How to Launch a New Google Search Ads Campaign
Google Ads has seen significant changes over the past few years, such as privacy-focused updates, additional options for ad customization, demand gen and performance max campaigns. This post explains how to set up a new Google search ads campaign in 2026, covering best practices across all of the necessary steps including campaign structure, assets, bid strategy, and conversion tracking.
Review Historical Data
If your brand has never run any Google Ad campaigns before, skip to the next session. Otherwise, I recommend checking the historical data in GA4 before relaunching, because you may uncover valuable insights for optimizing campaign performance
Google Ads traffic will automatically show up in GA4 as medium=cpc. In the Acquisition overview report, the card that shows sessions by session campaign is dedicated to Google Ads campaigns. Apart from the standard reports, you can also build custom exploration reports. For example, you could build a report that combines the keywords that you bid on, with the search term that a user entered on Google before clicking on the ad.
Conversion Tracking in GA4
This section explains how to set up conversion tracking in GA4. For conversion tracking in Google Tag Manager, please see my previous blog post.
Conversion tracking using GA4 is easy, but it requires several steps. First, link the Google Ads and GA4 accounts. To check whether the accounts are linked properly, in GA4, the Google Ads account should be listed under “Google Ads Links.” In Google Ads, the GA4 property should appear under Linked accounts.
Next, import Key Events from GA4 to use as conversion actions in Google Ads. Here’s a helpful tutorial video on how to do this.
When creating your ads in GA4, make sure that the final URL has UTM parameters.
For example: https://datachai.com/utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={keyword}&utm_campaign=datachai&utm_content=none&utm_campaign_id={campaignid}
The above UTM template includes two dynamic values. {keyword} and {campaignid} automatically insert the actual search query that triggered the ad, and the Google Ads campaign ID, respectively. Google Ads replaces these placeholders with real-time values when someone clicks your ad.
To ensure that your conversion tracking was set up correctly, do a conversion test by clicking on your own ad and generating a conversion, such as submitting a contact form. You should see your conversion in GA4 within a few seconds. Note that GA4 takes 24-48 hours to get attributed, so your conversions on Google Ads will be delayed by that much.
Campaign Structure
A well-organized Google Ads account is built on a foundation of purpose-driven campaigns. I recommend creating separate campaigns for:
- Non-Brand: Themed campaigns grouped by core products, services, or target industries.
- Competitor: To target users considering your competitors.
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Brand: To capture high-intent users already searching for your brand. Aim for 70%+ impression share on brand terms. To better control CPCs, further split your brand campaign into two:
- Core brand: Target only the pure brand name (e.g. “Data Chai").
- Brand + modifier: Target keywords that combine your brand name with a modifier, such as a service or product (e.g. “Data Chai digital marketing", “Data Chai pricing").
Competitor campaigns can be expensive, so it’s completely acceptable to pause this if it doesn’t align with your current budget. However, a critical best practice is to add competitor names as negative keywords across all your other campaigns. This prevents your non-competitor ads from triggering on these costly searches, ensuring your budget is spent efficiently.
Google’s algorithm needs options to optimize performance, so aim for at least 2 ads per ad group to enable testing. If you’re unsure of what to test, minimum variation is fine. For example, use straightforward copy in the one version (ex. “Marketing Automation Solutions”), versus urgent or price-sensitive copy in another (ex. “15% Off, Limited Time Offer”). To save time, draft ad copy in a spreadsheet for bulk uploads.
Keyword Match Types
For maximum control and cost-efficiency, I recommend starting with exact match keywords. Google’s phrase match has become increasingly expensive and less precise in recent years. Instead, use phrase match strategically as a research tool to discover new, high-performing keywords to later add as exact match keywords.
Search Partner Network Placements
When setting up your Google search ad campaigns, you’ll encounter the option to include Google search partners. Search Partners include other Google properties and websites, such as the Google play store, Google maps, and YouTube. I recommend turning off search partners, as I noticed that it generates mostly junk traffic and leads. In my experience, I’ve never seen or heard of any clients or colleagues getting positive results with it.
Bidding Strategy
In this section, I’ll describe how to choose the appropriate bidding strategy for your business goal. Google offers several different manual and automated bidding methods: maximize clicks, maximize conversions, maximize conversion value, target impression share, and manual cpc.
Lead Generation
If your business goal is lead generation or conversions, follow this basic strategy: start with manual cpc bidding to maintain strict budget control while the algorithm gathers data. Then, once your campaign consistently generates 30-50 conversions per month, consider switching to maximize conversions.
Brand Awareness
However, if your business goal is brand awareness, then you might try target impression share (TIS) bidding. TIS is an automated bidding strategy that allows marketers to set a target for the percentage of impressions they’d like their ads to receive, in relation to the estimated number of impressions available. I’d recommend focusing on ad placement at the “Top of results page", because absolute top can be extremely expensive, but visibility significantly drops as you move down the page.
Note that target impression share is not a smart bidding strategy, but is an automated budding strategy. Google’s algorithm will ignore your bid adjustment settings, with the one exception being a -100% device bid adjustment, which you can use to opt out of showing your ads on a specific device type.
Performance Max
Performance Max, or “PMax” campaigns take the historical conversion data in your Google Ads account, then uses smart bidding to optimize ad performance. Google’s algorithm shows your ads to similar audiences across all of Google’s advertising networks (YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, etc.) to get you new conversions.
PMax can be highly effective if you have enough historical conversion data, but if your Google Ads account is brand new, don’t go for PMax in the beginning. With PMax, you only have the option for smart bidding, so you’ll have to pick either maximize conversions or maximize conversion value right away. On top of that, you can specify the target ROAS or target CPA.
Once your account is ready to add PMax on top of your existing campaigns such as Search or Shopping, make sure to have these two settings in place: exclude your own brand, and target new customers only. Otherwise, the PMax campaign will just target branded traffic and high intent search traffic, which would have converted anyway through your existing campaigns.
Another warning about PMax is that you can’t target specific audiences. You can and should feed in as much audience signals as possible — remarketing lists, customer match, competitor websites, keywords they search for, brands they’re interested in, every little detail you can think of for your buyer personals. But at the end of the day, those are mere “signals”, not limitations. Google will surpass your signals and target audiences outside of your signals as its algorithm sees fit.
Demand Generation
Demand gen campaigns, first launched in mid-2023, are intended for increasing awareness of your brand. Contrary to PMax, demand gen gives you full control over audiences and ad placement within the YouTube and Display networks. I highly recommend setting up custom audiences and exclusions for demand gen campaigns, instead of relying on Google’s optimized targeting. In 2024, Google lowered the required minimum list size for lookalike segments from 1,000 to 100, so smaller businesses can also take advantage of this feature.
Once you’ve set up and launched the ad campaigns, monitor them especially closely over the first 1-2 weeks. Avoid over-optimizing too soon because Google’s algorithm needs conversion data. I’d wait for a minimum of 50 clicks before acting on any early trends such as underperforming ads or converting keywords.
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Launching a new Google Search Ads campaign requires careful planning, from ad copywriting to technical implementation. Whether you’re setting up a new account or relaunching an existing one, these best practices will help you to hit the ground running and maximize ROAS. Remember to start with manual CPC to control spend, give the algorithm enough data before making major adjustments, and leverage GA4 for reporting.
If you found this post helpful, share it with a colleague, or bookmark it for your next Google Ads campaign setup.
Ready to take the next step? If you’re looking to launch a new Google Ads campaign and require a digital marketing specialist, feel free to reach out to me. I offer full service including campaign setup, conversion tracking, and ongoing optimization and reporting.