How to set up Google Ads: Full Guide for 2026

There’s a right order to setting up Google Ads, and most guides get it backwards.

The instinct is to open an account, build a campaign and start spending, then think about measurement later. The result is a familiar story: weeks of budget spent with no reliable way of knowing which clicks turned into enquiries or sales, and no conversion data for Google’s bidding algorithms to learn from. By the time tracking is finally installed, the early spend has taught you nothing.

This guide does it in the order that protects your budget. We’ll start with account setup, move straight into conversion tracking (the foundation everything else depends on) and only then build your first campaign, before working through the specialist formats (Shopping, Display, remarketing, dynamic remarketing and hotel ads) as your account matures.

Everything here reflects how Google Ads works today, explained in plain terms, with UK-relevant context throughout. No prior Google Ads experience is assumed.

How to Set Up a Google Ads Account

Creating the account is the quick part, but two or three decisions made in these first five minutes are permanent, so they deserve care.

1. Go to ads.google.com and sign in with a Google account. If you already use this account for Google Analytics or a Google Business Profile, use the same one, as linking everything later becomes far simpler.
2. Skip the guided “first campaign” flow. Google pushes new advertisers straight into creating a Smart campaign before the account is even configured. Look for the option to switch to expert mode, typically a small link such as “Are you a professional marketer?” or “Create an account without a campaign”. This gives you the full interface and stops you launching a half-configured campaign on day one.
3. Confirm your business information, country, time zone and currency. Time zone and currency are permanent: they cannot be changed later without creating an entirely new account. For UK businesses, that means GMT/London and GBP. Check them twice.
4. Add your billing details under Billing settings. UK accounts can pay by debit or credit card, or by direct debit. Nothing is charged until ads actually run, so there’s no risk in completing this now.
5. Complete Google’s advertiser verification when prompted. It’s mandatory, it can take a few days, and ignoring it will eventually pause your ads, so get it out of the way early.

While you’re in the account, link any related Google properties under the linked accounts section of your settings: your Google Analytics 4 property, your YouTube channel and your Google Business Profile. The GA4 link in particular matters for almost everything that follows: conversion imports, audience building and remarketing all flow through it.

If you haven’t set up Analytics yet, do that first (our companion guide to setting up Google Analytics walks through the whole process) because GA4 and Google Ads conversion data work best as a connected system rather than two separate tools.

How to Set Up Conversion Tracking in Google Ads

This is the single most important part of your entire setup. Without conversion tracking:

• You can’t tell which keywords, ads or campaigns produce enquiries or revenue, only which ones produce clicks.
• Google’s Smart Bidding strategies (Maximise conversions, Target CPA, Target ROAS) have nothing to optimise towards, so they simply cannot work properly.
• You cant justify the activity as effectively within meetings

Set it up before you spend a penny. Here’s the process from start to finish. If you want to dive deep on conversion tracking, we also have a full guide to setting up Google Ads conversion tracking here.

Step 1: Decide What Counts as a Conversion

A conversion is any action with genuine business value: a contact form submission, a phone call, a quote request, a brochure download, a booking, a purchase. List yours before touching any settings, and assign each a value where you can. Even an estimated value per lead (say, your average deal size multiplied by your lead-to-sale rate) gives the bidding algorithms far more to work with than a bare count.

One discipline to adopt from the start: be selective. If every minor interaction is recorded as a conversion, your data becomes noise and Smart Bidding optimises towards the wrong things. Track what matters; mark the rest as secondary.

Step 2: Create a Conversion Action

1. In Google Ads, go to Goals → Conversions → Summary and click New conversion action.
2. Choose Website (the process for apps, phone calls and offline conversion imports follows the same logic).
3. Enter your website URL. Google scans it and offers to create conversion actions automatically, or you can define them manually for full control.
4. Set the category (lead, purchase, sign-up), the value, and the counting method: choose One for leads (five form submissions from one person is still one lead) or Every for purchases (every transaction counts).

Step 3: Install the Conversion Tag

You have three routes, and which one you choose matters less than choosing exactly one:

Google Tag Manager (recommended). Add a Conversion Linker tag, then a Google Ads Conversion Tracking tag containing your conversion ID and label, fired on the action that signals the conversion, such as a thank-you page view or a form-submit trigger. GTM keeps every tag in one place as your tracking inevitably grows, and means no further site-code edits when you add new conversion actions later.

The Google tag directly. If your site already runs the gtag.js snippet for GA4, you add the conversion event snippet alongside it. Perfectly functional, but each new conversion action means touching site code again.

Import from GA4. If your key events are already configured in Google Analytics (see our GA4 setup guide), go to Goals → Conversions → New conversion action → Import, and pull them straight into Google Ads. One source of truth, no duplicate tagging. Note that GA4-imported conversions attribute slightly differently from native Google Ads tags, so pick one method per conversion action rather than importing and tagging the same action, which double-counts it.

Step 4: Verify It Works

Don’t assume; test. Use Google Tag Assistant or GTM’s preview mode, complete a test conversion yourself, and check that the conversion action’s status moves from “Unverified” to “Recording conversions” in the Google Ads interface. Diagnose any issues now, not three weeks and several hundred pounds into a live campaign.

How to Set Up Google Ads Conversion Tracking on Shopify

Shopify deserves its own note, because it’s the platform where duplicate tracking most often creeps in.

The cleanest route is the Google & YouTube app from the Shopify App Store: connect your Google Ads account through it and purchase conversion tracking is configured automatically, including the checkout events that are otherwise fiddly to tag by hand.

If you prefer manual control, add the conversion snippet through Shopify’s customer events / pixel settings rather than pasting code into theme templates, where it can be lost in theme updates. Whichever route you choose: one method only. Running the app integration and a manual tag together records every sale twice, inflates your reported ROAS and quietly misleads Smart Bidding.

How to Set Up Enhanced Conversions in Google Ads

Enhanced conversions are no longer optional best practice. With third-party cookies unreliable and a meaningful share of conversions invisible to basic tags, they’re now fundamental to accurate measurement, and one of the simplest accuracy upgrades available to any advertiser.

In short: when someone converts on your site, enhanced conversions send Google a hashed (privacy-protected) version of first-party data the customer has already provided (typically their email address), which Google matches against signed-in users to recover conversions that cookie-based tracking misses. You see a more complete picture; no readable personal data leaves your site.

To set them up:

1. Go to Goals → Conversions → Settings in Google Ads, turn on Enhanced conversions, and accept the customer data terms.
2. Choose your implementation method: the Google tag (automatic detection of email fields on your conversion pages works for many sites), Google Tag Manager (map the email field to a user-provided data variable; the most controllable route), or the API for developer-led setups.
3. Test via the conversion diagnostics tab, which reports whether enhanced conversion data is actually being received and matched.

Two compliance notes for UK advertisers: your privacy policy must cover this data sharing, and enhanced conversions must respect your cookie and consent banner, so implement them through your consent management platform so data is only sent where consent allows.

How to Set Up a Google Ads Campaign (Your First Search Campaign)

With tracking live, you’re ready to spend money safely. A Search campaign is the right starting point for almost every business: it reaches people at the exact moment they’re actively searching for what you offer, which no other channel can claim.

1. Create the campaign. Click New campaign, choose your objective (Leads or Sales for most businesses), and select Search as the campaign type. Give it a name that will still make sense in six months; a structure like [Brand] | Search | [Theme] works well.
2. Turn off the network defaults. Untick the Display Network (it dilutes Search budgets into low-intent placements) and consider unticking Search Partners until you have enough performance data to judge whether they earn their keep.
3. Set location targeting properly. Choose your real service area, and under location options select Presence (“people in or regularly in your locations”) rather than the default “presence or interest” setting. The default is a classic source of irrelevant international clicks on UK campaigns.
4. Set your bidding strategy. With conversion tracking in place, you can start on Maximise clicks to gather data, then move to Maximise conversions (and later add a target CPA) once you have roughly 15–30 conversions recorded. Don’t start on a conversion-based strategy with zero conversion history; the algorithm has nothing to learn from.
5. Set a daily budget you can sustain for at least a month. Google can spend up to twice your daily budget on any given day, but averages out across the month, so judge affordability by monthly spend, not by the daily figure.
6. Build tight ad groups. Group closely related keywords together, one theme per ad group, so your ads can mirror the searcher’s actual query. A plumber would separate “boiler repair” and “bathroom installation” into different ad groups, each with its own tailored ads.
7. Choose keywords and match types. Start with phrase and exact match for control, and add negative keywords from day one: free, jobs, courses, DIY, whatever doesn’t fit your offer. Then review the search terms report weekly and keep pruning; this is the single highest-value routine in Search management.
8. Write your responsive search ads. Provide as many genuinely distinct headlines as you can (up to 15) and up to four descriptions; Google assembles and tests the best-performing combinations automatically. Include your primary keyword in at least a couple of headlines, make the benefit concrete rather than generic, and give every ad a clear call to action.
9. Add assets (formerly extensions): sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and call assets if the phone matters to your business. They cost nothing extra, expand your ad’s footprint on the results page, and consistently lift click-through rates.
10. Launch, then actually manage it. The first fortnight is for harvesting search-term data, pruning waste and feeding the algorithm clean conversion signals. It is not the period to judge final performance; that comes once the learning phase settles.

How to Set Up Google Ads for My Business: a Note on Smart Campaigns

If you run a small local business and the section above feels like more than you need, Google’s Smart campaigns automate keywords, bidding and placements from a short business description. They are genuinely quick to set up (under 15 minutes), but you trade away the search-terms visibility and negative-keyword control that make standard Search campaigns efficient over time. Our suggestion: use a Smart campaign only as a stopgap, and graduate to a standard Search campaign as soon as you’re able.

How to Set Up Google Shopping Ads

For retailers, Shopping ads, the product image listings that appear at the top of results, routinely outperform text ads on purchase-intent searches. They run on a different fuel, though: a product feed rather than keywords.

1. Create a Google Merchant Center account at merchants.google.com and verify and claim your website.
2. Upload your product feed: titles, descriptions, prices, images, availability and product identifiers, kept accurate and refreshed at least every 30 days. Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce can all sync feeds automatically through their Google integrations, which removes most of the maintenance burden.
3. Link Merchant Center to Google Ads from the Merchant Center settings.
4. Create the campaign. You have two options: a Standard Shopping campaign, which gives you more manual control and is ideal while learning, or Performance Max with your feed attached, which extends your products across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and Display using Google’s automation. Performance Max generally wins on volume once it has conversion data to learn from; Standard Shopping gives you cleaner control early on.
5. Optimise the feed itself. In Shopping, your product titles do the job that keywords do in Search, so front-load them with what people actually search for (brand, product type, key attribute), not your internal product names. Feed quality is the biggest performance lever in the whole channel.

How to Set Up Google Display Ads

Display ads put images across millions of websites and apps in Google’s network. They make a poor first campaign (search intent is far higher than browsing intent) but a strong second step for brand awareness and, especially, for remarketing.

1. Create a new campaign, choose your objective, and select Display as the campaign type.
2. Set location, language and audience targeting. For prospecting, in-market segments and custom segments built from what your customers search for tend to beat broad demographic targeting comfortably.
3. Upload assets for responsive display ads: multiple images and logos, up to five headlines and five descriptions. Google assembles and tests combinations automatically, which is far more efficient than producing fixed banners in a dozen sizes.
4. Watch placements closely in the first weeks and exclude low-quality apps and sites. Placement exclusions are to Display what negative keywords are to Search: the routine that keeps budgets honest.

How to Set Up Google Ads Remarketing (Retargeting)

Remarketing, also called retargeting, shows ads to people who have already visited your site. It is consistently among the highest-converting activity in any account, for the simple reason that the audience already knows who you are.

1. Get your tagging in order. Remarketing audiences are built from your Google tag or, better, from your linked GA4 property. With the GA4 link active and audience sharing enabled, your Analytics audiences become available directly inside Google Ads.
2. Build your audiences. Start simple: all visitors (30 days), visitors to key pages (such as your pricing or contact page), and, for retailers, basket abandoners. Note that audience lists need minimum sizes before ads will serve: typically 100 active users for the Display Network.
3. Create the campaign. A Display campaign targeting your remarketing audience is the classic setup. You can also layer remarketing lists onto Search campaigns (RLSA) to bid more aggressively when past visitors search again.
4. Cap frequency and exclude converters. Set a frequency cap so your brand is a reminder rather than a stalker, and exclude people who have already converted unless you are deliberately cross-selling.
5. Mind consent. For UK and EU traffic, remarketing tags must fire in line with your cookie consent banner: audiences only build from consented visitors, so a broken banner quietly starves your lists.

How to Set Up Dynamic Remarketing in Google Ads

Dynamic remarketing goes a step further: instead of a generic ad, visitors see the specific products they viewed on your site. It requires two extra ingredients: a product feed in Merchant Center (which you will already have if you set up Shopping ads) and tagging that passes product IDs with each page view, which the Shopify and WooCommerce Google integrations handle automatically. Connect the feed to your Display or Performance Max campaign, and Google assembles personalised product ads on the fly. For ecommerce businesses, it is usually the single highest-ROAS campaign in the account.

How to Set Up Google Hotel Ads

A specialist format, but worth covering for anyone in accommodation: hotel ads are the price listings that appear when people search for hotels on Google and Google Maps, showing live rates alongside competitors and online travel agents.

The setup differs fundamentally from other campaign types because it is built on live pricing:

1. Create a Hotel Center account and claim your property, making sure your Google Business Profile is verified and accurate first, as the two are tied together.
2. Connect pricing and availability. Rates must reach Google through an integration partner (typically your booking engine, channel manager or a connectivity provider) rather than a static feed, because prices must stay live and accurate.
3. Link Hotel Center to Google Ads and create a campaign with a Travel objective (Performance Max for travel goals).
4. Choose your bidding. Commission-based options, where you pay a percentage of booking value, sit alongside standard strategies, which suits properties that want media cost tied directly to revenue rather than clicks.

For independent hotels, the practical first step is usually a conversation with your booking engine provider about their Google connectivity, since that integration is the gateway to the whole channel.

Your Google Ads Setup Checklist

1. Create your Google Ads account in expert mode, remembering that time zone and currency are permanent
2. Add billing, complete advertiser verification, and link your GA4 property
3. Set up conversion tracking and verify it is recording before spending anything
4. Enable enhanced conversions
5. Launch a tightly-themed Search campaign with negative keywords from day one
6. Add Shopping (for retail), Display and remarketing as conversion data accumulates
7. Layer in dynamic remarketing and specialist formats where they fit your business
8. Review search terms, placements and conversion data weekly

FAQs About Setting Up Google Ads

How much does it cost to set up Google Ads?

Account setup is free: you only pay when someone clicks (or, for some formats, views or engages with) your ads. You control spend through daily budgets, and there is no minimum, though very small budgets in competitive UK sectors will gather data slowly. Cost per click varies enormously by industry and location, which is why your own conversion data, not benchmark CPCs, should drive budget decisions.

Should I set up conversion tracking before launching my first campaign?

Yes, without exception. Conversion tracking is what tells you, and Google’s bidding systems, which clicks created value. Launching first and adding tracking later means your early spend produces no learning at all, for you or for the algorithm.

What’s the difference between Google Ads conversion tracking and GA4 key events?

They can measure the same actions, but Google Ads conversion tags attribute with fuller access to ads data, while GA4 key events use Analytics’ cross-channel attribution model, so the same action can show slightly different counts in each platform. Either can feed your bidding: tag natively in Google Ads or import key events from GA4, but avoid doing both for the same action.

How long before my campaigns perform well?

Expect a learning period: Smart Bidding typically needs a few weeks and a meaningful volume of conversions before it stabilises. Judge early campaigns on data quality (relevant search terms, accurate conversion recording) rather than week-one cost per lead.

Do I need a website to set up Google Ads?

For most campaign types, yes: ads need a destination. Local businesses can run call-focused or Business Profile-driven formats, but a landing page that matches your ad’s promise will outperform a homepage or profile link in almost every case.

Can I set up Google Ads myself or do I need an agency?

The setup in this guide is entirely achievable in-house, and doing your own foundation work, especially conversion tracking, pays off even if you bring in specialist help later, because you’ll be able to judge any agency’s work against clean data.

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Related reading: this guide pairs with our walkthrough of how to set up Google Analytics: the GA4 foundation that powers the conversion imports, audiences and remarketing covered above.