How to Set Up Google Ads Campaigns

Setting up a Google Ads campaign correctly the first time saves weeks of debugging later. The choices you make during setup, which campaign type, which bid strategy, which match types, which landing pages, which conversion actions, determine the ceiling of what the campaign can achieve. A poorly structured campaign can be optimised for months without ever reaching the performance of a well-structured one.

This guide covers the full setup process from account structure to first-launch checklist. It is written for business owners setting up their first campaign and for existing advertisers who want to validate whether their current structure is built on solid foundations. For the keyword research that feeds the setup process, read our guide on how to choose the right keywords for Google Ads.

Understanding the 5-level hierarchy before you set up means you never have to rebuild a poorly structured campaign later.

Setting Up Conversion Tracking: The Non-Negotiable First Step

Before any campaign goes live, conversion tracking must be installed and verified. Conversion tracking tells Google Ads which user actions have commercial value to your business, whether that is a phone call, a form submission, a product purchase, or a visit to a thank-you page. Without conversion tracking, you are making every bid, budget, and keyword decision without knowing which actions are generating revenue.

For most Melbourne service businesses, the primary conversion actions to track are: phone calls of 60 seconds or longer (via Google's phone call conversion tag), form submissions (via the thank-you page URL or a form submit event), and in some cases live chat sessions. For ecommerce businesses, add product purchases with revenue values attached.

To install Google Ads conversion tracking, navigate to Tools, then Measurement, then Conversions in your Google Ads account. Create a new conversion action for each valuable user behaviour. Install the conversion tag using Google Tag Manager for easier management. Always test each conversion tag in preview mode before going live. A campaign where the conversion tag is broken reports zero conversions regardless of how many enquiries you actually receive.

Link your Google Analytics 4 account to Google Ads as a second priority. This adds audience data, session data, and goal completions from your website to your Google Ads reporting. It also enables remarketing audiences based on website behaviour, which is valuable for Display and Demand Gen campaigns once your Search campaigns are running profitably.

Choosing the Right Campaign Type for Your Business

Google Ads offers five primary campaign types. Each places your ads in different locations, uses different targeting methods, and suits different business objectives. Choosing the right type before setup prevents you from optimising for the wrong metric.

Start with Search campaigns. Expand to other types only after Search demonstrates a profitable cost per acquisition.

For the vast majority of Melbourne service businesses, a Search campaign is the correct starting point. It delivers the highest purchase intent (users are actively searching for your service), it is the easiest to measure and optimise, and it generates conversion data that makes later campaign types perform better. Display campaigns are excellent for retargeting Search visitors who did not convert on the first visit, but they should not run without the audience foundation that Search builds.

Start with Search. It is the simplest to measure, the fastest to prove, and the safest way to build the data foundation every other campaign type needs.

Campaign Settings: The Choices That Most Advertisers Get Wrong

Inside the campaign settings, three choices have an outsized impact on performance. The first is bidding strategy. For a new campaign with zero conversion history, Manual CPC is the safest choice. It gives you full control over how much you pay per click and prevents Google's automated strategies from making expensive optimisation decisions without data. Once you have 30 to 50 monthly conversions, consider switching to an automated strategy.

The second is location targeting. Google defaults to showing your ads to people 'in or regularly in' your target location, which is correct. However, double-check that the option is not set to 'people who show interest in your location', which includes users outside your area who have searched for location-related terms. For a Melbourne-based business, you want genuine Melbourne traffic, not someone in Brisbane who searched for 'things to do in Melbourne'.

The third is the search networks setting. By default, Google Ads includes the Search Network AND the Search Partners network. Search Partners extends your ads to non-Google search engines that have a commercial arrangement with Google. For most advertisers, performance on Search Partners is lower than on Google search itself. Start with Google search only and add partners later if the data justifies it.

The fourth common mistake is ad rotation. Set this to 'optimise' (Google's default) from the start, which shows the better-performing ad more often. Do not set it to 'rotate indefinitely' unless you have a specific reason to do so, such as running a controlled split test with enough statistical volume to be meaningful. For most campaigns, letting Google's system identify the best-performing ad copy faster is the right approach.

The First 30 Days: What to Do and What to Avoid

Once a campaign goes live, the first 30 days are a learning and data-collection phase. The campaign is in what Google calls the 'learning period', where the algorithm is testing which audiences, times of day, devices, and query variations generate the best results for your conversion targets. During this period, avoid making large structural changes (deleting ad groups, switching bid strategies, dramatically changing budgets) as these reset the learning process.

What you should do actively in the first 30 days: check the Search Term Report every 3 to 4 days and add irrelevant queries as negatives, monitor conversion tag data to confirm tracking is recording correctly, watch for any keywords spending heavily without generating any impressions (often indicates a structural mismatch), and track Quality Scores at the keyword level.

At the 30-day mark, run a formal review. Identify the top three converting keywords by volume and consider increasing their bids by 15 to 20%. Identify the three highest-spending keywords with zero conversions and reduce their bids by 40% or pause them. This 30-day cycle is the beginning of the systematic optimisation process. At DigiFix, the 30-day review is a formal deliverable for every new client campaign, with a written performance summary and action plan.

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