Guide To Redeeming The Free Ad Credit On Google My Business Dashboard
**Scroll down to the bottom to see the video that walks you through step by step with live screen shots**
*Edited Trascipt*
If you've recently created a Google my business profile, you've probably seen this screen. This is your main dashboard. And right in the middle they are making an offer for $100 in free ad credits.
Today I'm going to show you how to go about redeeming that.
Okay, so before we get started or we hit that get started button, we need to learn a little bit about this free ad credits. Now, there's stuff that comes in the mail that has promotional codes and there are other things you can find on the internet with promo codes. But this particular one that you're going to get from your dashboard in Google My Business is a little bit different.
So if you get a chance, go ahead and click the learn more button on your screen and you're going to have this little pop up here and you're going to see over here that it's going to say start with $100 in free ad credits.
Well, that's not exactly true. You don't start with $100 in free ad credits. In fact, it's completely false. If you click on the question mark here, you'll see if you spend 50 us dollars on Google ads by a certain date, and I'm going to guess that date changes from time to time, then you'll get $100 in the future. The Ad credit offer will be automatically applied when you sign up.
Okay? So if you go through the process through this link and you spend $50, then you'll get $100 in free ad credits for future use. I'm going to show you how to go about the process to get the hundred dollars in free ad credits. So as I go through this video, when I say to get the a hundred dollars in free ad credits bear in mind that we're going to have to spend a $50, in order to get it okay?
So first thing we want to do is go ahead and click the get started button, which I'll do now.
That's gonna take us to a new screen. It's going to pop up here in a second. There we go. So this is the Google ads where you create campaigns and set all those types of things up. If you don't have this setup or it pulls up where you need to create an account or log in, go ahead and do that and you'll get here to this initial starting screen.
So it says three easy steps. So let's walk through it here. Select your ad goal. We're going to create the ad and we're going to set our budget. So let's do that. Go ahead and click create an ad. So what's our main advertising goal? Do we want to get more calls, get more sales sign ups, or get more visits to your physical location? So that's just going to depend on what kind of business you have. If you take appointments or you need to speak to people first, maybe you want to direct them to your business phone number. If your web-based e-commerce you might want to get them to your website or if you have a brick and mortar location, that might be your particular advertising goal. So for me, I want to get more website sales or signups. I want to get people to visit a website. So I'm going to click next on that.
And then it's going to say what business do you want to advertise? So I have to select mine because I handle the Google my business for another account as well. I'm just going to select my Hoku marketing that's the one I'm focusing on. Where are your customers? So, you know, if you have an eCommerce site, it might be the entire planet, maybe you want to just focus on a particular country or region of a state, maybe even a city.
So for me it's asking do you want to set up a radius around your store? And my store is located in Kailua, but really I want to have it go to the whole state of Hawaii. I can actually do the whole country, and I have customers in Arizona, California, all over.
But for this particular ad, I am going to add the state of Hawaii. I'm going to pull that up nd you'll see right here it says Hawaii United States. So I'm going to click on that. So some of your locations are wthin a larger location. Take a minute to double check your location. So I'm going to delete out these smaller cities and locations that are located within Hawaii. And then you see that message disappears. And now if we kind of zoom in here, you'll see all of the islands in the state of Hawaii are now shaded.
So a potential audience size for this is 1.6 million. I'm gonna go ahead and click next. You can adjust that however you want to spend your time picking the right audience that you want. So now we're going to target our ads are relevant to Google searches.
So what that means is when people are searching for certain things, that's when we want our ad to pull up. So right now it's pre-populating with some of my products and services that I have on my Google my business account. So if you're okay with this, you can leave it, you can delete all of this and add different suggestions as you move and add products and services. You want to watch your potential audience size over on this side.
So right now I want to focus on website design. I want to make this ad just promote, building Shopify sites so they don't have Shopify specific, they have website design. So I'm going to get rid of online strategy and let's see if that affects the potential audience size of 5,234 so if I delete that, it actually lowered of the audience size to 5,207 and I'm going to get rid of internet marketing services.
I'm going to get rid of search engine optimization and that's a good to 3,368 is a potential audience size. So that's people who are searching within your geographic area for this particular Google search. So that's what I want to focus this ad on. You can go broad, you can go very narrow, it's up to, you can fiddle with it. If you really want to take the time and find out what you should do, jump on Google and you can search for a keyword research relevant to your website and your business.
There is a ton of information out there pick something that's related to your business that people might be searching for before they find out about your business. Okay, so I'm doing website design.
I'm going to click next and now we'll get to write our ad. Okay. So there's some tips. You can view some sample ads. Let's see what their sample ads are, advertise your business online, digital marketing services, digital and social media marketing, free consultation, contact, or visit us now.
So these are, sample ads and this is what it's going to look like when people see it. So for the headline I want to get rid of my name because I know people aren't really interested in my name. So I'm going to put that I really want to focus on my Shopify.
So let's just put experts in website design. We'll keep it simple. And then the description looks like I have a little bit of more room. I have 90 characters that I can use. So if the headline catches them, they're probably going to read below. So we can say we design, build and launch quality Shopify website stores, locally owned and operated. That's 87, so it's perfect, I wouldn't really need a period. Okay. All right. Write another ad if you want the clicks on your ad to go to. So this is one thing that I definitely want to change because my website actually has a section specifically for Shopify. So let me get that now.
Okay. So I grabbed that and I'm going to enter a, a website here. Let me spend, get that drop down to look here. So that's the page I want to direct them to. directly on that. I also want to look over here and just see more ad layouts. So let's take a look, see what they're going to show us. I hope you can see this. Sometimes these pop ups don't pull up on the recording but it just shows what the ad's going to look like in different formats. Right now I'm looking at what do we look like on a tablet and what it would be desktop and mobile. So you can do that when you're going through the process. Okay. So let's click on next.
All right, so now we're at the page where we can set our budget. Now keep in mind, remember early on in the video, I told you that in order to get the a hundred dollars free ad credit, we need to spend $50 first. Uh, a little deceptive, in that advertising there. And the way to set your budget up is a little tricky. So let me show you how to do it, in a way that you can actually control your budget and not have it automatically bill beyond what you want to spend. So we're going to go right down here into custom budget, we're going to edit this and we want to pick something that you're comfortable with. So I don't know what your budget is but for me, I'm going to go to spend just an even amount.
Let's get it to $15 here, $15 daily average, and I'm going to do four days. So I'm going to spend $60, for the campaign and then get my $100 in free ad credit. Now when we're setting it up on this page here, you're going to see that it's on automatic billing and it's going to take you, it's going to show you this monthly maximum. And you may feel, Oh, I don't want to spend that much. I only want to spend $15 over four days. Well that's what's kind of tricky about this. So we're going to need to set this, we're going to actually have to set up billing and we're going to have to go back into the campaign and set that end date so that they can't just continue to charge us $15 a day. So let's go ahead and set the budget.
So we'll see in the custom budget, we got $15 a day. All right, go ahead and click next. This is the campaign settings review. So just take a look at anything. If you need to go back in and you want to change wording or you got a spelling error, you can go ahead and edit. That's what we want to spend $15 daily.
We definitely don't want to spend that. We're just trying to get our credit. So we're going to come back to that and then we'll click next.
Okay. And here we are in the payment info. So I'm going to go ahead and I'll load my payment information and credit card in here and I will continue on when I get to the next screen.
Okay, great. So once everything has gone through, you should be hit with this screen in between, the payment information screen and this screen, you probably got a pop up talking about how they use their ad information and some retargeting type of information. So I hope you click through that or if you needed more information, obviously you can read up on that. But, yeah, so you're going to get a congrats all done. And you'll also see in here that it will take about an hour to review the campaign and then you can edit your campaign and check its progress. And this is important because we're going to want to edit the campaign or we're going to want to go back in and set the date on that.
So, it's been sitting for a little while. Let me see if we can get in there. Let's do, explore your campaign. Remember earlier when we were looking at the campaign, it was a Shopify Hawaii partner. So that is the campaign, that we're in. So yeah, now I'm going to show you how to go in and set the date so we can block, the charges from continuing on and only have the ad run for a certain period of time and we can stay within budget.
So to stay within that budget, we've got to go into expert mode. Now I went ahead and did that, but I didn't record it and I couldn't figure out how to get back into the express mode. So I have some still shots here. So if you look on the top right hand portion of your screen, you're going to see a wheel cog, you are going to have to click on that.
On the very bottom of the menu that pull up, there is an option to switch to expert mode. So you can only access control of the end date of the budget if you're in expert mode. So go ahead and do that and we'll be able to move on to the next step. I hope by now you're starting to realize that this stuff is tricky and they make it really, really hard for you to do basic stuff. But anyway, once you're in this expert mode you're going to get a new menu here. It's going to give you some, some additional options. If you don't see this menu, go ahead and click on this all campaigns and then click on overview.
And this is where you should be. So we're getting closer! We want to come down here and you want to click on settings and here's the campaign. So we only have one going obviously this will be your first one that you're doing. So we want to go ahead and set the end date. So they still make it hard of course, cause here's the campaign end date. It's just stuff hidden upon hidden, so anyway, how to change this? We need to come over here and you need to select this check box. Okay. When you select the check box and then you're going to come up here to this edit button and click the drop down menu and one of those options is to change the end date.
I hope that this has been a learning experience for you. Clearly the Google ad campaign is set up to just get you on automatic and really block you from setting an end date. I think what they're doing is they're just banking on the fact that you're going to forget to come in and cancel your ad, and it's just going to continue to run and be charged on your credit card. I don't like it at all. That's why I'm making this video to show you how to select an end date. So we're going to go ahead and click here. Yes, we want to select an actual end date. Okay. So today is October 9th. It's a Wednesday. It's going to start running tomorrow. So we want it to run for four days. So I'm going to have it end on the 15th, October 15th. Okay. And I'm going to apply that and then come back down over here and you'll see the campaign end date is October 15th. So yeah, that was a huge pain to do. Very difficult, very confusing. I hope this video helps you in setting an end date.
So once you set your campaign and let it run, it will just end automatically. If you're like me, forget to go back in or reminders what have you. It's just good to know that it's going to end automatically.
Now, some of you out there are probably saying, Hey, you have more than four days. The ninth to the 15th is 16 days a well, yeah, that's because in the settings I said, I'm only going to want this ad to run, Monday through Friday and not on Saturdays and Sundays.
So if you want to continue on I'll show you how to do that too, to set the dates for your campaign. Otherwise, this pretty much ends the section on how to use the free Google ad credit of a hundred by spending $50 first and setting the end date so you don't go beyond what you wanted to spend. Okay so for those of you that want to continue on and see how to set the actual dates let's get into that.
Okay so to adjust the dates we're going to come back here. We're going to click on that campaign that we're interested in, a Shopify Hawaii partner, that's going to pull up these cards here for us. And right in the first one here, there is scheduling, right now it's set for any time. I highly recommend going in here there's a lot more to scheduling ads and there's a lot more advanced stuff. This video really is about setting the end date, but if you're going to set the end date, you probably want to come in here and do scheduling. So for, for my business, it's mostly business owners or potential business owners who are looking to do a website. I don't want to run that maybe on the weekends. Maybe I'm just interested in Monday through Fridays. So I'm going to go ahead and change this to custom hours and I'm going to set this to a 12 hour period. Let's do 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Okay. And I'm going to shut out Saturday and Sunday. And, you know, let me go ahead and do the rest here. Okay, there you go. I’ve set Monday through Friday, 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM so you can set it however you want. We'll go ahead and save this and it's now set to custom hours. So yeah, that's just a little extra there, but I hope this video helped you with the process which is very, very confusing. I had to do a lot of research, pull up all kinds of tabs, go into chat rooms, forums, help desks just to figure all that out.. I hope that helps all of you spend your first $50 and get that $100 a free ad credit with a cap on the total budget. If you have any questions or comments or you want to see a video about something else, go ahead and let me know. Leave a comment below or if you visit my website, there's a contact page in there if you want to reach out to me direct.
All right. Thanks for watching.
