Google Ads is the fastest way to put your business in front of someone who is searching for exactly what you sell. It is also the fastest way to spend a few hundred pounds on nothing, because the default settings are designed to spend your budget, not to protect it.

This is how I set up a first campaign for a small business. It is deliberately conservative. You can loosen the settings once you know what is working.

Before you start

Decide on one thing you want people to do: phone you, fill in a form, or buy one product. One campaign, one goal. Then check that the page you will send people to actually makes that action easy on a phone. If it does not, fix the page first. Adverts pointing at a weak page are the most common way small businesses lose money.

Set a budget you can afford to lose entirely for two weeks. Ten pounds a day is enough to learn from. You are paying for information at this stage, not for sales.

Step 1: create the account and skip the wizard

When you create a Google Ads account, it will try to push you into "Smart" mode. Switch to Expert mode. Smart campaigns hide the settings you most need to control.

Step 2: choose a Search campaign

Pick the campaign type called Search. This shows a text advert to people who typed a search. Leave Display, Video, and Performance Max for later; they reach people who were not looking for you, which is a much harder sell.

Under the goal, choose the thing you decided on above.

Step 3: turn off the two settings that waste money

In the campaign settings, untick Search Network partners and untick Display Network. Both are ticked by default and both send your adverts to places that are far less likely to convert.

Set your location to the area you actually serve. Under location options, choose "presence" rather than "presence or interest". Without that, someone in another country reading about your town can trigger your advert.

Step 4: pick a handful of keywords

Keywords are the searches you want to appear for. Start with five to ten, and be specific. "Emergency plumber Norwich" is worth far more than "plumber".

Use phrase match by putting each keyword in quotation marks. Broad match, the default, lets Google show your advert for anything it decides is related, and in the first weeks that decision will be wrong more often than right.

Add negative keywords from day one. These are searches you do not want. "Free", "jobs", "course", and "DIY" are common ones. This list will grow every week as you see what people actually searched for.

Step 5: write the advert

A search advert is a set of short headlines and descriptions that Google mixes together. Write them so any combination makes sense.

  • Put the thing they searched for in a headline. If they typed "emergency plumber", the advert should say "emergency plumber".
  • Put your location in a headline.
  • Say something concrete: "Same-day callouts", "No call-out fee", "Family run since 2004".
  • End with the action: "Call now" or "Get a quote".

Add your phone number as a call extension and your address as a location extension. These make the advert bigger on the page at no extra cost.

Step 6: set bidding to something you understand

Choose Maximise clicks with a maximum cost-per-click limit for the first two weeks. Start the limit at a pound or two. This caps what any single click can cost you while you gather data. Google will suggest automated bidding strategies; ignore them until you have at least thirty conversions to learn from.

Step 7: track what happens

Set up conversion tracking before the campaign goes live. For phone calls, use Google's call reporting so calls from the advert are counted. For forms or sales, add the conversion tag to the thank-you page. Without this you are flying blind and every later decision is a guess.

The first two weeks

Check the campaign every couple of days. The report you want is called Search terms. It shows the actual words people typed before they clicked. You will find surprises. Add the useless ones to your negative keyword list and add the good ones you had not thought of as new keywords.

Do not judge the campaign on day three. Give it two weeks, then ask three questions. What did each click cost? How many clicks became a call or a sale? What did each of those cost you? If that last number is less than what a customer is worth to you, increase the budget. If it is more, fix the page or the keywords before spending another penny.

When to get help

Google Ads rewards patience and attention, and it punishes both neglect and impatience. If you would rather have someone set up and watch the first campaign with you, get in touch. The aim is always to get you to the point where you can read the numbers yourself.