Launching a Google campaign

Take a Google campaign from an approved marketing campaign to a live, correctly named, correctly tracked build. This process covers all three levels, campaign, ad group or asset group, and ad, because the inputs are gathered once for the whole build. It applies to every Google campaign type. The type changes which assets and copy templates you need, not the order of the work.

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What you’ll end up with

Three things that point at each other:

• A completed Google campaign brief, filed in the campaign library under the Google folder.
• A live campaign in Google Ads, named per the three naming conventions, pointing at a tagged landing page, optimizing toward a conversion action defined in the event tracking plan.
• Links back from the marketing campaign brief to this campaign’s brief, finished assets, and finished copy.

One person, the owner, is accountable for all three. The media buyer builds and runs the campaign.

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Before you start

Every input below has to exist, or be deliberately marked as not applicable, before the build starts.

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The process at a glance

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1. Confirm the campaign has a parent

Open the marketing campaign brief this spend belongs to and confirm Google is listed in its channels table, with a reason and a budget line.

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2. Pick the campaign type

The campaign type is the first real decision, because everything downstream depends on it: which assets you need, which copy template applies, and how the campaign is structured.

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3. Gather the inputs

Work down the table in Before you start. Customer profiles. Link them from the customer profile library, and note how each is implemented on Google: a Customer Match list, an in-market segment, or an audience signal. On Performance Max and Demand Gen, record explicitly that signals are signals and not restrictions, so nobody later reads broader delivery as a fault. Conversion action. Find the event in the event tracking plan and confirm it is importing and firing. Then check which conversion actions are set as primary for this campaign. Smart Bidding optimizes toward every primary action, so a campaign inheriting account defaults will chase conversions that have nothing to do with its objective. Destination. Check the landing page library first. On Search in particular, the match between the query, the ad, and the page is doing real work, so a page built for a different offer usually costs more than it saves. Assets and copy. Both are briefed. Check the creative drive and copy drive before commissioning anything new, then run the creative brief process and the copywriting process for what’s missing.

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4. Fill in the Google campaign brief

Copy the Google campaign brief and work down it. Every campaign gets its own. The brief fixes campaign type, conversion goal, budget, bid strategy, and structure. Those get reviewed before the build. Keyword additions and negatives, target adjustments, and asset rotation stay with the media buyer, who is making those calls against live data. Check the budget against the strategy before going further. Two pieces of arithmetic decide whether the rest of the brief is realistic:

1. Daily, not monthly. Google’s budget field is a daily average. Divide the monthly budget by 30.4 to get it. Google can spend up to twice that figure on a single day and caps the month at daily × 30.4.
2. Enough conversions for the strategy. Divide the monthly budget by the target cost per conversion. Target CPA wants roughly 30 conversions in 30 days; Target ROAS wants roughly 50. Below that, launch on a maximize strategy and record when you plan to switch.

The full tables are in the brief, under budget and bid strategy.

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5. Fill in a search theme brief per ad group

The campaign brief’s structure table lists the ad groups. This step decides what each one actually targets. Copy the search theme brief once per ad group, or the search theme template if the team already knows the sections. Check the search theme register first. A theme that already exists elsewhere in the account is usually better extended than duplicated, and two themes covering the same intent will compete in the same auction. Each theme fixes five things together: Apply the one-ad test before moving on. If a single responsive search ad could not be genuinely relevant to every keyword in the group, it is two themes. Splitting now costs a second brief. Splitting after launch splits the group’s history as well. Register the theme’s short form in the ad group theme dictionary at this point, because the next step builds the ad group name and the utm_content value from it.

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6. Assemble names and UTMs

Write all three names and the tagged URLs into the brief before opening Google Ads. One tagged URL per ad group, not one per campaign. utm_content carries the ad group name, so a campaign with three ad groups has three URLs. Tagging all three identically collapses them into one row in analytics, at exactly the level the campaign was organized around. Three values are worth checking against the standard rather than typing from memory: Decide auto-tagging and manual UTMs together. Auto-tagging adds a gclid for Google Ads reporting; it does not fill the utm_source and utm_medium fields your analytics groups by. Most accounts run both, and the brief is where that decision gets recorded rather than re-argued. Record the auto-applied recommendations setting at the same time. Recommendations left on can rewrite ad copy, add keywords, and change the bid strategy after launch, which means the reviewed brief and the running campaign stop matching. Which ones are on is the media buyer’s call; that somebody made the call is the brief’s.

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7. Register an experiment or a pilot, if either applies

If there is a control, follow creating an experiment: register the ID, apply it at the level the hypothesis targets, and don’t change it after launch. If there is no control and the spend exists to find out whether something works, it is a pilot. Fill in a pilot brief: a read date, a budget ceiling, and the kill or scale rule, all set before launch. A new channel, a new product line, or a new market with no history usually falls here. If it is neither, skip this step.

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8. Build the campaign, groups, and ads

Build from the brief. Work down the levels:

1. Campaign: type, networks, conversion goals, budget, bid strategy, locations and languages, campaign name.
2. Ad groups or asset groups: one per row of the brief’s structure table. On Search, the keywords, match types, and ad group negatives come from that group’s search theme brief. On Performance Max and Demand Gen, audience signals and assets. Group name.
3. Ads: copy from the filled copy template, assets from the approved files, final URL with UTMs attached, ad name.

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9. Run the pre-launch checklist

Run the Google pre-launch checklist with the campaign built and paused.

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10. Launch and link back

Set the campaign live, then:

• Paste the finished assets and finished copy links into the marketing campaign brief.
• Add the campaign to the reporting dashboard named in the brief.
• Record the launch date and the mid-flight review date in the brief.

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11. File the brief

File the completed Google campaign brief in the campaign library, under the Google folder, named per the file naming conventions. On Search, add a row per theme to the search theme register and file each theme brief alongside the campaign brief. The register is what the next person checks before planning a theme, so a theme that runs without a row in it is invisible to everyone except the person who built it.

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Exceptions

• The campaign is always-on brand defence. It still gets a brief, but experiment and mid-flight review may not apply. Keep the core: type, conversion goal, budget, bid strategy, and structure.
• You are adding an ad or asset to a live campaign. Skip steps 1 to 6. The ad group already has a theme, so read its search theme brief rather than filling in a new one. Confirm the copy and assets are approved, name the ad per the ad naming conventions, attach the UTMs, and run the ad-level rows of the pre-launch checklist. Do not skip step 7. If the new ad is a variant running against the existing one to find out which performs better, that is an experiment and it needs a registered ID before it goes live. A variant added without one is indistinguishable from an ordinary creative refresh a month later, and the result cannot be traced back to what changed.
• You are adding an ad group to a live campaign. That is a new theme. Run step 5 in full, then steps 6 and 8 onward. A theme added straight into Google Ads is the most common way a register stops matching the account.
• The campaign is cancelled before launch. File the brief with a short note on why it stopped.

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Related resources

• Google campaign brief The workbook this process runs on.
• Search theme brief One per ad group on Search, filled in at step 5.
• Search theme register Checked before a theme is planned, filed to after launch.
• Google pre-launch checklist The pass before spend starts.
• Campaign brief process The parent process, one level up.
• Creative brief process and copywriting process
• Google Merchant Center For Shopping and retail Performance Max.
• Creating an experiment When the campaign carries a controlled test.