TLDR: Google Ads can be one of the most profitable channels in your marketing mix. It can also be one of the fastest ways to burn through a budget. The difference usually comes down to understanding how the platform works, not just how to press “enable” on a campaign.
Building the ad itself: headlines, sitelinks, snippets and asset groups
Once your account is in good shape, the next job is building ads that people want to click.
Headlines
Your headline is the blue link people see when your ad appears in Google search results, and it’s what they click through. A strong headline does three jobs at once. It describes what you are, makes what your offer sound enticing and gives a clear call to action explaining why someone should click.
Sitelinks
Sitelinks are the extra links that appear beneath your ad, pointing to specific pages on your website. You’ll often see them organically, but you can also build them as assets within Google Ads to send people to particular offerings.
Say you have a sale running on one product category and someone searches for your brand. The sale isn’t directly relevant to their search, so it wouldn’t belong in your headline. But people like a sale, so a sitelink gives them the option to click through. You can create plenty of sitelinks and Google will mix and match them, typically showing around six on a desktop and eight on a mobile.
Structured snippets, callouts and promotions
Sitelinks are just one type of extension (now called assets in Google Ads). Extensions are extra pieces of information you can add to your ad, and each makes your listing bigger and more useful.
Structured snippets describe the range of what you offer under a set heading. A holiday provider, for example, might list “Destinations: Greece, Turkey, Portugal”. Callouts highlight what you offer or why people should choose you, such as the product types you stock or free delivery. Promotion assets tell searchers when an offer is live. There are other asset types too, some very specific to sectors like hotels or vehicles, but these are the core ones to get right first.
Performance Max and asset groups
Performance Max, or PMax, is Google’s all-in-one campaign type. Rather than only showing Search ads, it can serve Shopping ads from your product feed and appear across Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube and Display placements.
For ecommerce brands, standard Shopping campaigns can sometimes outperform PMax. Most of the time, dedicated Search campaigns will be more effective for search, and Demand Gen campaigns will usually handle display and video better, because they’re specialised. But PMax is a great way to get maximum coverage using Google’s AI for the lowest possible effort.
Asset groups sit inside a PMax campaign and hold everything you want to show users. That includes your images (up to 20 per asset group), your business name and logo, headlines, descriptions and videos for YouTube. Think of the asset group as the toolkit Google draws from to build your ads across every channel.
If you have physical stores, you can also run PMax for store goals by linking your store locations. This lets you show ads in places like Google Maps and direct people straight to your door. We cover that in more detail below.
Why Google Ads feels so complicated (and how this guide helps)
If you’ve ever logged into Google Ads and felt instantly overwhelmed, you’re not alone. Campaigns, ad groups, keywords, search terms, audiences, segments, account IDs, access levels. There’s a lot going on, and very little of it is explained as you go.
It doesn’t help that the platform never stands still. Over the last year or two, the acceleration of AI tools and changes in the way people search have transformed how Google Ads works. Something that was already complicated has become a moving target.
This guide walks you through the fundamentals in the order you’ll actually need them: getting to grips with your account, diagnosing why ads aren’t showing, building ads that get clicked, targeting the right people, understanding Quality Score and using local ad formats to drive footfall.
Finding your way around the Account: IDs, Linked Accounts and Access
Before you build anything, it pays to understand the structure of the account you’re working in. Three things matter most here.
Your Google Ads customer ID
Every Google Ads account has a unique 10-digit customer ID, displayed in the format 123-456-7890 at the top of the screen next to your account name. You’ll need it whenever you contact Google support, link other tools or give an agency access. It’s worth saving somewhere safe, especially if your business runs more than one account.
Linked accounts
Google Ads works best when it isn’t operating in isolation. Linking Google Analytics 4 lets you import conversions and see what users do after they click. Linking Merchant Center is essential for ecommerce brands running Shopping or Performance Max campaigns, as that’s where your product feed lives. Linking YouTube and your Google Business Profile opens up video and location-based formats. You can find these connections in the linked accounts area of the account, or simply type “linked accounts” into the search bar at the top of the platform.
Access and security
Google Ads lets you control exactly who can see and change what. Admin access gives full control, including managing users. Standard access allows someone to make changes to campaigns without managing users. Read-only access is ideal for stakeholders who need to see performance without touching anything, and there are also billing and email-only levels.
A good rule of thumb is to give people the lowest level of access they need, and review your user list regularly. If you work with an agency or freelancer, grant access through their manager account rather than sharing your login details. That way, you always keep ownership of your account and its data, whoever manages it day to day.
Auditing your account: What to check and why your Ads might not be showing
“Why can’t I see my ad?” is one of the most common Google Ads questions, and one of the most frustrating. There’s rarely one obvious answer. You have to investigate.
Step one: check your impressions
An impression is simply someone seeing your ad. Start by looking at the impressions column in your account. If it shows more than zero, your ad is serving. You just haven’t seen it.
There are plenty of reasons for that. If you’ve spent hours setting up the account and searching for your own ad without buying anything, Google may have decided you’re a low-intent user who isn’t worth showing an ad to. You may also have excluded your own location or set up an IP exclusion, so your ads don’t serve to your own office. That’s good practice, as it stops you wasting budget on your own clicks. If you want to check how your ad appears, use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool rather than searching live.
Step two: if impressions are stuck at zero, work from the top down
If your impressions aren’t moving, something is stopping the ad from serving. We recommend working through the account level by level.
At account level
Check that your billing details are in place, because without them nothing will serve. Check whether your account needs verification. Some industries, such as financial services, can’t show ads until advertiser verification is complete.
At campaign level
Review your targeting and location settings. Overly rigid settings, like strict device exclusions for mobile or desktop, can leave you without enough volume to serve.
At ad group level
Check the same targeting settings and make sure there’s an ad in the ad group. It sounds obvious, but incomplete ads and missing copy are more common than you’d think.
At keyword level
Look for disapprovals or anything flagged as “not serving”. Then ask whether your keywords make sense. Are they terms people search for?
Very strict exact match keywords with no search volume behind them are a classic reason for an ad that never shows. Working through each layer in turn is the quickest way to find the culprit.
Keywords, negatives and audiences: getting targeting right
Targeting deserves a guide of its own, but the fundamentals are simple: show your ads to the people most likely to buy and keep them away from people who never will. If you’re selling a women’s spring/summer fashion line, a finance professional in his mid-forties searching for gilets isn’t your audience.
Keywords and match types
Keywords have always been the foundation of Google Ads search campaigns. That’s shifting towards intent and user behaviour, but keywords still play a vital role in showing Google what intent looks like for your business.
A women’s footwear brand would want keywords like “heels” and “pumps”. But people now search far more conversationally. Someone might type “where is the best place to buy black heels in a size 6 with next-day delivery”. You’ll never have that as an exact match keyword, and you’ll never predict every variation. That’s why broad match matters: it lets Google match your ads to the full range of ways people search.
Broad match on its own can be too loose, though. To keep it focused on the right people, pair it with audience signals and a smart bidding strategy such as target ROAS (return on ad spend). This gives Google the information it needs to find the searches most likely to convert.
Negative keywords
Negative keywords tell Google which searches you don’t want to appear for, and they’re one of the simplest ways to protect your budget. That same footwear brand might add negatives like “jobs”, “repair” or “free”, or exclude men’s terms entirely. The more you use broad match, the more important negatives become. Make a habit of reviewing your search terms report regularly and adding anything irrelevant as a negative.
Audiences and customer data
Head to the Audience Manager in Google Ads (if you can’t find it in the menu, just type it into the search bar). From here, you can upload your own customer data.
Once uploaded, the data is hashed, meaning it’s encrypted rather than stored as readable names and email addresses. It’s mainly used to help Google understand your audience and build lookalikes, rather than to aggressively target individuals. You can use it for retargeting too, but as always, how you collected the data and the consent you have in place is what matters from a GDPR perspective.
Here’s how it works in practice. Upload a list of past customers and Google looks for patterns. It might find that 85% are women aged between their twenties and forties, share certain interests and watch similar YouTube channels. From there, it builds a profile of what your buyers look like and targets people with similar characteristics who haven’t purchased from you yet.
Quality Score
Quality Score is Google’s measure of how strong your keywords, ads and landing pages are. It’s scored out of 10, and you can find it in the keywords section of your account by adding “Quality Score” as a column.
It’s based on three factors. Expected click-through rate is how likely someone is to click your ad when they search that keyword. Ad relevance is how closely your keyword matches the content of your ad. If you sell orthopaedic shoes through a healthcare-focused ad and someone searches “shoes”, that’s less relevant than an ad entirely about shoes. Landing page experience is how good the page is once someone lands. Google crawls your landing pages, and slow load speeds, hard-to-read content and poor accessibility will all drag your score down.
Why it matters for your costs
The lower your Quality Score, the more you pay for each click. The higher your score, the more relevant Google considers you, and the cheaper it becomes to serve your ad. This is how Google stops ad auctions from becoming a straight bidding war. If irrelevant ads always won by outspending everyone, users would have a poor experience, stop using Google and the ad revenue would dry up. Rewarding relevance keeps quality ads at the top of the page.
If your costs rise without explanation, dig into the Quality Score components rather than assuming something is wrong with your campaigns. In the meantime, the best defence is doing the fundamentals well: tightly themed ad groups, ad copy that mirrors your keywords and fast, accessible landing pages.
Beyond search: Local Services ads and Google Maps
For businesses with a physical presence, Google Ads offers ways to drive people through your door, not just to your website.
Local Services ads
Local Services Ads use your Google Business Profile to show ads tied to your location and to what people are searching for nearby. They’re only available to certain business categories, and availability varies by sector and region. Services like healthcare, dentistry, building and home services are common examples. So if someone searches “dentist near me” or “plumber in Leeds”, you can pay to appear with an ad that sends them straight to your practice or business.
Google Maps and PMax for store goals
Google Maps has ads too. In fact, nearly every free Google product does, from Search and Shopping to Gmail, YouTube and sites across the Display Network.
Local Services Ads and PMax for store goals can both put you on Google Maps. Standard PMax campaigns can too, if you link your business locations, though this overlaps heavily with store goals.
The idea is to use Google to drive footfall. Imagine a brilliant shop tucked down an alley off the high street. The rent is cheap, there’s loads of space and the products are great, but nobody walks down there because nobody knows it exists. Local formats connect people searching for something relevant with a business they might otherwise have walked straight past.
It’s also a smart way to compete with Amazon and the big online retailers. They can out-muscle smaller businesses financially, but they can’t beat the convenience of “the product you want is just down the road”. Someone can pop in, pick it up and be home within the hour, rather than waiting a day or two for delivery.
Get Google Ads working for you
Google Ads rewards the people who understand it, and it moves fast. If you don’t have the time to keep on top of it, or you want expert eyes on your account, that’s exactly what we do.
At Modo25, our paid media team audits, builds and manages Google Ads accounts that deliver measurable results, from Search and Shopping to Performance Max and local campaigns. And through our supported in-housing model, we can help your team take control of Google Ads with our expertise behind you, so you stay informed and in charge.
