Getting Started

Struggling to capture the 3% of the market that’s ready to buy?

Google & Bing ads are an excellent choice to show up in the search engine results when it matters the most.

In this blog, we break down exactly how we create optimized Google & Bing Ads for B2B companies.

Steps to Success

To get your Google & Bing ads created, these are the steps that we will follow.

1. Google Ads Account Creation
2. Keyword Forecast
3. Campaign Creation
4. Ad Creation
5. Bid Strategy & Match Types
6. Microsoft Ads Campaign Import
7. Adjust Budgets

Disclaimer: We will not be covering conversion tracking & marketing tech stack setup in this article. This will only be setting up accounts & getting campaigns ready to start running. Follow us for future content updates regarding those topics.

Why you should care about Google Search Ads in 2024

Over 2/3's of decision-makers will start their search to solve their problem in Google.

Google reserves the top 3 search spots for Google Ads.

By showing up higher for searches relevant to your business, you are more likely to be clicked.

If you're more likely to be clicked then you have a very high chance of booking a demo with these decision makers.

Google & Bing ads are a great way to capture demand in 2024.

How to Create a Google Ads Account in 2024

Create your free Google Ads account here.

During the creation process, it will ask for you to set up a payment profile.

Be sure to use a business credit card since Google Ads can be marked as a business expense.

We recommend skipping the campaign creation process that it prompts you with because it misses out on a lot of key attributes of the campaign that we would like to update.

Familiarizing Yourself With Google Ads Expert View

If you skip the campaign creation process, you will be taken to the Google Ads overview page.

At this point, we recommend swapping from the Simplified view to the Expert View.

This is important because the rest of this tutorial will be done in the context of the Expert View.

Don't worry, you don't have to be an expert to familiarize yourself with it.

Simply swap to "Use previous design" to change to expert view.

Creating a Google Keyword Planner Forecast

An amazing, and completely free feature that comes with Google Search Ads is the Google Keyword Planner.

This tool helps fill the role of expensive tools like Semrush and Ahrefs by allowing you to find keywords that you can start to bid on.

Simply navigate to "tools & settings" and click "Keyword Planner" under the planning panel to access this free tool.

Once you are inside the planner, you have two options.

1. Discover more keywords
2. Get Search Volume Forecasts

We recommend choosing "discover" simply because this option still allows for forecasts later on - but starts you out with the opportunity to add new keywords.

We have talked extensively about keyword forecasting and how to choose keywords for your Google & Bing Ads campaigns so we will not be covering that in this article.

If you want to learn more about longtail keyword's you should be bidding on for your campaigns, then click the hyperlinked article.

Creating your forecast is as easy as placing some of those longtail keywords into the discover tab and then clicking "Get Results."

From here, all that's left is to grab all of the semantically related keywords that you will also want to show up for in the search engine.

Forecasting your keywords

Once you have selected all of your keywords, it's time to select Forecast in the left side panel to review what your performance could look like if you were to bid on these keywords.

You are able to select your conversion rate and the conversion value.

As a rule of thumb, we like to choose a 1% conversion rate and a conversion value equal to your average customer value.

If you don't know your average customer value, then we recommend you follow our content for ways to calculate this and how it relates to your marketing KPIs.

Creating Your Google Search Ads

Now that the forecast is complete, it is time to create the campaign.

Select one of the create campaign buttons while within the Google Ads platform.

Here is one - but there are a ton of them - especially in new ad accounts.

From here, we are going to select Website Visits & Search Ads as the primary things to get the campaign started.

We will also fill out a few small pieces of information like the campaign name and choose Page Views as our conversion for this example campaign.

As a side note, we recommend choosing Lead's or Website Traffic in almost all circumstances. Since we didn't cover conversion tracking in this article, we decided on choosing website traffic. However if we were setting this campaign up for a client, we would have installed conversions and chosen leads.

Choose Bidding Strategy

Next, we will need to select a bidding strategy.

It's best to choose maximize clicks instead of maximize conversions because our account doesn't have conversion data yet.

So we will not be able to optimize around conversions if there is no data that Google has to do so yet.

You can choose to change this to Manual Bidding (or Enhanced Cost Per Click) as well - but it would need to be done after the campaign is created due to Google Ads limitation of selecting it during the campaign creation.

Choosing the best settings to optimize your Google Search Ads

This part of the campaign process is so important.

Here is a rapid-fire list of settings you need to make sure you select if you want optimized Google Search Ads.

1. Choose a location and select "More Options" to ensure that "Presence In" is selected. If this isn't done, you will get a lot of spam from other countries & waste $1000s in ad spend.

2. Select In-Market audiences for observational purposes - NOT Targeting.

3. Turn on ad scheduling for 6 am to 6 pm Monday through Friday to avoid wasted spend when your sales team can't follow up with leads or take phone calls.

How to Create Google Search Ad Groups & Ads

We are almost done!

At this point, we are going to paste our keywords from our Keyword Planner into the Ad Group.

Next, we need to create the ad.

This article is not going to cover how to create Best-In-Class Responsive Ads for your PPC campaigns - but if you follow our blog, there will be a future blog that does.

We will rapid-fire the keys to a great Search Ad below:

1. Use UTM tracking to keep tabs on the source of your website visits and leads.
2. Incorporate Dynamic Keyword Insertion so that the user's search shows up as a headline.
3. Complete your ad and get an excellent score (this matters for ad quality scores)
4. Use as many extensions as you can with your ads - the more space you can take up in the Google Search, the more likely your ad will be selected.
5. Use title case for your ad text (it takes up slightly more room on the search page)

Publishing Your Google Search Ads

All that's left once you create your Ad Groups and Ads is to publish the campaign.

Simply select a daily budget that ensures you are within your monthly marketing budget parameters then hit publish.

If you have $1000 to spend for the month on Google Ads - then choose a $33 per day budget to ensure it is evenly spent.

Keep in mind - if you are not running ads on the weekends, then you actually only have 20ish days to run ads for the month so adjust your daily budget accordingly if you want to hit your $1000 a month Google Search spend.

Two Last Optimizations

You can select these last two optimizations right after you publish your campaign.

1. Change the bidding strategy to enhanced Cost Per Click (or manual bidding) - this is optional but is a great way to control how much you are bidding on specific keywords. It's not recommended because Google doesn't think you will adjust your keywords as needed - however, when you work with an agency, it's their job to do this maintenance and squeeze out value from your campaigns. This is one way that we can do just that.
2. Change the keyword match types to (phrase or exact) - we never recommend broad match keywords.

How to Import Your Google Search Ads into Bing Ads in 2024

The easiest way to do this is to sign up for a Microsoft Ads account.

Once you have created an account, you can simply select Import and sign into your Google Ads account that has your Search Ads campaign.

Simply follow the steps and select your campaign to import.

How to choose an import schedule on Bing Ads

We generally recommend not setting an import schedule, especially if Bing Ads has a different ad budget compared to Google Ads.

If you do, then be sure to select "Once Now" in the import scheduler instead of the default which is automated imports.

By selecting Once Now, you will be responsible for syncing any changes from your Google Ads to your Bing Ads - however, this is a small price to pay for the piece of mind of not overspending your monthly budget.

Bing Ads will take the same daily budget from Google Ads and spend it - there is no shared budget between the two platforms.

How to adjust the Bing Ads Campaign Budget

Once you have imported your campaign, you can simply adjust the budget by clicking campaigns on the left-hand panel and clicking the pencil next to the Bing Ads campaign daily pacing.

Wrapping Up

At this point, you have optimized Google & Bing Search Ads that will help capture existing demand in two of the biggest search engines.

We recommend checking these daily for the first few weeks to ensure you're ads are showing for the right searches.

After a few conversions fire that are qualified, we recommend swapping your bidding strategy to max conversions or max conversion value.

We will create a new article on how to optimize your Google & Bing Search Ads once they are running.

Until then.