Google Ads is the platform advertisers use to buy ads across Google’s properties and partner sites. It was called Google AdWords until 2018. For SaaS companies it is most often used for search campaigns, plus retargeting and, increasingly, Performance Max campaigns that spread one budget across several Google channels.
How an account is organized
An account contains campaigns, which hold the budget, bidding strategy, location and language settings. Search campaigns contain ad groups, and each ad group holds keywords and the ads that serve for them. Assets such as sitelinks and callouts can sit at account, campaign or ad group level.
- Search: text ads on Google results pages, targeted by keywords.
- Performance Max: one campaign across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, run largely by Google’s automation.
- Demand Gen: image and video ads on YouTube, Discover and Gmail.
- Display and Video: banner and YouTube campaigns, often used for retargeting.
What decides performance
Google ranks ads with Ad Rank, which combines your bid with ad quality, thresholds, the context of the search and the expected impact of your assets. Strong accounts tend to have tight keyword-to-ad-to-page relevance, clean conversion tracking and enough conversion data for automated bidding to learn from.
Conversion tracking is the foundation. Smart Bidding strategies optimize toward whatever you mark as a conversion, so if that action is low quality, the automation will find more of it.
Google Ads for B2B SaaS
B2B volumes are small compared with ecommerce, so automated bidding can struggle to learn from a handful of demos a month. Common workarounds include optimizing toward an earlier but still meaningful event, importing qualified-lead and closed-deal stages from the CRM, and consolidating campaigns so each one has more data.
Example
Separating brand from non-brand
Hypothetical company Rivetgale runs one search campaign for its brand name and another for category terms. Mixing them would make the account look far more efficient than it is, because brand searches convert at a much higher rate. Splitting them lets the team see what non-brand demand really costs.
Common mistakes
Accepting every auto-applied recommendation
Some recommendations broaden match types or raise budgets. Review them against your goals before applying.
Leaving Search Partners and Display on by default
New search campaigns can include partner sites and the Display Network. Decide deliberately whether you want that traffic and check its conversion quality.
Questions
Google does not set a high minimum, but a budget that buys only a few clicks a day will take a long time to produce enough data for decisions or for automated bidding to learn.
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