Shoes for running", "Running sneakers", "Running shoe" may prompt your ad to show.

Smoothie (Negative Keyword)

Increase Sales

Imagine you have an online store that makes and delivers organic juice (not shakes or smoothies) in 30 minutes.

• shakes (negative) - "Organic juices" (phrase match) - +organic juice (broad match modifier)

Key Value Proposition of Google Search Campaigns

Show your ads when a customer is searching for your product or service.

Dynamic Search Ads - Not Automatically Generated

Description Line

Google Ads Auction

Google's way of deciding which ads will show and how they're positioned. Google ranks the ads that appear on the search results page and determines the cost for each ad click. The order in which ads appear is based on Ad Rank.

5 Factors of Ad Rank

1. Bid 2. Ad Rank Threshold 3. Context of Query 4. Ad Extensions Impact 5. Auction-Time Ad Quality

Bid

Maximum amount you're willing to pay for a click on your ad.

Ad Rank Threshold

Minimum quality an ad must achieve to show in a particular ad position.

Context of Query

When calculating Ad Rank, Google looks at search terms, location, device, time, nature of search terms, other ads and search results, and user signals and attributes.

Ad Extensions Impact

Google estimates how ad formats (like sitelinks or callouts) will impact your ad’s performance.

Auction-Time Ad Quality

Google looks at how relevant and useful your ad and landing page are to the user. Quality Score is an estimate of ad quality.

3 Main Factors that determine Ad Quality

1. Expected Clickthrough Rate (eCTR) 2. Ad Landing Page Experience 3. Ad Relevance

Expected Clickthrough Rate (eCTR)

The likelihood that the ad will be clicked. Predicts whether your keyword is likely to lead to a click.

Ad Landing Page Experience

How relevant, transparent, and easy-to-navigate the page is for users. Should help users complete their task with original content.

Ad Relevance

How closely the ad matches the intent behind a user's search.

Average Cost Per Click (CPC)

Is not the price you're paying for each of your clicks. It's an average — actual costs can vary above or below.

Quality Score

An estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Higher-quality ads lead to lower prices and better ad positions.

Components of Quality Score

Expected clickthrough rate, Ad relevance, Landing page experience.

Ad Rank Factors - Not Considered

Increasing the conversion rate of your landing pages.

Good Landing Page Attributes

Transparency about your business, easy to navigate, relevant and original content.

Required Parts of a Text Ad

Headline, Description, URL.

People are most likely to notice your text.

Headline

Description Fields

Two fields (up to 90 characters each) to highlight unique details about your product or service.

URL

Shows your website address. Gives people an idea where they'll go when clicking your ad.

Number of Ads per Ad Group

3-5 ads per ad group.

Number of Extensions per Campaign or Ad Group

At least 3.

Responsive Search Ads

Create ads that adapt by mixing headlines, descriptions, and URLs to show the best combination to users.

Flexibility

Create flexible ads that adapt to device widths.

Relevance

Save time by providing multiple headline and description options, letting Google show the most relevant combinations.

Reach

Reach more potential customers with multiple headline and description options.

Performance

Increase ad group performance by capturing clicks and conversions your existing ads might miss.

Description Field Character Limit

90 characters.

How Google Ads generates Responsive Search Ads

Based on existing high performing ad copy.

How does Google Ads generate responsive search ads?

Google Ads creates them based on existing high performing ad copy.

What do users want?

Relevant Information, Information based on their moment, Ads that contribute to their experience.

Why do search ad extensions matter to users?

Increased Engagement, Better Ad Quality, More Qualified Leads.

What are the 3 Universal Extensions?

1. Sitelinks 2. Callout Extensions 3. Structured Snippets

What is a Sitelink Extension?

Direct to specific sections of the website. These extensions are additional links that appear just under the text of your search ads, directing users to specific pages of your website.

What is a Callout Extension?

Highlight value-adding attributes. These extensions are short, specific (25-character) snippets of text. They can be used to highlight information about value-adding attributes of the business, products, or services.

What is a Structured Snippet Extension?

Give a glimpse of what's offered. These allow you to describe features of a specific product or range of products or services offered by the business before users click on the ad.

What are the types of Ad Extensions?

1. Location Extensions 2. Affiliate Location Extensions 3. Call Extensions 4. App Extensions 5. Price Extensions 6. Promotion Extensions 7. Message Extensions

What is a Location Extension?

Give directions to the business. This extension lets you show your business address, phone number, and a map marker alongside your ad text. On mobile devices, there's a link with directions to your business.

What is an Affiliate Location Extension?

Give directions to retail partner locations (available in select countries). This allows product manufacturers to drive visits to retail partners that sell their products. The format displays the headline and URL for the manufacturer's website, ad text for the manufacturer's product, and the nearest retailer.

If you're looking to get calls from customers, use _.

Call Extensions

__ are great if you have an app to promote. This format gives you the option of driving traffic to your website or the app store from a single text ad.

App Extensions

Price Extensions

These extensions let you showcase your services and range of products alongside their respective prices. They're available globally in several languages and currencies.