Google Ads step by step: From new account to first campaign, and the AI ads on their way

Before you start: Three clarifications

Google Ads is still the most direct route to customers with buying intent: Roughly 90 percent of Norwegian searches happen on Google, and the ads sit where decisions are made. But before opening the account, clarify three things:

• The goal. What should a krone in give back? Sales, leads or bookings, and what is a customer worth? Without that answer you cannot judge whether the campaign works.
• The landing page. The ad is just the door. The page behind it must answer what the ad promises, load fast and have a clear next action.
• Consent. To measure conversions and run remarketing in Norway and the EEA, Google requires your website to send consent signals via Consent Mode v2. Get the consent banner in place first, otherwise you lose the measurement everything else builds on.

Step 1: Create the account in expert mode

Go to ads.google.com and sign in with the company's Google account. And here comes the single most important piece of advice in this guide: Do not follow the default flow. Google pushes new advertisers into a simplified Smart campaign where you give up control over keywords, placements and bids. Look for the link to switch to expert mode, or the option to create an account without a campaign, and you get full access to the tool from the start.

Then complete the administrative part: Country, time zone and currency (these cannot be changed later, so choose correctly), billing information and payment method. Set up access for colleagues under Admin and Access and security, with the usual logic: One user per person, never shared passwords.

Step 2: Conversion tracking before you spend a krone

This is the step most people skip, and it is why most Google Ads accounts are steered blindfolded. Do it in this order:

1. Link Google Ads to GA4 under Tools and Linked accounts. Data then flows both ways: GA4 sees the ad traffic, and Google Ads can use GA4 events.
2. Define conversion actions. Under Tools and Conversions, create the actions that actually matter: Purchases, form submissions, booked demos, phone clicks. Import events from GA4, or use the Google tag directly on your site.
3. Set values where you can. Even an estimate, like the average value of a lead, lets smart bidding strategies later optimise towards value instead of volume.
4. Test that it works. Complete a test conversion yourself and confirm it shows up before turning on traffic.

Step 3: Choose campaign type, and start with Search

Google Ads has many campaign types: Search, Shopping, Display, Video and Performance Max. The advice for beginners is simple: Start with a Search campaign. That is where intent is highest, the numbers are easiest to interpret, and the learning is greatest. Shopping is the next step for online stores, while Performance Max is powerful but a black box that works best once the account already has conversion data to learn from.

Choose your objective (sales, leads or traffic), campaign type Search, and switch off the two defaults that steal budget from beginners: Display Network expansion, and in most cases search partners too. Then you know the money goes to Google search itself.

Step 4: Budget and bidding strategy

Set a daily budget you can live with for a few weeks, for most small businesses 100 to 300 kroner a day is a sensible starting point for one campaign. The budget can be adjusted at any time.

On bidding, the recipe has two stages: Start with Maximise clicks, preferably with a max CPC cap, while the account gathers conversion data. Once you have roughly 20 to 30 conversions, switch to a smart strategy like Maximise conversions, optionally with a target CPA, or target ROAS for online stores. The smart strategies are good, but they need data, and they need the conversion tracking you set up in step 2.

Step 5: Keywords, match types and negative keywords

Build tight ad groups: One theme per group, 5 to 15 keywords, so the ad can mirror the search precisely. Match types control how broadly Google interprets your keywords:

Start with exact and phrase, and be careful with broad match before you have negative keywords and conversion data in place. And negative keywords are the beginner's best friend: Add words like "free", "course", "jobs" and "salary" from day one if you sell services, and top up the list weekly from the search terms report. It is often the easiest saving in the whole account.

Step 6: Write the ads

Search ads are responsive: You provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Google assembles combinations and learns what works. Here is how to make that work for you:

• Vary the angles. Some headlines with the keyword, some with concrete benefits ("Reply within 24 hours"), some with trust ("Over 500 Norwegian customers") and a clear call to action. Not fifteen rephrasings of the same sentence.
• Be concrete. Numbers, prices and specific promises beat generic superlatives, in ad copy as everywhere else.
• Pin sparingly. You can lock a headline to position one if something must be there, but every pin reduces Google's room to optimise.
• Use assets. Add sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets (and the call asset if phone matters). They cost nothing, give the ad more space on the page and lift click-through rates.

Quality Score ties it together: Google rewards alignment between keyword, ad copy and landing page with lower click prices and better positions. The tight structure from step 5 is half the job.

Step 7: The first weeks

Once the campaign is running, the work is in the follow-up, and the most important report is Search terms: It shows the actual searches that triggered your ads. Weekly routine: Add converting searches as their own keywords, and add irrelevant ones as negatives. In addition:

• Watch CTR, cost per conversion and conversion rate, not just clicks and impressions
• Give changes one to two weeks before judging them, especially with smart bidding that needs calm to learn
• Test one thing at a time, otherwise you will not know what worked

Five mistakes that eat the budget

Having seen the inside of many Norwegian Google Ads accounts, the same mistakes keep repeating. Check yourself against the list:

1. The Smart campaign from the default flow. It runs broad, reports little and teaches you nothing. If your account started that way, build a proper Search campaign alongside it and phase out the old one.
2. Missing or wrong conversion tracking. Without tracking, both you and Google optimise for clicks, and clicks pay no bills. Worse is double counting or tracking page views as "conversions", then the system learns the wrong thing.
3. Broad match without negative keywords. The combination sends your ads to everything Google finds vaguely similar, and the budget disappears into searches you should never have been near.
4. All keywords in one ad group. Then the ad cannot mirror the search, Quality Score drops, and you pay more per click than the competitor with tighter structure.
5. Panic adjustments. Changes every other day reset the learning in smart bidding. Set a fixed weekly routine instead, and make bigger changes less often.

The new chapter: Ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode

And then to what makes this guide more important than it has been in years: Google search is changing fast, and the ads are moving into the AI surfaces with it. This is the status now:

• AI Overviews: Google already shows ads above, below and inside the AI overviews in several markets, including the US and UK, drawn from regular Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns.
• AI Mode: Ads in the fully conversational surface are being tested with selected advertisers, and formats where retailers present offers directly in AI answers are being piloted.
• Norway: No confirmed date yet, but the rollout keeps widening, and when it reaches us, it is managed from exactly the same Google Ads account and campaigns you are setting up in this guide. Measurement follows in GA4, and Search Console already has a beta report for generative AI performance, a clear signal of where this is heading.

Put simply: The account, the conversion tracking and the craft you build now are the entry ticket to the AI ads that are coming. It is the same shift the ChatGPT Ads launch is part of, and we have written a dedicated step by step guide for ChatGPT Ads as the sister guide to this one.

Paid search and AI visibility belong together

Finally, the same principle that applies in every channel: Ads buy you space, but they do not replace the organic position. The numbers show that both organic and ad clicks fall where AI answers appear, and then being present in the answers themselves, organic AI visibility, becomes the other half of the equation. Those who master both, paid and organic, in both Google and ChatGPT, are the ones who own the customer journey going forward. The overview of the whole paid AI landscape, across ChatGPT, Google and the other surfaces, is in our pillar guide on AI advertising. That combination is what we help Norwegian businesses with every day.