Google Ads Tutorial 2026: The Complete Guide for Affiliate Marketers (Part 1)

The following Google Ads tutorial tackles the biggest advertising platform in the world.

In the whole digital ad landscape, two advertising giants have ruled the market for a long time: Meta and Google. If you run ads, you want to advertise on both of them. We’ve covered the topic of running your ads on Meta in one of our previous articles.

Today, I am going to tell you all you need to know about the latter one, the one with the bigger market share.

It is pretty easy to start advertising on Google, especially if you use their automated, AI-driven options that can guesstimate a lot of campaign factors for you. Unfortunately, making profits with Google is not that easy.

There are actually several different campaign types that require different approaches and strategies. Also, even the smallest, seemingly insignificant changes in your campaign setup can make a world of a difference in terms of campaign profitability. Finally, Google Ads policies put several restrictions in place that make using some luring techniques or running some verticals more challenging or even impossible.

This is why I am here. Even though I will not make setting up a profitable campaign a breeze, I will help you eliminate the most common mistakes and use everything that Google has to offer to your advantage.

About This Google Ads Tutorial

This tutorial has been divided into two parts. The first part focuses on crucial information that you need to know prior to running a campaign:

• The size and importance of Google Ads
• Google Ads for affiliate campaigns and tracking with Voluum
• The marketing funnel
• Campaign types
• Quality score

The second part takes a deep dive into creating and running campaigns across all of the major campaign types. It includes the following topics:

• Keyword research
• Landing page design
• Selecting a goal and a campaign type
• Choosing the right bidding strategy and outlining your budget
• Content and audience targeting
• Setting up an ad
• Setting up tracking
• Optimizing a campaign

The following Google Ads tutorial works best when read step-by-step, but you can skip a chapter or two if you feel comfortable with the subject.

Google Cares About Its Business

You may think that a company like Google has a diversified source of income. After all, it makes a lot of stuff: devices, services, cloud infrastructure, generative AI. But despite its efforts, advertising still makes up the majority of its revenue.

Ad quality is essential. Google has to keep both their biggest advertisers and users happy. The latter, bombarded with irrelevant or controversial ads, will not only fail to convert but may start to dislike the platform itself. On the other hand, advertisers have to be certain that their ads are shown in a healthy context. Otherwise, they will abandon the platform.

The lesson you should learn is as follows: if you play your cards right and follow their rules, you will be able to run Google Ads campaigns with all their blessings. If you try to stretch the rules, you will get banned. Maybe not instantly, but eventually. Follow this Google Ads tutorial’s recommendations to minimize the risk of a ban.

Google Ads for Affiliate Marketers

Having said the above, you may wonder if Google Ads is the right place for your affiliate campaign. The answer is…

It depends.

Affiliate marketing in its essence is about earning a commission for promoting third-party offers. This is NOT prohibited by Google. What is prohibited is promoting certain verticals and using techniques stereotypically associated with affiliate marketing: cloaking or sneaky redirects.

But if you…

… run offers that are not excluded by Google Ads policies… … use a landing page instead of direct-linking to an offer… … do not try to hide a landing page from Google’s reviewers… … and use Voluum’s direct tracking method to track events without the initial redirect that Google dislikes…

… you should be in the clear. But do remember that Google uses a variety of factors to assess your credibility as an advertiser. We will talk about this more in the section about quality score.

Tracking in Google

When it comes to event tracking, Google has historically been very strict about the use of external trackers. It did not endorse, and still does not allow, redirect-based tracking on click. The assumption was that all event tracking could be handled by Google itself, with its Analytics platform and conversion pixels.

In 2018, Google introduced the parallel tracking feature, which was effectively an invitation for external trackers. This feature allows Google Ads to call up a tracker’s URL in parallel with directing a visitor to a destination URL. As of 2026, parallel tracking is mandatory for Search, Shopping, Display, Video, and Performance Max campaigns. The only campaign type where it remains optional is Hotel campaigns.

However, parallel tracking only captures the first part of a visitor’s journey. Any interactions with a landing page and conversion events that follow them cannot be tracked through the parallel tracking mechanism alone. The thread is lost.

From the point of view of an affiliate marketer, parallel tracking on its own has not changed much. One more thing has not changed: Voluum still provides a reliable way to track every event from Google Ads, end to end.

Google Ads and Voluum

Voluum adds a layer of additional functionality that is invaluable for affiliate marketers. It allows you to track every event: clicks on an ad, clicks on a CTA button on a landing page, and finally, conversion events. Voluum does not need to use redirects to do this. Instead, it uses a sure-fire and foolproof way to track all visitor movements.

The many uses of Voluum are brought up throughout this Google Ads tutorial.

How do we track clicks in Voluum?

To meet the “no redirects” rule that Google enforces on advertisers, Voluum offers a direct method of tracking. It uses a small script (the campaign tracking script) that, after being implemented on a landing page, is called on page load. Once a user is on your landing page, Google does not check what happens next, so you can track clicks on a CTA button using direct tracking or redirects through Voluum. Both will work well.

How do we track conversions in Voluum?

Google Ads provides its proprietary solution for tracking conversions, known as the Google tag. It is a small script that you implement on a thank-you page that appears after a user completes a conversion, and it works in a similar way to Voluum’s conversion tracking pixel.

This works great when you are an offer owner.

But when you advertise third-party offers, which is the essence of affiliate marketing, you cannot edit their web pages. Additionally, most affiliate networks do not support submitting tracking scripts. Affiliate networks report conversions via the server-to-server (S2S) postback URL method, which is not natively supported by Google Ads.

This is where Voluum sits in the middle. Putting Voluum between Google Ads and an affiliate network allows you to keep all user and conversion data in one place. You will be able to learn the characteristics of your visitors as well as your conversion rate.

On top of that, thanks to Voluum’s Google Ads API integration, you will be able to fetch cost information from Google to Voluum (something that is not supported in the typical affiliate way by passing dynamic tokens, since Google Ads has no cost token). The same integration enables a cookie-less S2S postback that reports conversions from Voluum back to Google Ads through the Google Ads API. This matters more in 2026 than ever, because third-party cookies and traditional pixels are increasingly unreliable. The API-based postback gets your conversions counted even when a browser blocks the tag.

Types of Campaigns in Google Ads

Google Ads is not a single network. Your ads can run across several distinct campaign types that differ significantly in key aspects.

The major campaign types in 2026 are:

• Search (and AI Max for Search)
• Performance Max
• Demand Gen
• Display
• Video (YouTube)
• Shopping
• App

At the start of the campaign creation process, you will need to select which campaign type you want to run. Sometimes you can use more than one for a single goal, but the trend in 2026 is toward consolidation: Google’s own “Power Pack” recommendation pairs Performance Max with AI Max for Search and Demand Gen.

Choosing a campaign type influences what targeting options, ad formats, and bidding strategies you have at your disposal. We discuss this in more detail in the next chapters.

Campaign type: Search

Search ads are the ad type that instantly brings Google to mind. Everyone uses Google, so everyone has seen a Google search ad. It appears at the top of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Search ads use the CPC model, so you pay only when someone clicks your ad, not just sees it. Why would anyone click your ad, apart from the fact that it is beautifully written and designed? Because they have an intent to find something similar to what you offer.

Whenever a user types something into the search bar, Google matches this phrase with keywords that you have provided and, after a programmatic auction, displays the winning ad. So the situation is that a user searches for a term that indicates a buying intent and they see an ad strictly related to that intent. How lucky.

Search ads are great for addressing the bottom of the marketing funnel or when you do not have time or resources to run the whole funnel. They appear right where they should be, spark an immediate action, and cost pennies (sometimes).

A 2026 wrinkle worth knowing: Google has introduced AI Max for Search, an “AI-driven targeting” layer that expands the matching of your existing search campaigns to relevant queries even when they do not match your keywords directly. Google has also announced that Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaigns are being deprecated and will be auto-upgraded to AI Max starting September 2026. If you have any DSA campaigns running, plan the migration now.

Campaign type: Display

Over 2 million websites, 90%+ of global internet users covered, various display ad formats. Gmail, YouTube, and countless partner sites. The Display network is huge, yet it is often overlooked by advertisers.

The Display network consists of both Google-owned pages and partner pages that participate in the Google AdSense program. This program allows publishers to earn money by renting their advertising space.

Where are these ads? Virtually everywhere.

Many visual ads that you see in various forms come from Google. Closing the ad reveals which company supplied them.

This network works great when building brand awareness, but can also be used as a simple way to reach visitors with visual ads.

Campaign type: Video

Google’s video campaigns serve ads on YouTube and across the Google video partners. The main video ad formats include:

• Skippable in-stream ads, displayed before, during, or after another video. After 5 seconds, the user can skip. You are billed on a TrueView view (30 seconds watched, or the full ad if shorter, or an engagement), or on a CPV / CPM basis depending on your bid strategy.
• Non-skippable in-stream ads, displayed before or during another video. More expensive, but you can be sure that your ad has been watched.
• In-feed video ads, which appear as thumbnails alongside other YouTube content. You pay only for users who click the thumbnail (or autoplay for at least 10 seconds).
• Bumper ads, short non-skippable ads displayed before another video. You pay on a CPM basis, which means you pay for each 1,000 views of your ad.
• Shorts ads, vertical video ads that appear inside the YouTube Shorts feed. These have become a significant inventory source in 2026.

Creating a video ad is more challenging than creating other ad types, yet this format is considered very attractive. Think about it: everyone likes watching videos. After all, they are already on a platform designed for watching videos. And you can pass so much information and emotion with the right combination of image and sound.

Campaign type: Shopping

If you are a shopping junkie, like the majority of people, you have probably already seen or used Google Shopping ads. They share certain similarities with search ads because they appear at the top or on the right-hand side of the SERP. You can even go to the “Shopping” part of the Google search engine to see products related to your search in one place.

Google Shopping is not a product marketplace. It is what is called a Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) that lists physical products from various stores that have signed up with the Google Merchant Center. Each store provides information about its products in the form of data feeds.

These feeds are what you actually see in the SERP.

To run a Shopping campaign, you need to have a Google Merchant Center account. Once you provide all your store and product data, you go to Google Ads and link both accounts. In 2026 most ecommerce advertisers run Shopping inside Performance Max rather than as a standalone Shopping campaign, though Standard Shopping is still available and many marketers run a “hybrid” setup that uses both.

Campaign type: App (in-app)

This campaign type allows you to display ads inside many of the 2+ million apps available in the Google Play store, as well as across YouTube, Search, and Display. The pricing model is different, as App campaigns usually aim to increase app installs or in-app actions. You pay per install (CPI) or per in-app action (CPA), depending on the campaign goal.

Google uses information from a user’s Google searches, Play Store activities, and other behavioral signals to make sure that the ads shown are the best-matching ones.

Campaign type: Performance Max

Performance Max (PMax) replaced Google’s old Smart Shopping and Smart campaigns in 2022, and by early 2026 PMax accounts for roughly 45% of all Google Ads conversions. It is now the default cross-channel campaign type that Google pushes hardest.

A Performance Max campaign serves your ads across every Google surface from a single campaign: Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. You provide goals, budget, creative assets (headlines, descriptions, images, videos), and audience signals. Google’s AI handles placement, bidding, and asset combinations.

For affiliates, PMax is a double-edged sword. It can find pockets of cheap conversions you would never identify manually, but it gives you less granular control over where your ads run. If you decide to test it, lean on the asset performance report and use brand exclusions (introduced in PMax in 2026) to keep the AI inside guardrails you actually want.

Campaign type: Demand Gen

Demand Gen replaced the old Discovery campaigns in 2024 and sits between top-of-funnel awareness and bottom-of-funnel Search or PMax. Demand Gen ads run across YouTube (including Shorts and connected TV via Shoppable CTV), Gmail, and the Discover feed. The format is visual and feed-native, with image, carousel, and video options.

If you are running a content-driven funnel and want to fill the consideration stage before your Search and PMax campaigns close the deal, Demand Gen is the modern answer.

This concludes the part of the tutorial with an overview of campaign types.

Quality Score

At this point, you know where your ads can appear. Now let’s talk a little about how to make sure they actually do.

No, we are not setting up a campaign just yet. That comes in the second part of this Google Ads tutorial. Instead, we will discuss quality score.

Quality score has a great influence on whether your ads are shown, how often, and at what price.

Google measures, tracks, and analyzes everything its crawling bots can put their hands on. This includes users as well as advertisers. Various parts of your campaign, your account history, your ad destination, and your landing page design will all be checked to make sure that you are the kind of advertiser that can deliver an engaging experience to users.

What good is a high quality score?

For Google, money talks, but it cannot out-talk other factors. The highest-paying advertiser does not necessarily win. Google plays the long game, where it prefers to lose some short-term profit in favor of showing a better ad from a more respectful advertiser.

When deciding whose ad to display, Google looks at Ad Rank. In its simplest form, Ad Rank is the product of your max bid and quality score, but in 2026 the formula is a bit more involved: it also takes into account Ad Rank thresholds, auction competitiveness, ad asset performance, and the user’s context (location, device, query intent, time of day).

The quality score also influences the cost of an ad display.

So a high quality score means higher chances of displaying your ad and paying less. This is something worth taking care of.

What is quality score made of?

Google does not like to go into too many details when describing how its features work. It would probably prefer if everyone simply assumed there is magic underneath that minimalistic interface.

It is not magic, but algorithms.

Quality score itself is a 1 to 10 diagnostic rating displayed at the keyword level in Search campaigns. It is based on three factors:

• Expected click-through rate. Google’s prediction of how likely your ad is to be clicked when shown.
• Ad relevance. How closely your ad copy matches the intent of the search.
• Landing page experience. How relevant, useful, and fast your landing page is.

Beyond the visible quality score, Google’s auction system looks at additional signals:

Account history. An account that shows a history of natural human behavior is better than one created minutes ago. Mind that Google is very good at following the crumbs of your activity and figuring out if there is one person behind several accounts. If one of your accounts gets banned, or at least receives a low score, do not expect that creating a new account will give you a fresh start.

Google tracks your activity across many devices and platforms, and connects you with various payment methods. A brand new account requires a different browser, device, IP, and probably several other things we do not know about.

Landing page. Google cares where you send its users (yes, that is what it thinks about most of the users on the internet, that they are its users). It will measure several things about your landing page (load speed, mobile-friendliness, content relevance) and will keep measuring others once you start sending users (conversion rate, bounce rate, time on page).

A good, or better yet, a very good landing page is a must. It will not only serve you better when it comes to user conversions, but also as a way to raise your quality score. Double win. Or double loss, if your page does not live up to Google’s expectations.

Past data. If you ran campaigns before, Google will draw predictions based on your past success rate. Google likes profitable advertisers. Past successes drive future ones.

Ad relevance and ad asset strength. Google wants to make sure that its users find what they are looking for. The relevance of your ads to the keywords you bid on still matters, and in 2026 the strength and variety of your ad assets (headlines, descriptions, images, videos for responsive and PMax campaigns) is just as important.

A note on automation: in heavily automated campaign types like Performance Max and Demand Gen, you will not see a visible quality score, but the same signals (expected engagement, asset performance, landing page experience) feed the AI’s bidding and placement decisions. The visible number is gone; the underlying logic is not.

Be nice to Google’s algorithms and they will do the same in return.

Google Ads Tutorial: Part 2 Coming to Theaters Near You… and to This Blog

As you can deduce from the amount of text in this part of the tutorial, mastering Google Ads will not be an easy task. But you are already several steps closer.

You know more about how everything works and what your place in the Google ad industry should be. You can take a break for now, relax, maybe do some thinking.

See you next week for part 2. We will be looking at campaign creation and optimization, so stay tuned.