I'll focus on the search network as it's probably the most efficient and what you should start with. If you're into shopping ads, most of this wont apply to you. It all starts with the keyword planner, go play around with that tool and get comfortable with it because its the basis of everything else. Learn about keyword match types, take the time and study it. It's not that complicated and if you fudge it up it can burn a hole in your wallet. Make an ad group per keyword(you can put some synonyms in there too if you like) and make at least two ads per group(this way they can compete against each other and you can improve them as you get data). Don't bother with keywords that don't get a reasonable amount of traffic. You can technically put all your keywords into one ad group with one ad but it sucks so don't do it. Some people here will tell you to do it anyway but those people are noobs so don't listen to them. Make damn sure your location targeting is right, you don't want to pay to advertise to people who can't buy. Google will suggest bids for ad placements, they like to suggest high for obvious reasons so when you start out bid something like 30% lower and if that still hits your daily budget you can lower it but if it doesn't hit the daily budget because of low bids you can raise it. (there's more nuance to this, but roughly speaking this works) Once you have a campaign up and running, check your search terms daily at the start so you can see what search terms are ACTUALLY triggering your ads and at what cost. That way you can fix problems asap and not wind up with huge ad spend for months worth of crap traffic. Add negative keywords based on these results. Keep in mind this idea about balance: If your campaign is set up to only be triggered by very specific keywords and nothing that could be misinterpreted to be about something else then you'll have very relevant traffic but not so much. If however you have many and roughly related keywords that will result in a lot of traffic but of a lower quality. The trick here is finding the Goldilocks zone: you don't want to be too specific or you'll miss out on too much traffic, but you don't want to be too vague or you'll be paying for a lot of traffic that does not convert. Really if your starting out I can't stress enough the importance of following up on the search terms. It's easy to get bogged down with CPA, retargeting, tag manager, ad copy and the ocean of information and extra complications out there but your real bread and butter on the search network is "what searches are triggering my ads? " and "how much am i paying for it? " If you can manage those two factors to be good for your first campaigns you'll be doing very well and the rest is just extra and nice. Finally I want to mention that it's probably a good idea to get just a little bit of guidance at the start. A while back I happened to visit a non-profit company for something unrelated and happened to see someone working on a Google Ads campaign, I sat down with him for 30 minutes as he took notes and that saved the company thousands. That guy didn't even do such a bad job but people tend to get really lost and focus on the wrong things when they start out with this so remember that you're playing with real money and going at this alone without experience is a very easy way to lose money. I learned that the hard way as did many others. It's often way cheaper and better for your peace of mind to just pay someone with experience for a couple of hours of their time. Hope this helps, best of luck.
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