Google Ads Guide 2026: How to Set Up, Run & Optimise Campaigns

10. What are the Google Ads bidding strategies?

Bidding strategy determines how Google sets (or lets you set) the amount you're willing to pay per auction. The right choice depends heavily on how much conversion data your account has.

11. How do you use negative keywords effectively?

Negative keywords tell Google which searches your ad should not show for. This is arguably the highest-leverage, lowest-effort maintenance task in the entire platform, and it's the one most accounts do too rarely.

1. Go to Reports > Search terms weekly, and review the actual queries triggering your ads — not just the keywords you added, but what people literally typed.
2. Flag anything irrelevant to your offer: wrong intent ("free," "jobs," "how to," DIY-oriented terms for a service business), wrong product category, or geography outside your service area.
3. Add negatives at the right level: ad-group level for terms specific to one group, campaign level for terms that should never trigger anything in that campaign, and account-level negative keyword lists (managed under Tools & Settings > Negative keyword lists) for universal exclusions like "free" or competitor brand terms you've decided not to bid on.
4. Use negative match types the same way as positive keywords — broad, phrase, or exact — to control how tightly each negative excludes.

12. What ad extensions (assets) should you use?

Google renamed "extensions" to "assets" in 2022, but the function is the same: additional information attached to your ad that takes up more real estate on the results page and directly feeds the "expected impact" component of Ad Rank. Ads with strong asset coverage consistently outperform ads without them, at no extra bid cost — you only pay for the click, not for the extra visibility.

Add at minimum sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets to every active campaign — there's essentially no downside, and Google's own guidance treats sufficient asset coverage as a meaningful factor in the Optimization Score (Section 19).

13. How do Performance Max campaigns work?

Performance Max (PMax) is a single, goal-based campaign that serves across all Google inventory — Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps — from one campaign, driven by machine learning rather than manual placement or keyword control. You supply asset groups (headlines, descriptions, images, videos, logos) and a conversion goal; Google decides where, when, and to whom to show which combination.

1. Go to Campaigns > New Campaign > Performance Max, and select a conversion goal that matches an existing, accurate conversion action from Section 7.
2. Build asset groups around distinct themes — for e-commerce, typically by product category; for lead-gen, by service line — mirroring the same "one intent per group" logic used for Search ad groups.
3. Add Audience signals (not hard targeting — PMax treats these as a starting hint, not a restriction): customer match lists, website visitors, and relevant interest categories.
4. Set account-level negative keywords via Tools & Settings > Brand restrictions and negative keyword lists — PMax's own campaign-level negative keyword controls are limited, so account-level lists are your main lever for excluding irrelevant traffic.
5. Give the campaign a genuine 2-3 week learning period before making significant changes; PMax's black-box nature means early volatility is normal, not necessarily a sign of a broken setup.

14. How do Google Shopping campaigns and Merchant Center work?

Shopping ads run from a product feed rather than keywords — Google matches your product data (title, description, price, images, availability) against search queries automatically. Setup happens in two parts: Merchant Center for the feed, Google Ads for the campaign.

1. Create a Google Merchant Center account at merchants.google.com, verify and claim your website URL, and set up shipping and tax settings accurately — errors here are the most common cause of product disapprovals.
2. Upload your product feed: a direct file upload, a scheduled fetch from a hosted file, or — most reliably for larger or frequently changing catalogues — a content API integration or a supported e-commerce platform plugin (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.) that keeps the feed automatically synced.
3. Optimise feed titles and descriptions with the actual search terms customers use — "waterproof men's trail running shoes size 10," not just a generic internal product name. Feed quality substitutes for the keyword targeting you'd normally control in a Search campaign.
4. Link the Merchant Center account to Google Ads under Tools & Settings > Linked accounts, then create a Shopping campaign (Standard or as part of a Performance Max asset group) referencing that feed.
5. Use Merchant Center Diagnostics weekly to catch disapproved products before they silently stop serving — a disapproved product generates zero impressions with no obvious alert in the Ads interface itself.

15. How does audience targeting and remarketing work in Google Ads?

Audiences let you layer behavioural and demographic targeting on top of keyword or automated targeting, and they power remarketing — showing ads specifically to people who've already interacted with your business.

The single highest-value remarketing list for most accounts is past converters, excluded — build a remarketing audience of people who already purchased or completed the lead form, then exclude them from prospecting campaigns so you're not paying to re-acquire someone who's already a customer, unless a genuine repeat-purchase or upsell campaign specifically targets them.

16. How do you manage budgets and bid adjustments?

Budget is set at the campaign level as an average daily amount — Google can spend up to roughly double that on any single day if it sees a strong opportunity, balanced out over the billing cycle, so short-term daily fluctuation above the set budget is expected behaviour, not a bug.

1. Set initial budgets based on target clicks: divide your monthly budget target by expected CPC to estimate click volume, and sanity-check that against the conversion rate you need to hit a meaningful number of conversions.
2. Use bid adjustments (device, location, time of day, audience) to shift spend toward segments that convert better — if mobile converts at half the rate of desktop for your business, a negative mobile bid adjustment protects budget rather than spreading it evenly across a channel that underperforms.
3. Review the Budget report (under Campaigns) for "Limited by budget" status — a campaign losing impression share to budget constraints, especially one with a strong Target CPA or ROAS already, is usually a signal to increase budget rather than a warning to reduce it.
4. Avoid frequent, small daily budget changes — each meaningful budget adjustment can restart a portion of the Smart Bidding learning period, so batch changes weekly rather than reacting to single-day fluctuations.

17. How do you A/B test ads and landing pages?

Google Ads has a built-in Experiments feature (under Campaigns > Experiments) that splits traffic between a control and a variant of a campaign, giving statistically sound comparisons rather than eyeballing before/after performance, which is vulnerable to seasonality and other confounding factors.

1. For ad copy testing, RSAs already test headline/description combinations automatically — but testing genuinely different value propositions (price-led vs. benefit-led messaging, for example) still needs a deliberate experiment rather than relying on RSA's internal combination testing alone.
2. For landing page testing, run a Campaign Experiment splitting traffic between two landing page URLs, and let it run long enough to reach statistical significance — Google's Experiments interface flags this, but as a rule of thumb, wait for at least 100 conversions per variant before drawing conclusions on a meaningful metric like conversion rate.
3. Test one variable at a time. Changing headline copy, landing page, and bidding strategy simultaneously makes it impossible to attribute a performance shift to any single change.

18. How do you link Google Ads to GA4 and Search Console?

Linking Google Ads to GA4 gives you access to GA4's richer behavioural data — engagement, page paths, event sequences — for traffic that came from paid clicks, and lets you import GA4 key events directly as Google Ads conversion actions, avoiding the duplicate-tracking problem covered in Section 7.

1. In GA4, go to Admin > Google Ads Linking, select the Google Ads account, and enable both personalised advertising and auto-tagging during setup — auto-tagging appends a gclid parameter to your ad URLs, which is what allows GA4 to attribute sessions back to the specific ad, keyword, and campaign that drove them.
2. Back in Google Ads, go to Tools & Settings > Linked accounts > Google Analytics (GA4) to confirm the link and import any GA4 audiences you want available for remarketing.
3. Import key events as conversions under Tools & Settings > Conversions > Google Analytics 4 properties — this is generally the more reliable single source of truth described in Section 7, rather than running a separate native Google Ads tag in parallel.
4. Separately, link Google Search Console under GA4's Admin panel (Search Console links) to bring organic query data into the same reporting environment — useful for spotting keywords that convert well organically and might be worth testing as paid terms too, or conversely, terms you already rank well for organically where paid spend may be less necessary.

19. How do you use Google Ads reporting and the Optimization Score?

The Optimization Score (visible on the Recommendations page, 0-100%) estimates how much headroom exists to improve performance based on Google's own suggestions — bid strategy changes, new keywords, asset additions. It's a useful directional signal, but it should never be chased blindly: several common recommendations (broad match expansion, automatically applied budget increases) can conflict with a deliberately tight, well-controlled account structure.

1. Review the Recommendations page regularly, but evaluate each suggestion against your actual account goals rather than applying everything to push the score toward 100%.
2. Build a recurring reporting cadence: weekly search term and negative keyword review, monthly performance review against budget and CPA/ROAS targets, and a quarterly full account structure audit.
3. Use Auction Insights (available at campaign, ad group, and keyword level) to see impression share, overlap rate, and position relative to specific named competitors bidding on the same terms.
4. Set up automated anomaly detection rules or scripts to flag sudden spend spikes, CPA jumps, or conversion tracking drops to zero — catching a broken conversion tag within a day matters far more than catching it three weeks later during a monthly review.

20. What are the most common Google Ads mistakes?