Google Ads for Small Organisations
A step-by-step course in running Google Ads well on a small budget. You'll decide whether Google Ads is right for you, set up your account properly, track enquiries and sales, choose keywords and structure your campaigns, write ads and landing pages, build and launch a Search campaign, optimise week by week, and report on what your spend is achieving.
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A step-by-step course in running Google Ads well on a small budget. You'll decide whether Google Ads is right for you, set up your account properly, track enquiries and sales, choose keywords and structure your campaigns, write ads and landing pages, build and launch a Search campaign, optimise week by week, and report on what your spend is achieving.
The course has 8 modules, each with a short video, a written lesson, an exercise, a quiz and at least one worksheet (13 worksheets in all, in Word and PDF).
Who this course is for
People who look after marketing in small UK businesses and organisations, including anyone who has tried Google Ads before and wasted money.
Course content
Module 1: Is Google Ads Right for You?
Google Ads can put your business in front of people at the moment they search for what you sell, but every click costs you money, and plenty of small organisations have paid for clicks that never turned into a single customer. This module helps you decide, before you spend anything, whether Google Ads is likely to pay for itself for you: how the auction and your budget really work, what an enquiry might cost, which campaign types suit a small organisation, and where Google Ads simply isn't the answer.
about 70 minutes of reading, plus a 45-minute exercise (working out your own cost per enquiry and break-even point).
What you'll be able to do
- Explain how Google decides which ads show and in what order (Ad Rank), what Quality Score is, and why you usually pay less than your maximum bid.
- Predict how your budget will behave: how much Google can spend on one day and in one month, and what else appears on the bill.
- Work out a break-even cost per enquiry for your business, and estimate whether Google Ads is likely to beat it.
- Describe the main Google Ads campaign types and choose a sensible first campaign type for a small organisation.
- Recognise the honest limits of Google Ads and the common myths that waste small advertisers' money.
- Decide whether to go ahead, fix something first, or wait.
Module 2: Setting Up Your Account Properly
Most expensive Google Ads mistakes are made before the first ad runs: a rushed first campaign spending money before tracking works, the wrong time zone locked in for good, a card in someone's personal name, or an agency that owns the account instead of you. This module sets up your account properly, in the right order: getting through Google's guided sign-up without a rushed campaign, payments and what you will actually be charged, advertiser verification, users and ownership, account security, and linking Google Analytics, your Business Profile and (if you sell products online) Merchant Center.
about 60 minutes of reading, plus a 60-minute exercise (set up or audit your account with a checklist, and record who has access and who owns what).
What you'll be able to do
- Create a Google Ads account through Google's guided first-campaign sign-up without launching a rushed campaign, and explain the difference between Smart campaigns and the full interface (Expert Mode).
- Choose the settings you can never change later (time zone, currency, payments profile type) correctly the first time.
- Set up postpay, explain the payment threshold and monthly invoicing, and predict what a month's invoice will include, including the 2% UK Digital Services Tax fee and VAT.
- Complete advertiser verification on time and know what Google shows publicly about you.
- Give each person and agency the right access level, so your organisation, not a supplier, owns the account, and protect it with 2-Step Verification.
- Link Google Analytics 4, your Google Business Profile and Merchant Center, and check that auto-tagging is on.
Module 3: Measuring What Matters
Every pound you put into Google Ads should be traceable to something that matters to your business: a call, an enquiry, a booking, a sale. This module shows you how to choose those actions, set up tracking through Google Analytics 4 or the Google tag, count phone calls, and get the settings right so your reports (and later, Google's automated bidding) are working from honest numbers. It finishes with UK consent rules and a simple way to prove your tracking works before you spend a penny more.
about 70 minutes of reading, plus a 60-minute exercise on your own account and website (with a quick check the next day).
What you'll be able to do
- Explain what a conversion is, and why cost per conversion matters more than clicks when you're spending your own money.
- Choose two to four primary conversion actions for your business, and decide which softer actions to keep as secondary.
- Set up website conversions by importing GA4 key events or using the Google tag, and track phone calls from your ads and website.
- Choose the right settings for each action: category, primary or secondary, count (One or Every), value (including a simple lead value), conversion window and attribution.
- Explain how UK cookie law (PECR, as amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025) and ICO guidance apply to Google Ads tracking, and the difference between basic and advanced Consent Mode.
- Test that each conversion action is recording, and spot the signs of broken or inflated tracking.
Module 4: Keywords and Campaign Structure
Most small accounts that waste money do so before a single ad is written: the keywords attract people who were never going to buy, the budget is spread so thinly that nothing gets enough clicks to learn from, and ads show in places the business can't serve. This module helps you choose searches worth paying for, build a small, focused account around them, and set locations and keyword controls so your money goes where your customers are. By the end you'll have a campaign map and a keyword and negatives list ready to build in Module 6.
about 70 minutes of reading, plus an 80-minute exercise on your own business.
What you'll be able to do
- Sort searches by intent (ready to buy, comparing, researching, or the wrong crowd) and decide which ones are worth your money.
- Plan a small account that concentrates your budget: few campaigns, brand kept apart from non-brand, and tightly themed ad groups with their own landing pages.
- Set campaign locations to match where your customers really are, choose between Presence and Presence or interest, and understand what's changing with language settings.
- Use Keyword Planner to find keywords and rough costs, and explain why its numbers are estimates, not promises.
- Choose match types for a new account and explain how broad match and AI Max change what your keywords can trigger.
- Build negative keyword lists that actually block what you intend, knowing that negatives don't match close variants.
Module 5: Ads, Assets and Landing Pages
Your keywords decide which searches you enter. Your ads, assets and landing pages decide whether the right people click, whether the wrong people stay away, and whether the click turns into an enquiry or a sale. This module shows you how to write responsive search ads that earn the right click, which assets are worth adding, the UK rules your ad text and prices must follow, and how to check that every ad lands on a page that keeps its promise.
about 80 minutes of reading, plus a 90-minute exercise in which you write the ads for one campaign, plan its assets, check them against the rules and test your landing pages.
What you'll be able to do
- Explain how a responsive search ad is put together, its character limits, what ad strength does and doesn't tell you, and when pinning is worth it.
- Write headlines and descriptions that match the searcher's intent, put off people who will never buy, and lead to the conversion you track.
- Choose and plan the assets that suit your organisation: sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, images, business name and logo, call, location, price and promotion assets.
- Check your ad text, prices and claims against the ASA's CAP Code, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 and Google's own ad policies, and spot when your business falls into a restricted category.
- Choose and test a landing page for each ad group that matches the ad, answers the obvious questions and makes the next step easy.
Module 6: Building and Launching a Search Campaign
This is the module where your plans from Modules 1 to 5 become a live Search campaign. We'll go through the campaign set-up screens setting by setting, explain which ones cost small advertisers money when left on Google's defaults, and help you choose a sensible starting budget and bid strategy. Then you'll run a pre-launch check and learn exactly what to look at (and what to leave alone) in the first 48 hours.
about 70 minutes of reading, plus a 75-minute exercise in which you build, check and launch your first Search campaign.
What you'll be able to do
- Gather everything you need before you start, and choose the objective, campaign type, conversion goals and a clear campaign name.
- Set networks, locations and languages so your money is spent only on searches from the people you can actually serve.
- Turn your monthly budget into a daily budget, explain how Google's daily and monthly limits work, and choose a starting bid strategy that suits a new account.
- Make an informed decision on AI Max, set an ad schedule knowing how the June 2026 pacing change affects spend, and answer the EU political ads question.
- Build your ad groups, keywords, ads and assets in the set-up flow, then run a pre-launch check before you publish.
- Check the right things in the first 48 hours, and resist the changes that would set your campaign back.
Module 7: Optimising Week by Week
Once your first Search campaign is live, the job changes from building to tending. This module shows you where your money is going (the search terms report), how to read the few numbers that matter, when to hand bidding over to Google's Smart Bidding, which of Google's suggestions to accept, and how to test and record changes so you always know why results moved. It ends with a 20-minute weekly routine you can keep up alongside the rest of your job.
about 70 minutes of reading, plus a 60-minute exercise in your own Google Ads account. After that, the routine takes about 20 minutes a week.
What you'll be able to do
- Use the search terms report to find wasted spend, add negative keywords at the right match type and level, and spot new keywords.
- Read click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per conversion and Quality Score together, and work out what to fix first.
- Decide when a campaign is ready to move from Maximise clicks to Smart Bidding, make the switch safely, and explain what the 17 August 2026 change to Target CPA and Target ROAS means for you.
- Review Google's recommendations on their merits, explain why optimisation score is not a performance measure, and switch off auto-apply.
- Use change history, experiments, automated rules and budget changes without losing track of what you did.
- Run a 20-minute weekly optimisation routine and keep an optimisation log.
Module 8: Beyond Search, Reporting and Growth
By now you have a Search campaign that is measured, built carefully and looked after every week. This final module looks at what comes next: when Performance Max, Shopping, Local Services Ads, Demand Gen, YouTube or remarketing are worth your money, and when they aren't yet. It then gives you a one-page monthly report that talks about cost per enquiry rather than clicks, a monthly routine, and a 90-day plan, so you finish the course knowing exactly what to do on Monday.
about 70 minutes of reading, plus a 65-minute exercise.
What you'll be able to do
- Decide whether Performance Max suits your organisation yet, and set one up with the controls that protect a small budget (brand exclusions, negative keywords, channel and search term reporting).
- Explain how Shopping ads and free listings work in the UK, including Merchant Center, product data basics, VAT-inclusive prices and Comparison Shopping Services.
- Judge whether Local Services Ads, Demand Gen, YouTube or remarketing would add anything for your organisation, and what each needs before it can work.
- Produce a one-page monthly report for your boss, partners or owner that leads with cost per enquiry (or return on ad spend for a shop), not clicks.
- Run a monthly routine that catches billing, tracking and policy problems before they cost you money.
- Write a realistic 90-day plan with goals you can check, named owners and dates.
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