This blog post is the second of a two-part series. You can find the other post here- Google Ads for Dummies: 4 Campaign Must-Haves (Part 1). We made these to set a baseline for what small businesses need to ensure results from Ads. This post serves to summarize the full picture. This post focuses more on specifics of how to setup your Google Ads campaign. Below, you’ll see what your ads need, more broadly, to put your best foot forward with this new channel.
It’s important to set realistic expectations here. Google Ads is not a guerilla marketing campaign. You won’t get a big boost of new customers overnight. Instead, you’ll need to work to drive a steady flow. This flow will be consistent, and you’ll be able to take measurable steps to improve it. It won’t explode customer volume for you quickly, but it also won’t dry up quickly. Google Ads will be a workhorse for you; if you feed and care for it some, it will be there day in and day out. As you move forward to launch or optimize early campaigns, keep this in mind.
A Healthy Volume of Impressions and Clicks
It’s not enough to just launch your campaign. You also need plenty of impressions and clicks such that you achieve your goals on Ads. You may have set loose or strict goals for the number of leads or customers that you want to drive from ads. Both of these are normal and come at natural (early -> later) stages of your business. But first, always keep in mind that you still need significant enough volume to get close to your goals. Our way of doing this comes from the fire, measure, aim approach that we often write about. You want to launch campaigns first, and then follow up to optimize them. Step #1: get to the point where you drive at least enough clicks to spend the full daily budget you’ve set in Ads. To spend your full daily budget at least maximizes your spend, and ad clicks require spend. You want to spend your full daily budget to maximize the number of chances you have to drive a customer. Once you’re spending, you want enough impressions. You need to make sure you drive enough clicks to achieve your goals. This starts with sufficient impressions (people viewing ads) at an industry-standard clickthrough rate. New campaigns often may not spend their full daily budget at first, and you may not know why. When adding keywords, estimate the number of monthly impressions and clicks you’ll see. You can do this in the Google Keyword Planner (a tool in ads), by adding them under “Get search volumes and forecasts.” With this estimate you’ll also see an assumption on your expected clickthrough rate of ads. Use this info to back-calculate the number of clicks you need to drive the number of leads or customers you want. Estimate a conversion rate on the traffic you’re driving (the rate of clicks becoming leads or customers). It’s perfectly fine to start with back-of-the-napkin math. Your lead or customer goal / your estimated conversion rate = the number of clicks you’ll need to hit that goal. Map these out, then find enough keywords to hit that goal. This confirms that you may be able to get close to that volume on your current daily budget. You absolutely do not need to hit this instantly. You may set a lower budget and plan to increase it when you see success. The key is that, from the beginning, you put yourself within spitting distance of your goal.
Conversion Tracking & Conversion Goals
In 2025, Google Ads rely strongly on conversion optimization. This means your ads thrive, most of the time, when they use conversion goals. Conversion actions are “a customer action that you’ve defined as valuable to your business.” Conversion goals, from there, are goals that you set your campaign to optimize for. Google’s optimization is quite powerful when used well. You can see dramatically more conversions by optimizing ad spend toward driving conversions. To do this, first decide which actions you want Ads to drive. Phone calls, key page visits, web form completion, scheduling a meeting, and purchasing are options. Most small businesses prioritize new customers, and ROI, as their advertising goal. Optimizing brand awareness, presence in ad auctions, or clicks isn’t the best goal to start with. Businesses just getting started should start with a goal that drives customers. You probably already know your goal because you know how customers reach you today. Once set, do some quick analysis to figure out what this action is worth or what the breakeven cost is. Do this by looking at how much revenue you make from customers that contacted you, this way, within a period of time. Then, divide that revenue by how many leads or customers took this contact method. Once you know the goal and cost per goal, you need to install Google’s conversion tracking. This code tracks when this action happens on your website. Installation can be complicated, so help from a developer will often be required. That being said, many content management systems have ways to do this quickly. You can also opt to install something called Google Tag Manager to do this. With it, you only have to install one tracking system that you then push changes through. To finish conversion tracking, test to make sure conversion tracking works. You can use Google’s tag assistant to do this, and you may need to tweak how things are setup to get it working correctly. After that you can launch your campaign with confidence. Make sure to use conversion goals and optimize campaigns to these goals. They help you do everything you can to encourage Google to drive real business through your ads.
Effective Landing Pages
A landing page could be defined as a page that people land on from a marketing campaign. Google Ads uses the term final url instead. It’s defined as “the destination webpage people reach after clicking your ad.” Your landing page is the first part of your business that the people who click your ads interact with. It does all of the heavy lifting after you drive customers from ads. Your landing page needs to pitch your products and build trust in your business. It also needs to appeal to people’s emotions and motivate them to take action. While doing this, it should reduce as much friction as possible from the process of buying. An effective landing page decreases the cost of gaining a lead or customer. It does this by increasing the percentage odds that a website visitor will take action. In order for a landing page to achieve this it needs to do a few things. As we mentioned it needs to pitch your products, but in a way that the average buyer will understand. Next, it needs to minimize distractions and present one call to action. That call to action should be visible as soon as someone visits. We call this “above-the-fold” in marketing. Below the fold, when visitors scroll down, it needs to offer supporting information about products. Toward the bottom it should build trust and conquer any objections they have to buying. Whatever your landing page is, though, effectiveness is objective. If you have a landing page with a high conversion rate it IS effective, regardless of any of those rules it breaks. If not, it isn’t effective regardless of how many rules it follows. Best practices for landing pages aren’t gospel, they’re just guidelines.
A Working Sales Process
Certainly, you need content to make an effective Google Ads campaign. But once you capture leads you also need a working sales process. This is a sales process that turns leads into customers, or gets entry-level customers to buy again. Many businesses launch ads but don’t focus on closing as many of the leads they capture as possible. Studies show there’s a 10x decrease in purchase rates on sales leads that get contacted more than 5 minutes after submission. What this means is that speed-to-lead is key for a business that wants to make the most ROI off ad spend. Studies also show that by making a few call attempts, rather than just one, sales reps can increase contact rates of a lead by 70%. These studies go on to present that 30% of sales leads taken in by any business are never contacted at all. This data proves companies should try to contact leads as quickly as possible. It also proves that they should follow up with leads several times. Of course, small businesses have limited resources across the board. That may make it difficult to meet all these goals. Part of this comes down to culture. If you want to grow your second priority, after retaining customers, is closing new ones. This could look like a simple mindset shift. It could also look like a set of processes. Commonly, for example, companies set up cascading follow up. This means the whole team may pitch in on trying to engage new leads. Businesses could also set up automated follow up, by email or SMS. This is designed to make sure they keep in touch with leads, or get them to schedule a call with a sales rep in the future. The process of setting up a working sales process will look a little different for each business. To turn Ads into a profit-driving machine, use best-practices like these to boost sales.
For ads to succeed, we truly believe your ads need these 4 things. But that doesn’t mean you need them all, or that you need them to be perfect, on day 1. Instead, consider these your key pillars to success. You can start small, and launch an initial test for each. You don’t need to prove Google Ads will help you triple your business in the first few weeks, and shouldn’t expect that. Instead, you should constantly run tests to boost results in each area. Then, just let them sit for a bit and collect data to help you decide your next test. You’ll be iterating on these over time, so there’s no need to get mired in indecision. Just make sure you’re collecting performance data and that you’re making tweaks over time. Use Google Analytics to monitor traffic behavior. Find some way to identify where your customers are finding you. Maintain customer contacts in a CRM or at least a spreadsheet. Take a diligent process, but balance that by making sure not to complicate things. Consistent wins come from finding this balance.