Google Ads

Connect your Google Ads account with Lexer

First, we'll show you how to integrate your account for the first time, and how to re-integrate your account should it become disconnected.

Benefits of a Google Ads integration

Integrating your Google Ads account with Lexer provides a number of benefits, such as:

• Send segments as customer lists for targeting

Integration in a nutshell

Here's a summary of how Google Ads integrates with Lexer: 

Integrating your Google Ads account

When integrating your Google Ads account, you will be prompted to login using a Gmail account. Make sure you login to the correctly linked Gmail account. This could be a personal Gmail, or a business Gmail.

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Navigate to Lexer Integrate, and you’ll see a range of supported integrations. We’re going to select Google Ads.

Click the Google Ads integration button.

Enter the appropriate Gmail account, and login.

Check all the accounts your wish to integrate, select all user Groups who should have access to these accounts, and click Add Integration.

Your Google Ads account(s) are now fully integrated and we can start sending custom audiences to them for targeting using Lexer Activate. Please contact Lexer Support (support@lexer.io) to build this activation for you.

Reconnecting your Google Ads account

Should your account become disconnected at any time, we will alert you with an email.

The method of reconnecting is very straightforward. Simply access Lexer Integrate, click on the Google Ads square and select the account that requires reconnecting. You’ll be able to tell which account or accounts require reconnecting as they will have a small amber circle next to their name. Once you click on the account, click the "RECONNECT" button, and sign into the associated Gmail again. This will re-authenticate and reconnect your Google Ads account with Lexer.

From the Google Ads column, select your account for reconnection and click Reconnect.

Send an email list to Google

Custom audiences are created using Lexer Activate, and you can send either hashed emails, mobile numbers, or advertiser IDs. For more information on what Google supports, see here.

Before you get into it, make sure you have the following items ready:

• Access to your Google Ads account
• An integrated Google Ads account
• A Google Ads activation in Lexer Activate
• A Segment(s) saved in Lexer Segment
• Your Google Ads account must have an average annual spend of over USD $50k.

Creating your activation

First, you’re going to navigate to Lexer Activate. Activate allows you to send audiences to social, search, email platforms, and keep up to date on your activation status. Learn more about Activate here.

Your first step is to click ACTIVATE NEW AUDIENCE.

As you’re sending this to Google, select the appropriate Google Ad account.

Next we’re going to pick your relevant Segment(s), and send to your audience. If your combined audience size is greater than 1 million, schedule the activation and get in touch with Lexer Support (support@lexer.io) to approve the audience.

Set and forget – auto-updating audiences

You have the option to enable always-on audiences to Google, which will add and subtract customers as they move in and out of your Segment. In this example, we’re targeting customers who haven’t installed your loyalty app, so when new users download it they’ll be removed from your audience. Audiences in Google are updated twice a day (every 12 hours) with a refreshed list of customers that now match your Segment’s parameters. If you’d like to make a change to the frequency that this updates, contact Lexer Support (support@lexer.io).

Once you send an audience, you can begin building this activation and sending it to your chosen Google Ads account. The larger the audience, the longer this can take. We will notify you once an audience has been sent via email. The moment you receive that email, your audience should be immediately available in your Google Ads account. It may take a few hours before it is ready to use, but you can start making your ad right away.

Let’s get out of Lexer and head over to your Google Ads account.

Creating your Google Ads campaign

Head to ads.google.com and make sure you’re logged into the correct account. Your Google Ads account links to a Gmail account, so double check you’re not accessing it with a personal Gmail.

Google Ads home screen

This is the home screen you’ll be welcomed with. If you have any existing campaigns, this is where you’ll get an immediate snapshot of how they are performing.

Finding your custom audiences

If you want to check all the audiences already activated to Google, you can navigate to the Audience Manager.

Click TOOLS, then Audience Manager

From the audience manager, head to the “CUSTOM AUDIENCES” tab to see all of your audiences. You’ll want to make sure your audience is ready to go before you start building the ad.

Click the CUSTOM AUDIENCES tab

Starting your campaign

When your audience is ready to go, let’s head back to the Google Ads home screen and start making your campaign. To do this, you can click on the Google Ads logo.

Selecting your campaign type and assigning a goal

Now let’s click on "New campaign" and choose your campaign type.

There are a few different campaign types, in this example we just want to have this run as a search campaign. You can read about the other campaign types here: About Google Ads types.

Here, you get to choose a campaign goal. These help to support you as you build your campaign with Google. In this example we’re going to work with the LEADS goal. You can read more on campaign goals here: About goals in Google Ads.

Campaign settings

When building out your ad campaign, you’re first required to provide the following:

Once you've done this, you can choose your start and end dates, and add your audience(s)

You can also add in extra information to your ad, like additional links, more business information or a specific phone number. These areas are optional, and we’ll be leaving them blank in this example.

Set up ad groups

Ad groups are a list of keywords you want to be associated with your campaign. There are two types of ad groups:

• Standard: Text ads written by you that serve based on keywords that you select.
• Dynamic: Text ads that use your website content to target relevant searches and generate headlines automatically.

If you’re comfortable with the standard of copy on your associated website, choosing Dynamic will work fine. But if you’d like absolute control, select Standard and populate the lists yourself.

If you use the standard option, Google provides a handy tool for you that will help you with some keyword ideas. This might reduce the uniqueness of your terms, but it will make the process quicker.

Create your ad

This is where you get to really work on the creative of your ad. You can populate the following:

1. Enter your final URL
2. Add headline 1
3. Add headline 2
4. Add specific site URL path to your ad
5. Include a brief description

Google doesn’t provide you with a whole lot of characters to use here, so remember to keep your ad to the point, and focused on the end goal of the customer. For example, we’re wanting our customers to download our loyalty app. Instead of writing Download our app today! You could instead talk to the benefit of what this action will bring, Save in app now!.

Sending your ad live

Once you’ve finalized your copy and you’re happy to proceed, click the Save and continue button. You’ll be taken to the final page, where you can read the summary of your ad. Now you’re done, click through to view your ad’s progress (Google need to approve all ads before they go live). This process shouldn’t take longer than a day.

To view the current status simply click CONTINUE TO CAMPAIGN.

Final things to remember

• Access to your Google Ads account
• An integrated Google Ads account
• A Google Ads activation in Lexer Activate
• A Segment(s) saved in Lexer Segment
• Your Google Ads account must have an average annual spend of over USD $50k.