Create Google Ads for SaaS: 32 Experts Steps for Profits (2024)

We curated 32 steps to create Google Ads from Google Ads experts and SaaS Founders. Let’s GO!

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Note: SaaSwrites is a curated growth marketing hub and resource built to help SaaS founders grow their products. We sincerely thank all our experts for their constant value addition to this world.

Jackson says if you start running Google Ads without preparing first, you’re gonna waste a ton of money.

Do these 10 things first to spend smarter, save time, and become profitable faster:

1. Learn the foundations

There are lots of places to learn Google Ads online.

YouTube has a lot of gold on it too.

If you want to take your business's ads to the next level, here's what I would do: - custom landing page - unique, scarce & urgent offers promoted - dig into Google Ads and optimize your campaign itself Most businesses have 0/3 checked off, so you'll be far ahead ~ Alex Lathery

2. Study Your Audience

The first step in selling to an audience is understanding them from top to bottom.

Do so by reading customer reviews, spying on people where they hang out online (e.g. Facebook groups), and doing one-on-one interviews with ideal customers.

3. Come Up With Angles

In the research phase, look for audience pain points, audience desires, and things your competitors are doing wrong.

Once you have those, create marketing angles from them.

4. Study Campaign Types

Google offers many different campaign types.

Look them up and see which might work best for your offer.

I’ve found search and shopping to be best for most beginners.

5. Do Keyword Research

Keywords are a huge part of Google Ads.

Research them using Google’s keyword planner, SpyFu, and various SEO tools.

The best terms tend to be medium or low-competition and have buying intent.

6. Gather Assets

Every type of Google ad is made up of assets.

Search ads are just headlines, descriptions, and extensions.

7. Set Up Tracking

This one is crucial.

If you don’t gather accurate data, optimization is nearly impossible.

Set up tracking as well as you can and test it to make sure it’s working.

8. Upload Customer List

If you already have customers, add their emails to Google.

This will make your account smarter because Google will know the type of people who buy from you rather than needing to slowly and expensively find that out.

9. Optimize Your Offer

The best ads in the world can’t save an offer that people don’t want.

Use your audience/competitor research to build something truly valuable.

Then pump up its persuasive power with terms like free shipping and refund guarantees.

10. Optimize Your Site & Back-End

Just like with offers, great ads can’t save a terrible website with no email marketing.

Optimize yours with copywriting, images, videos, all the necessary site pages (terms, customer support, etc), a lead gen popup, and automated email flows.

George Clements says “you DON'T need to spend money to learn Google Ads. Here is an 8-step framework to KICKSTART start your first campaign.”

George shares his 8-step framework to create Google Ads

11. Establish your foundation

Before even thinking about ads you should know your product and audience inside-out.

This allows you to:

Identify competitors

Writer better ad copy

Have a better understanding of what keywords to target

12. Research your competition

You can learn from their mistakes and use their ads as inspiration for your own.

Find the top companies' ads for products in the same space.

Their copy has probably been tested with a budget.

This will give you a huge head start.

13. Keyword Research

Go to Spyfu, plug in your competitors, and find out which terms they’re targeting.

Ahrefs is also a great choice for keyword research.

Knowing the right keywords to target is essential.

Otherwise, you'll be going in blind.

14. Create thematic ad groups.

Separate your keywords into ad groups based on their theme.

Selling a pizza oven?

Ad group #1: Outdoor pizza oven

Ad group #2: Compact pizza oven

I recommend between 5-10 ad groups.

15. Ad Creation

Create ads that are highly relevant to the ad group.

This means your ads will be more relevant to the user's search term.

Use responsive search ads to leverage google's machine learning.

This will mean:

Higher traffic quality

Increase clicks on your ads

16. Eliminate negative keywords

You don't want to be wasting money on ads that no one is clicking on.

Negative keywords prevent your ad from showing to people who search for those words.

Remove broader searches that would not be a good fit for your service or product.

17. Gather data fast

There are eight types of automated bidding options in Google Ads.

We want to set your bid settings to max conversion or TCPA.

This bid strategy will maximize whatever budget you have for conversions.

And will allow you to test your ads quickly.

18. Optimize

Add extra negative keywords.

Identify and improve underperforming keywords.

Fix ads that have a low CTR, conversion rate, or poor quality score.

Improve your location targeting.

Upgrade your landing pages.

In fact, Jackson Blackledge says you don’t have to create every Google Ads campaign from scratch.

Instead, you can…

Spy on your competitors

See which keywords they're targeting

Look at their best ads

Use that data to improve your ads

Here’s how to do it in 5 simple steps:

19. Use Auction Insights

This is a tool within Google Ads that tell you how you stack up against businesses that are targeting the same keywords.

Check this page out to get ideas for which competitors you should spy on.

Here’s a resource on Google to use auction insights to compare performance.

20. Search Keywords

This one is low-tech, but it can get you great results.

Just take your top keywords, search them, and see what comes up.

I bet you’ll get some inspiration from the ads they show.

21. Find Your Competitors’ Keywords

Most decent keyword tools let you search a URL.

After that, it’ll spit out keywords it believes the business is targeting.

Here are some tools that can help you with this:

SpyFu is probably the best option

iSpionage, SEMRush, and Ahrefs are all worth a try.

22. Do Further Keyword Research

You should have keyword research done on your own, but after you find your competitors’ terms, search those on Google and use them to find more phrases.

Again, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and other keyword tools should all work well.

23. Compile, Analyze, and Test

The next steps are organizing what you found, reading it, using it to brainstorm new ideas, turning those ideas into ads, testing them, and optimizing them.

This is a difficult process, but once you have the data, it gets a lot easier.

Finally, Jackson shares that “if you want to max out your ROAS you need to have your landing page dialed in.

Here are 10 landing page hacks that will 2x your conversion rates and ½ your CPAs overnight:

24. Multiple Landing Pages

Audiences will be at different levels of awareness when they click on your ads.

Building multiple landing pages for each stage of the buyer journey will lower your CPAs and make every customer feel like you are talking directly to them.

For example,

Unaware: Fill the landing page with more information about their problem and how you can solve it

Product Aware: Load this with more social proof and customer transformations.

25. Heat Mapping Apps

You can install these on your shopify store to see what sections of your landing page customers are clicking off at.

Identify the “hottest” areas and keep reiterating them till their stone cold.

26. Have a good UX

Customers should be able to breeze through your site and find exactly what they're looking for in a few clicks or less.

Make sure to organize your:

Category Pages.

Clear navigation bar.

TOS & Privacy Policy on the footer.

Make everything crystal clear.

26. Optimize for mobile.

61% of Google Ads clicks come from mobile, if you’re not mobile optimized you’re making it harder for the majority of your traffic to buy.

Make sure every web page is locked in for mobile for a smooth user experience.

If your product is consumable, this is a great way to increase your LTV from the get-go.

Customers will feel like they’re getting a bargain and it makes it 10x more convenient for them rather than re-ordering everytime they run out.

Humans are social creatures, the more people we see enjoying a product the more desire we’ll have to buy it.

Make sure your product pages have:

Video reviews

Written reviews

Customer UGC

Star rating directly under the product

29. Clear Copy & Product Images.

This sounds obvious but 90% of landing pages get it wrong.

They load up a bunch of white-background product images with some basic benefits listed and call it a day.

You need to sell customers their dream outcome.

Whatever you can do to tap into a customers emotions and show the what they're missing out on, do it.

→ Show Images of the product in action. → Dig deep into their pain points with your copy. → Sell the lifestyle transformation, not the benefits.

30. Comparisons

There are always going to be competitors and copycats, show your customers what you have that they don’t.

Skincare Brand Example:

Competitors: Animal-tested and contains pre-manufactured chemicals.

You: Cruelty-free with 100% organic ingredients.

31. Multiple CTA’s

You never know what piece of information is going to trigger that impulse buy.

Give your customers as many possible opportunities to buy as you can, and have a CTA below every section of information and social proof.

32. The Power of Free

People love free stuff, even if it means they have to pay for something else to get it.

→ Free Bundles → Free E-Books → Free Shipping

Give them some sort of complimentary value when they order.

That’s it! Now go ahead and create your Google Ads.

We’re sure you’ll do much better with these expert tips to create Google Ads.

If you’re looking to explore more, feel free to watch this video from Jason on Google Ads Campaign Structure: How To Advertise On Google (Campaign Template + Case Study).