Google Ads Search Certification Study Guide

Direct to specific sections of the website. These extensions are additional links that appear just under the text of your search ads, directing users to specific pages of your website.

Sitelinks

Place brackets around the keywords. This way, your ads will only show if the search means the same thing as your keyword. It may include close variations of your keyword, like misspellings, plurals, and synonyms. This is different from phrase match, as there can't be any extra words before or after the search terms. For example, the keyword [men's bicycles] will show when someone searches for men's bicycles or men's bikes, but it won't show for men's bikes for sale.

Exact Match

The likelihood that the ad will be clicked. It predicts whether your keyword is likely to lead to an ad click. However, you should be actively working on improving this, which is often how users who see your ad actually end up clicking on it.

Expected Clickthrough Rate (eCTR)

The likelihood that the ad will be clicked

Expected clickthrough rate

What makes up a Quality Score?

Expected clickthrough rate, Ad relevance, and Landing page experience.

An estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Higher-quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.

Quality Score

"I want to enter new markets quickly.": Dynamic Search Ads can help you broaden your current activity to new business areas or countries.

Rapid Expansion

_____ more potential customers with multiple headline and description options that give your ads the opportunity to compete in more auctions and match more search terms.

Reach

Types of Ad Extensions:

1. Location Extensions 2. Affiliate Location Extensions 3. Call Extensions 4. App Extensions 5. Price Extensions 6. Promotion Extensions 7. Message Extensions

How ads end up in front of customers:

1. A person performs a search 2. An auction starts 3. The Google Search engine ranks all the ads 4. A search turns into a sale

5 Factors of Ad Rank:

1. Bid 2. Ad Rank Threshold 3. Context of Query 4. Ad Extensions Impact 5. Auction-Time Ad Quality

How to get the right customers to see your ads:

1. Create ad groups 2. Create a unique list of keywords 3. Create a set of text ads for each ad group 4. Dynamic search ads

3 Main Factors that determine the quality of an ad:

1. Expected Clickthrough Rate (eCTR) 2. Ad Landing Page Experience 3. Ad Relevance

3 Universal Extensions:

1. Sitelinks 2. Callout Extensions 3. Structured Snippets

How many ads per ad group should you use?

3-5 ads per ad group

Up to how many characters can each description field have?

90 characters

Include even more information with your ads, such as location details, links to pages on your website, and your phone number.

Ad Extensions

When you create your ad, you have the option to add extra information to your ad, such as a phone number, or more links to specific pages on your site. Google Ads estimates how these and other ad formats you use will impact your ad's performance.

Ad Extensions Impact

How relevant, transparent, and easy-to-navigate the page for users. Users want these to help them find what they're looking for. A highly relevant _____ yields a higher score. A high-quality _______ should have appropriate and original content that helps the user complete their task. It should be easily navigable and transparent about the nature of the business, how the site interacts with the user's computer, and how it intends to use their personal information.

Ad Landing Page Experience

To help ensure high-quality ads, we set minimum quality ______ that an ad must achieve to show in a particular ad position.

Ad Rank Threshold

How closely the ad matches the intent behind a user's search. A measure of how well an ad matches what the user is searching for, and helps to make sure that only useful ads are shown. It also prevents businesses from simply paying their way onto a search that's unrelated to their product or service.

Ad Relevance

Allows you to choose certain days or hours of the week for your ads to show.

Ad Scheduling

How closely the ad matches the intent behind a user's search

Ad relevance

Give directions to retail partner locations (available in select countries). This allows product manufacturers to drive visits to retail partners that sell their products. The format displays the headline and URL for the manufacturer's website, ad text for the manufacturer's product, and the nearest retailer.

Affiliate Location Extensions

These ads drive engagement, app installs, and in-app purchases. They appear across the Google Search and Display Networks, as well as on Google Play and YouTube.

App

__________ are great if you have an app to promote. This format gives you the option of driving traffic to your website or the app store from a single text ad.

App Extensions

How many extensions should you use per campaign or ad group?

At least 3

Google Ads also looks at how relevant and useful your ad and the website it links to are to the person who'll see it. Quality Score is an aggregated estimate of our assessment of the quality of your ad.

Auction-Time Ad Quality

Is not the price you're paying for each of your clicks. Because the system is dynamic, this can vary a lot from auction to auction and depends on a variety of factors, such as the context of each query. This is just an average--meaning that the price you pay could be above or below that average. Higher-quality ads typically lead to lower costs, better ad positions, and more advertising success. When users see better ads, they're happier and more likely to actually click on those ads.

Average Cost Per Click (CPC)

This is when you're telling Google Ads the maximum amount you're willing to pay for a click on your ad. You often actually end up paying less, and you can change this amount at any time.

Bid

The maximum amount your company will pay when a customer clicks on their ad.

Bid Amounts

Controls the manner in which you pay for users to interact with your ads. Once you choose the metric you'd like to focus on for your campaign, you'll see different bidding options to help you optimize for it. You can choose to manually set your bids for clicks on your ads, or let Google Ads do it for you.

Bid Strategy

Your bid strategy controls how you pay for users to interact with your ads. Your bid limit is the most that you'll pay per click for ads in an ad group, and your budget is the average amount that you're comfortable spending each day on your campaign. The budget that you choose is entirely up to you, and you can adjust it at any time.

Bidding and Budget Settings

Shows ads if a keyword (or any variations like misspellings, synonyms, or related searches) are included in a user's search terms. (default match type)

Broad Match

Adding a + sign in front of a keyword. This prompts your ads to appear only if the keyword or its close variations are in any part of the search terms. This is different from broad match, which allows for any variation of the keyword to appear in the search term. This only allows for close variations.

Broad Match Modifier

The 5 match types for your keywords:

Broad Match, Modified Broad Match, Phrase Match, Exact Match, Negative Match

Is the average amount you're comfortable spending each day on your campaign. You can adjust it at any time.

Budget

How can Google Ads help you advance your business goals?

By driving online, in-app, in-person, and over-the-phone sales, By building awareness of your brand, By influencing consideration of your products and services

If you're looking to get calls from customers, use _____________. These extend ads with a phone number, allowing mobile users to directly call your business.

Call Extensions

Highlight value-adding attributes. These extensions are short, specific (25-character) snippets of text. They can be used to highlight information about value-adding attributes of the business, products, or services.

Callout Extensions

Are created around a marketing goal and set up based on the actions you'd like customers to take.

Campaigns

With the ad auction, __________. When calculating Ad Rank, we look at the search terms the person has entered, the person's location at the time of the search, the type of device they're using (e.g., mobile or desktop), the time of the search, the nature of the search terms, other ads and search results that show on the page, and other user signals and attributes.

Context of Query

Google Ads gives you complete control over your budget. You choose how much to spend per month, per day, and per ad. Based on your settings, Google Ads uses a lightning-fast auction to determine which ad to show. If you want to change your strategy, you can easily adjust your ad, modify your budget, or pause and restart a campaign.

Control

What are the three main factors that determine ad quality?

Expected clickthrough rate, landing page experience, and ad relevance

Two ________ fields — with up to 90 characters each — let you highlight unique details about your product or service. On mobile, where space is tight, Google Ads optimizes your ad to show the highest-performing text.

Description

Which part of a Search ad isn't automatically generated by Dynamic Search Ads?

Description Line

Reach your customers on any device, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

Device Targeting

Includes desktop, tablet, and mobile. You can also choose to customize ads for different devices.

Devices

You can easily engage customers across Google's most popular properties with a variety of rich, unique ad formats. Reach your users across the YouTube Home Feed, Gmail, and Google's Discover Feed — all with one campaign.

Discovery

How does Google Ads generate responsive search ads?

Google Ads creates them based on existing high performing ad copy.

Increase brand awareness when users are browsing content they're interested in online.

Display

Create ______ ads that adapt to device widths, giving you more room to share your message with potential customers.

Flexibility (flexible)

Your campaign's ads are eligible to show to customers located in, or who show interest in

Geographic Location

Google's way of deciding which ads will show and how they're positioned. Google ranks the ads that appear on the search results page, and determines the cost for each ad click. The order in which ads appear on the page is based on a calculation we call Ad Rank.

Google Ads Auction

Includes, by default, Google Search partners. Your ads will show on Google Search, but also extend to the hundreds of additional sites partnering with Google. Showing your ads to even more people out there should help you grow your business!

Google Search Network

People are most likely to notice your ________ text.

Headline

The 3 required parts of a text ad:

Headline, Description and URL

What makes up a text ad?

Headline, Description, URL

These campaigns display hotel prices and availability on Search, Maps, and Assistant to connect you with the millions of travelers actively searching for you.

Hotel

Imagine you have an online store that makes and delivers organic juice (not shakes or smoothies) in 30 minutes. Which keyword list would you use to reach each of the following business goals?

Increase Sales: - smoothie (negative) - shakes (negative) "Organic juices" (phrase match) Increase the number of visitors to your website: +organic juice (broad match modifier)

Why do search ad extensions matter to users?

Increased Engagement, Better Ad Quality, More Qualified Leads.

Which of the following factors is not considered by Ad Rank in its calculation?

Increasing the conversion rate of your landing pages

"I want to make sure my ads appear for more relevant user searches.": Use Dynamic Search Ads as a complement to your existing keyword strategy. This requires little effort and ensures good coverage without complex implementation or campaign management.

Incremental Search

The words and phrases that will prompt ads to show up. It's best to create ad groups around themes or products.

Keywords

How relevant, transparent, and easy-to-navigate the page is for users

Landing page experience

Allows you to restrict where your ads may appear, based on the user's language settings and the language of the site.

Language Testing

Gather contact details through a signup page

Leads

These campaigns help you drive important offline metrics — like store visits or in-store sales — by advertising on multiple platforms. Let Google Ads optimize how your ads appear on Search, Maps, Display, and YouTube to maximize your offline performance.

Local

Specialized campaign types:

Local, Hotel, Discovery

Give directions to the business. This extension lets you show your business address, phone number, and a map marker alongside your ad text. On mobile devices, there's a link with directions to your business.

Location Extensions

Your campaign's ads are eligible to show to customers in particular locations, or to customers who've chosen your selected language as their browser's language setting.

Locations and Language Targeting

"I want my users to find me even on my long-tail products.": This is great for you if your website content is large and dynamic, and you fear the risk of missing long-tail traffic with a keyword-targeted, campaign-only strategy.

Long-tail Automation

Should be the main thing you want to achieve for your business and can be changed at any time. Search campaign marketing goals can be set to Sales, Leads, or Website Traffic. (Display, Video, and App campaigns have additional goals to choose from.)

Marketing Goal

Adding a minus sign in front of the keyword scooter (-scooter). This means ads won't show if someone includes that (-) keyword in their search.

Negative Match

Setting indicates where you want your ad to appear, based on the campaign type you select.

Networks

Increase ad group _________ by attracting additional clicks and conversions that your existing text ads aren't capturing.

Performance

Placing quotation marks around the keywords. This prompts your ads to appear only if the keywords within the quotation marks or close variations of them match a user's search term. This is different from broad match modifier as there cannot be any extra words between the user's search terms, but similar since extra words can appear before or this match type.

Phrase Match

Google Ads helps you connect with the right people, at the right time, with the right message. Your ads can appear on Google Search, YouTube, and more, just when someone is looking for products or services like yours. You can also customize options, such as keywords and location, to get in front of the most relevant customers.

Relevance

Save time by providing multiple headline and description options. Then let Google Ads show the most ______ combinations to your customers.

Relevance (relevant)

What do users want?

Relevant Information, Information based on their moment, Ads that contribute to their experience

These let you create ads that adapt to show more relevant messages to your customers. All you need to do is supply the headlines, descriptions and URLs for your ads. The more headlines and descriptions you enter, the more Google Ads can test and serve ad variations that match users' search terms — which can improve your ad performance.

Responsive Search Ads

Pay only for results, like clicks to your website or calls to your business. Our measurement tools make it easy to see how your site, apps, and ads are performing. Plus, smart technology lets you create, manage, and optimize your campaigns so you can get the most out of your investment.

Results

Encourage customers to complete a purchase

Sales

Drive action on your site when users are searching for similar products or services.

Search

These ads show up next to Google search results and on other Google partner sites, like YouTube, when people search for products or services you offer.

Search

These ads promote your products by giving users detailed information about what you're selling. They appear on Google Shopping and next to search results.

Shopping

Google Ads campaign types:

Search, Display, Video, Shopping, App

If Hiroko wants to increase sales of kids' bikes by creating an end-of-the-year sale, what's the best way for her to do this?

She can create a new ad group for the end-of-year sale

If your exact match keyword is [running shoes], which searches may prompt your ad to show?

Shoes for running Running sneakers Running shoe

Promote your products, share details about your inventory, and boost traffic to your online or physical store.

Shopping

What is the key value proposition of Google Search campaigns?

Show your ads when a customer is searching for your product or service

This sets a campaign start and end date.

Start and End Date

Give a glimpse of what's offered. These allow you to describe features of a specific product or range of products or services offered by the business before users click on the ad.

Structured Snippets

A new suitcase company wants to attract customers to their website. In their situation, what are the benefits of using broad match?

They won't have to create an exhaustive keyword list of every type of suitcase they sell. They can reach potential customers that haven't yet heard of their brand.

Which attributes describe a good landing page experience?

Transparency about your business, easy to navigate, relevant and original content

The ___ shows your website address. It gives people an idea of where they'll go when they click your ad.

URL

Reach your target audience at scale and bring your business story to life.

Video

These ads appear on their own or within other streaming video content on YouTube and across the Google Display Network.

Video

Get more customers to learn about your new products

Web Traffic

Process of Dynamic Search Ads:

You specify the pages of your website, daily budget, and an ad template. The customer enters their search term in Google Search. If you have content relevant to the search, Google dynamically generates an ad headline and destination URL to the best matching page on your site.