Surviving Google Ads: A Beginner’s Guide to Testing Demand (Without Losing Your Mind)

In the first few posts, we talked about finding problems, who might pay, what the business could look like, and how to test product demand with a landing page. How will people find your landing page? A Google ad! 

Google Ads are what I consider a necessary evil. Necessary because it’s a good way to understand demand but evil because the ads platform is a quagmire. PSA to any Google Ads friends, if you need some UX research on how users use / are challenged by the platform, reach out ;)

Here are the steps I took:

First attempt

Here’s how my journey with Google Ads went: Set up an account, follow the guides, get my account locked (probably a glitch), ghosted by tech support twice, abandon that account, and start fresh. After a few setbacks, I found a better guide and finally got things working thanks to Youtube videos from not Google.

Second attempt

With my new account, I went to ads.google.com. Then I start googling basically making a Google ad for idiots and found a great resource, Loves Data. I followed this video closely, literally step by step copying what he told me to do. Highlights are

  • I would recommend doing a search ad, which is your traditional ad you would see when you google something. When your product doesn’t exist yet, you don’t have assets like logos or videos that might be useful in display ads (which feature stuff that’s not words)
  • Optimize for clicks to begin with (or nothing), which will let you at least see who is searching and clicking on ads like yours
  • Set a very low cost per click maximum, like $2
  • Determine a list of keywords, which are terms you think people would use googling your product
  • Create ad copy, which will be headlines and descriptions. Note these are sort of combined together randomly by google’s algo. Make sure you don’t have lots of redundant copy, which looks like word salad when randomly concatenated together. 
  • Set a very low daily budget, like $5 (unless you’re actually trying to acquire real customers)
  • Of course, connect this ad to the URL of your landing page we made in Step 3
  • Published my first ad! Waited for it to be approved by google. Checked back 2 days later and it was live.

Pro tips:

  • Skip Google’s support materials and head straight to helpful YouTube tutorials from reputable sources (I recommend Loves Data).
  • Document everything. I create a breadcrumb trail in Google Slides with video links, screenshots, and notes. You won’t remember all the details later.
  • Make sure you’re using up-to-date resources—Google Ads frequently changes its interface, and nothing is worse than hunting for buttons that don’t exist.

You’ll have a lot of really interesting information you can glean from ads, such as:

  • How many people are searching for your keywords?
  • Where are people located who are searching? What are their demographics? 
  • Are they on web or mobile?
  • Broadly, who clicks on your ads? What are their demographics?
  • What related keywords are people searching for?
  • How competitive (expensive) is the space?
  • Can you get an early sense of cost to acquire customers?

Interpreting Google Ads is another whole post, but I will walk you through that as well. In the meantime, if you successfully placed your first ad, congratulations! It took me a couple of tries.

The value of placing Google Ads is worth the pain of using the Google Ads platform. Despite the frustrations, running Google Ads is well worth the effort. You can get pretty decent signals for < $100 in ad spend. Even with a small budget, you’ll get valuable insights into your product’s demand—and that’s worth the Ads platform pain.