My First Time Using Google Ads

This week at Praxis, we were given a very open-ended assignment: learn to use a new tool to help a business in some way. The only ramifications were to go out of our comfort zones and to choose a business that we were either close to or were interested in. My thinking initially drifted towards something music related, which would make sense. It would have been very reasonable for me to design some promotional material for a company I like, but I decided that would be too in my comfort zone. Instead, I decided to go for a complete curve ball, and start an ad campaign for my dad’s bar in downtown Houston. Here’s how it went.

Initially, the plan was or me to enter the existing Google Ads campaign for the bar and modify some stuff, as there had been a couple things that my dad couldn’t figure out, like bidding on specific keywords. Keywords are essentially search terms related to your product/business that will be used to promote your business. If you run a business that sells minimalistic streetwear, your biggest keywords would be obvious things like “minimal clothes” or “streetwear brands”. The way that text ads with Google work, is that bid on certain words, and of course whoever pays the most will have their ads most prioritized on any given search. Normally, Google does this automatically with their own artificial intelligence, but he wanted me to set manual bid amounts higher on some specific words. It sounded easy enough, but somehow or another, I got bogged down and couldn’t figure it out. As I alluded to earlier, this is nowhere near my comfort zone, so it was most likely an error on my end, but that doesn’t matter for now.

I ended up pivoting late into the week, and decided to simply create a whole new ad campaign from scratch, which was surprisingly pretty easy. Honestly, I think giving the background on everything before took much longer to explain than this will, because Google made it very simple. They have a streamlined process for setting up search result ad campaigns: just a few steps on what your goals and budget are, and a section for submitting a few basic things such as a short description of the business, some logo/product images, and the general audience demographic, which I will show pictures of down below.*

All in all, this was a very new experiment for me. I was very frustrated trying to figure out the more advanced portions of it, so this might not be for me, but I’m happy that I tried something different. Since the campaign is a fresh launch, I won’t be able to report immediately back on the results of it to see if it does well, but I’ll at least include a picture of the final overview of the page.*