Setting up your first Google Ads account and campaign structure

With the auction mechanics from part 1 understood, this part builds the actual account and first campaign — using Bright Leaf Coffee, launching a Search campaign for its coffee subscription product, as the real, running example.

Creating the account

At ads.google.com, account creation asks for a business name, billing country, and time zone before anything campaign-specific — these apply account-wide and are worth getting right immediately, since the time zone specifically affects how daily budgets and reporting windows are calculated for every campaign created afterward.

Choosing a campaign goal

Google Ads asks for a campaign goal up front — Sales, Leads, Website Traffic, among others — and uses it to pre-select relevant settings and bidding strategy defaults. For Bright Leaf Coffee's first campaign, Sales is the correct goal: the actual objective is subscription purchases, not just traffic for its own sake, and choosing the accurate goal here shapes the automated bidding recommendations (part 10) offered later.

Setting a realistic starting budget

Daily budget: $30/day
Monthly equivalent: ~$900/month

A daily budget is an average Google Ads aims to spend per day over a month, not a hard daily ceiling — some days may spend more, some less, balancing out to roughly the daily budget times 30 over a month. Starting deliberately modest — enough to gather real data within a few weeks, not so much that a mistake in early campaign structure becomes expensive before it's caught — is the right instinct for a first campaign, with room to scale once real performance data exists.

Location targeting: don't skip this

Location: United States (shipping) or a specific metro area (a local pickup option)

Bright Leaf Coffee ships nationwide, so its location targeting is the full country it serves — but a business with a physical-only presence (a local coffee shop, not the subscription business used here) should target a specific radius around its actual location, not the whole country by default. This single setting is one of the most common sources of wasted spend for any local business — showing ads, and paying for clicks, from searchers who could never actually become customers.

The campaign structure being built

Bright Leaf Coffee (account)
  └── Search — Coffee Subscriptions (campaign)
        └── Coffee Subscription — General (ad group)
        └── Coffee Subscription — Gift (ad group)

Two ad groups from the start, not one — "General" for broad subscription-intent searches, "Gift" for gift-specific ones ("coffee subscription gift," "gift for coffee lover"). Splitting these now, rather than lumping every keyword into one ad group, is what lets part 6's ad copy actually speak directly to each distinct intent — a gift-focused ad performs differently than a general-purchase one, and one ad group can't cleanly serve both.

Network settings: Search only, to start

Search Network: ✓ enabled
Display Network: ✗ disabled (for this campaign)

A default Search campaign offers to also show ads on the Display Network (part 3 covers what that actually is) — leaving it enabled on a Search campaign mixes two very different ad formats and performance profiles into one campaign's reporting, making it hard to tell which network is actually driving results. Keeping them separate from the start, one campaign per network, is standard practice this series follows throughout.

Next: the different campaign types available beyond Search — Display, Shopping, Video, and Performance Max — and which one actually fits a given goal.