Google Ads Tutorial 2026 Part 2: How To Set Everything Up

The first part of this Google Ads tutorial focused on understanding how everything works. Now comes the time of clicking, doing, and seeing actual progress.

We go through keyword research, creating assets, and launching a campaign.

The Research Game: Find the Perfect Keyword

In Google Ads, you can advertise your offer on selected websites or, more commonly, when a specific keyword is searched.

You will need to find a keyword that associates with your offer best.

To do so, ask yourself some questions:

• What do people search for when they look for offers similar to mine?
• How are similar offers being marketed?

At first, you can start the keyword research on your own. Type your keywords into the browser’s incognito mode (so you get unskewed results) and see if you can find similar offers. Check also the “People also ask” section in the SERP, and the AI Overview block if Google shows one for your query. Both will tell you a lot about what users actually want when they search for that term.

The second step is to use professional keyword research tools. Google provides one called Keyword Planner, which is a great way to check the volume of traffic you can expect. Other tools worth a look are Semrush and Ahrefs, which let you check competitor data and historical keyword performance that Google’s own tool no longer shows in detail.

Branded Keywords

During your research, you may be tempted to use branded keywords, meaning words strictly related to a specific brand or term, like “coca cola”. Follow these two simple do’s and don’ts when deciding whether to use these keywords:

Do:

Do use keywords that are related to a brand you own or have rights to use. You may think it is pointless to pay for something you can get for free (since users can reach your offer organically when searching for your brand), but your competitors may intercept this traffic. You don’t want a situation where a user types in your brand name and the first thing they see is an ad that says “10 reasons not to use your brand.”

Don’t:

Don’t use keywords that do not belong to you. Google is very sensitive to that, and so are trademark owners.

We will talk about setting up keywords later. For now, it is important to get one or more keyword ideas.

Landing Page: People Have To Land Somewhere

A landing page will be the destination for your visitors. You need one up and running before you even think about creating a campaign.

If you are not a web developer or a graphic designer, there are many automated solutions that will let you build a beautiful landing page without typing a single line of code.

Regardless of how you create your landing page, remember that Google will grade your work. Its primary goal is to provide a smooth marketing experience for its users. Every landing page that gets marked as poor quality will not get much traffic, and in 2026 it will also drag down the ad strength score of any Performance Max or Demand Gen asset group it sits inside.

You sell your page both to Google and to your visitors. And the first one drives the latter. It is a two-birds-one-stone scenario. We have covered the topic of creating a good mobile landing page in one of our previous articles.

On top of that, you need to provide good and compelling copy that resonates with your audience. You may find some tips here.

Create a Google Ads Account

Here comes the biggest “duh…” moment of this entire Google Ads tutorial: you need a Google Ads account to run ads in Google.

An advertising account has to be attached to your Google account. Create a new one or use an existing one.

Remember how Google grades your account credibility? It becomes important now.

If you use an existing Google account, your account history matters and may have a positive or negative impact on your score. If you create a brand new Google account for the first time, make it a good one:

• Google actually checks for your physical address, so if you have provided one that does not exist or the address of a sports stadium, for example, you will get a lower rating.
• Have an email address with your first and last name. It is graded as higher quality than an abstract address name.
• Attach a reliable payment method.
• Complete advertiser verification when prompted. Since 2023 Google requires identity verification for most advertisers before ads can serve at full reach, and skipping it now is a sure way to get throttled or suspended.

Meet all the criteria and you should not have any problems running a campaign. Keep in mind, however, that we cannot completely rule out the possibility that you, your account, or your campaigns will be questioned by Google. You are at their mercy.

The Campaign Structure, or How I Got To Mars

Forget for a brief second that you are an affiliate marketer who wants to get as many people to your web page as possible. Think in reverse, the way people trying to launch a manned mission to Mars must think: they want a few of the best people. They need to be exclusive, screen out people who do not fit the profile, and pick only the ones interested in space topics.

This way, Google Ads’ campaign structure makes more sense.

In this perspective, Google’s campaign structure is a three-level funnel that sifts out people who do not hit specific marks on your list. This leaves only the perfect future Mars colonists.

Now go back to the original affiliate marketing idea. You want many people, but you want them to convert later, so their relevance or affinity matters. You still want to sift out the uninterested users but get the biggest number of the most interested ones. Use each level of the Google Ads campaign structure as a way to sort users and get the ones that matter for you.

You are almost like a Mars program director.

A note before we start: the three-level structure described below (campaign → ad group → ad) is the classic Search campaign structure. Performance Max and Demand Gen replace ad groups with “asset groups” and replace keyword targeting with audience signals and AI-driven matching. Most of the underlying principles still apply, but the levers are different. We will mainly walk through the Search flow here.

You have reached the point in this Google Ads tutorial where there is nothing else to do but start a new campaign. Let’s roll.

Level 1: The Campaign

The first thing Google will ask you to do, before even choosing a campaign type or providing a campaign name, is to select your campaign goal. This will limit the number of suitable campaign types to the ones that can hit that goal and will optimize your campaign accordingly.

The current goal options include Sales, Leads, Website traffic, App promotion, Local store visits and promotions, and YouTube reach, views, and engagements (the latter is what Google’s old “Awareness and consideration” goal got renamed to for new campaigns in 2025).

Once you define your goal, you will have to select a campaign type. We talked about campaign types in the first part of this tutorial. The only thing to add here is that in some setups Google will give you the option to combine more than one type in a single campaign, especially when you select Performance Max or AI Max for Search.

For classic Search campaigns, keep one principle in mind: one campaign equals one campaign type. Mixing inventory inside a manually controlled campaign skews the results. For PMax it is different by design, since the whole point is cross-channel.

Selecting a campaign type is followed by providing a campaign name and defining GEO targeting.

And then comes this barely visible but powerful option called audiences.

Audiences

This is a power tool that will make your targeting more accurate. Target people based on their:

• Affinity. Select interests that are related to your offer.
• Demographics. Define their age, parental status, household income, etc.
• In-market. Set audiences that are actively researching or comparing products in your category.
• Custom audiences. Build your own audience from keywords, URLs visited, or app usage.
• Remarketing. Target audiences that have previously engaged with your business. This is still an extremely efficient strategy, especially for ecommerce and B2B funnels.

In 2026, audiences in Search campaigns work as “signals” rather than strict targets when you enable optimized targeting or use Smart Bidding. Google will use your audience list as a hint, not a fence, and may serve your ads to similar users it predicts will convert.

Your Budget and the Bidding Strategy

Provide an amount of money you feel comfortable spending each day. Google will adjust your daily spend to buy the most traffic and will keep your monthly spend in check (a daily budget can spend up to 2x on a high-volume day, but the monthly cap remains the daily budget times 30.4).

When it comes to bidding, you have several Smart Bidding strategies to choose from. The big ones in 2026 are:

• Maximize Conversions. Google spends your budget to get the most conversions possible. Use this when you are starting out and need to build conversion data. You can attach a Target CPA (tCPA) once you have at least 30 conversions in the last 30 days, which tells Google to optimize for that cost per conversion.
• Maximize Conversion Value. Like Maximize Conversions, but optimizes for revenue rather than volume. Once you have 50+ conversions with value data, you can attach a Target ROAS (tROAS) so Google prioritizes higher-value transactions. This is the default for ecommerce.
• Maximize Clicks. Buys the most clicks possible within your budget. Useful for awareness campaigns or as a fast way to gather data before switching to a conversion-based strategy.
• Target Impression Share. Bids to land your ad at the top, on the first page, or anywhere on the SERP a defined share of the time. Useful for brand defense.
• Manual CPC. Still available, still gives you the most control. But Enhanced CPC has been quietly phased out for Search and Display since 2024, so if you want automation you go straight to one of the Smart Bidding strategies above.

You can also go for a fully manual setup if you feel confident enough. This gives you more control over your spending. But consider that algorithms are, if not smarter, definitely faster, and Smart Bidding now takes into account thousands of contextual signals (device, location, time, query, user behavior, audience overlap) that no human can react to in real time.

If you do go manual, there are two competing schools of thought:

• Bid low and gradually bid up. This lets you slowly climb the learning curve and save budget. It may take longer before your campaign becomes profitable, though.
• Bid high and optimize. This is the recommended strategy if you want fast results and a better signal from Google. Google likes spenders that produce conversions. Do not hold back. You can learn from your mistakes later.

Costs per click vary across industries. The cost depends on the volume of people bidding and the competitiveness of other advertisers. Even in a manual setup, Google Ads will suggest an optimal bid that should give you a decent amount of traffic in your industry.

Yes, You Can Track Google Ads Costs in Voluum

You may be familiar with the typical affiliate way of sending cost information from a traffic source to a tracker, which is by using the {cost} token or similar.

Yeah, that does not work here. Google does not support any dynamic token that passes information about how much you have actually paid. This would make gathering financial information in Voluum pointless.

Or rather, it would, if the Voluum team had not built the feature that fetches cost information automatically in the background. The Google Ads API integration through Voluum’s Automizer connects your Voluum account to your Google Ads account and pulls cost data on a schedule. The same integration also pushes conversions from Voluum back to Google via the Google Ads API, which is the 2026-friendly, cookie-less way to do conversion reporting.

So yes, you can have both cost and conversion information in one place. How cool is that.

Level 2: The Ad Group

This level of campaign setup is where content targeting lives. Depending on the campaign type you have selected, you can target using the following content: keywords, topics, or placements.

Keywords

You have already researched keywords and have some ideas, as described at the beginning of this part of the tutorial. You know which keywords to use for each part of the marketing funnel.

The important thing to understand is that, despite the fact that you submit and bid on keywords, you actually pay for search terms.

Google uses different match types to show your ad not only to people who typed your exact keyword but also to people who used similar or related phrases. This is based on the match type:

• Broad. You put your keywords without any punctuation. This makes your ad visible to the widest audience, with Google using the search context, your account history, and your landing page content to decide whether to show. In 2026, broad match combined with Smart Bidding is Google’s preferred setup because it gives the algorithm the most room to find converting queries.
• Phrase. You put your keywords in quotation marks. This makes your ad visible to users whose search includes the meaning of your keyword. Since the 2021 update, phrase match also covers the old Modified Broad Match behavior, so the words do not have to appear in the exact order.
• Exact. You put your keywords in square brackets. This is still the most precise match type, but “exact” is no longer literal. Your ad will show for queries with the same meaning, including close variants, plurals, misspellings, reordered words, and implied meaning.

A note on ad group structure: the old “Single Keyword Ad Group” (SKAG) approach where you put exactly one keyword per ad group is largely obsolete in 2026. With broader match types, Smart Bidding, and Responsive Search Ads automatically tailoring copy to each query, most accounts now run Single Theme Ad Groups (STAGs), which group a handful of tightly related keywords with the same intent into one ad group. This way the algorithm gets the conversion volume it needs to optimize, and you keep your ads relevant.

You can safely mix different match types inside one ad group.

After you run your campaign, a Search Terms report will be available for you. Check what users are actually typing and adjust your settings accordingly. Add irrelevant search terms as negative keywords.

Level 3: The Ad

The time has come to create an actual ad. Depending on the campaign type you selected, you will have different ad formats to create. Each sparks emotions differently and reasons with a user by various means. It is important to have a clear understanding of how they work and on whom they work.

Below are some basic design tips valid for all ad formats:

• Do not overpromise or make false claims about your product.
• Create multiple variations inside one ad group to give Google’s AI enough material to test.
• Clearly state benefits.
• Show a clear call-to-action and avoid generic ones like “click here”.

Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)

RSAs have been the only Search ad format since June 2022. There are no more standard or expanded text ads, only this flexible format that Google’s AI assembles on the fly.

You provide:

• Up to 15 headlines, each up to 30 characters.
• Up to 4 descriptions, each up to 90 characters.
• Up to 2 display URL paths.

Google then mixes and matches them into the combination it predicts will perform best for each query. To reach “Excellent” ad strength (which correlates with higher impression share), aim for at least 8 to 12 unique headlines.

A few RSA-specific tips:

• Do not write everything in ALL CAPS.
• Avoid headlines that read like clickbait.
• Skip exclamation marks in headlines (Google limits you to one per ad anyway).
• Pin headlines to specific positions only when legally or structurally necessary. Pinning everything kills the AI’s ability to test.
• Include your main keyword in at least 2 headlines for relevance.
• Add sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, image assets, and call assets at the campaign level. These can lift CTR by 10 to 20%.

Responsive Display and Image Ads

The Display Network supports two formats: Responsive Display Ads (RDAs), where you upload images, logos, headlines, and descriptions and Google assembles them, and uploaded image ads, where you provide finished creative in fixed dimensions. Most advertisers use RDAs because they cover every placement size automatically. Roughly 72% of display campaigns now run RDAs as the primary format.

• Use images that create a sense of depth or movement.
• Provide images in multiple aspect ratios (1.91:1, 1:1, 4:5).
• Do not exaggerate text inside the image. Google does not impose a strict text-in-image rule, but most of your image should not be covered in text. Google may overlay its own headlines and branding, and a busy image makes that messy.

Video Ads

• Use a catchy thumbnail image. Human faces looking straight into the camera work exceptionally well.
• Use testimonials instead of product descriptions.
• If you use a skippable in-stream format, capture the viewer’s attention in the first 5 seconds. Give them a reason to keep watching.
• Use captions so your ad still works for users who cannot turn on audio (which is most of them on mobile).
• Include an end slate (a fully or partially static frame at the end) that displays cards with links or buttons.
• For Shorts ads, shoot vertical (9:16) and lead with a hook in the first second.

Final URL

All of these ads have to point somewhere. Put your landing page URL here. Plain and simple. No tokens, no nothing. We will enable tracking next.

It would be good if your destination URL contained the keywords you provided. They will be highlighted in your ad. It would be very good.

How To Connect Voluum with Google Ads

We are approaching the end of the campaign setup. You have probably already saved your campaign and you are wondering: what does Voluum have to do with all this? How will it know that someone clicked on your ad?

This is the moment when the curtain goes up and Voluum’s direct tracking method comes rolling in.

The direct tracking setup consists of two things:

• A campaign tracking script that you implement into your landing page’s HTML.
• A Campaign URL.

Both are generated once you set up a campaign in Voluum, as described in the knowledge base article.

Once you complete the setup in Voluum, your Campaign URL looks something like this: https://my_lander.com/?cpid=976d4dc5-d4d3-4881-aaf7-a9272fa3112e&gclid={gclid}&campaignid={campaignid}

The first part is familiar: it is your landing page URL, the same address you provided as the Final URL in the ad setup in Google Ads. The remaining part of the URL, after the “?” character, is also important. It passes a special parameter called cpid, which enables the direct tracking script to fire.

You pass this parameter in your Google Ads campaign settings as the Final URL suffix. Because parallel tracking is now mandatory across Search, Shopping, Display, Video, and Performance Max campaigns, the Final URL suffix is the correct place to pass tracking parameters, and Voluum’s direct tracking script reads them on the landing page without any redirect.

That is enough for event tracking. Every click on an ad will be counted. If you want to pass costs from Google to Voluum and report conversions back to Google, set up the API integration through Automizer (covered in the account integration article). That gives you the cookie-less, server-to-server conversion flow that survives browser privacy changes, ad blockers, and the general entropy of modern web tracking.

What Kind of Information Will You Have?

Well, all of it. Google can pass various data points to Voluum, such as keywords used or the name of the creative shown. Voluum adds and calculates an additional layer of information on top, including device name, country, time to convert, ROI, and bot probability.

Want to check how your keywords performed per offer on mobile devices yesterday? No problem.

Voluum can present your data across all kinds of dimensions, so you can observe patterns and get optimization ideas.

Quick Optimization

Give your campaign a few days to run before doing any optimization changes. Google’s algorithms need data to work, and these few days should give them enough to get going. For Smart Bidding campaigns, the official learning phase is around 7 to 14 days, so do not panic at early volatility.

Once the learning period ends, you can make some basic adjustments.

Optimize Keywords

The Search Terms report in Google Ads is a testimony to the quality of your prior keyword research.

You can see which queries are actually being matched by your keywords and which ones drive profit.

• Use the top-converting queries as new campaign or ad group ideas.
• Exclude unprofitable queries by submitting them as negative keywords so you do not waste money on them. With broader match types in 2026, a healthy negative keyword list is more important than ever.

Optimize Your Ads

Always test new ad ideas. Keep the profitable ones, but keep testing new angles. To speed things up, duplicate an existing approved ad and modify it. This way you can skip going through the approval process from scratch.

In RSAs specifically, check the Asset Performance report every 4 to 6 weeks and replace any headline or description rated “Low”. Variety gives the AI more material to find winning combinations.

Optimize Your Bids

Bid adjustments allow you to bid higher or lower for specific groups of users on a percentage basis. The classic adjustments are:

• Location. Bid higher on regions that bring you more profit.
• Device. Bid higher for traffic from device types that convert better.
• Ad schedule. Bid lower during less profitable parts of the day.

Most of these adjustments work only with Manual CPC and a few legacy strategies. Smart Bidding strategies already factor location, device, time of day, and audience into every individual auction, so manual bid adjustments are mostly ignored once Smart Bidding is on. Instead, the levers you have under Smart Bidding are your tCPA / tROAS target, your audience signals, and your campaign-level exclusions.

But where will you find the data that supports each adjustment? In Voluum, of course. It is built for things like that. It is your go-to place to do your affiliate work.

The End of One Journey Is the Beginning of Another

The point of this Google Ads tutorial was not to go over every little option available, but rather to give you an understanding of how everything works. From that perspective, I can honestly say we have done more than just scratch the surface. We broke the surface and got straight to Google Ads’ heart.

Of course, this does not mean there is nothing more to learn. There are more options in Google Ads, more features in Voluum, and more lessons, deductions, and tricks to discover. You have learned how to walk. Now it is time to fly.