Google Ads app

We've all seen a Google ad. We've all clicked one. And we've all had the same thought: how can you create and manage them directly inside Webflow without ever leaving your site?

In this video, we'll show how that's done in four steps:

We'll install and connect our Google Ads account. We'll create a campaign, where we add our assets directly from Webflow. We'll then review, preview, and launch that campaign. And finally, we'll talk about how you can manage your campaigns within Webflow.

Before we get into it, Google Ads. What are they? And what's the real benefit here? Google Ads can run on a campaign type called Performance Max. It automatically shows your ads across Search, YouTube, Display, and more.

You set the goal and the budget. Google handles where and when they appear. The big benefit here is that your ads use assets that are already in Webflow, your Google tag gets set up automatically, with some exceptions, and you don't have to leave your site to launch a campaign.

Everything is in one place. Let's install and connect our Google Ads app. We're here on our site. It's a high-end travel service website, and we want to create an ad campaign for our company. We want more leads, more clients, and more revenue. Basic business stuff.

So let's go in and open up the Apps panel. From here, we can find the Google Ads app. Once we do, let's click Install, and we need to connect our Webflow site here.

Let's authorize and find our site. Once we do, we select it and authorize the app. Authentication successful. Great. Let's open up Webflow again.

Next, we need to connect our Google account. So with a few clicks and one "Allow," we're connected.

If you don't already have a Google Ads account, you'll need to create one. But if you do, you can select it right here.

We already have an account, so we're going to select it and connect it. Once we're connected, we can continue.

We can either skip to the dashboard or go straight into creating our Performance Max campaign. And that leads us to our next step: creating a campaign.

The campaign builder walks you through five sections, and we'll try to move fairly quickly through each one of these.

First, a quick note. We've already set up our billing, so if you haven't already, you'll see a note like this. And if you need a credit card, just let me know. I have plenty.

Campaign setup. First, we'll give it a name. It helps to make it clear, especially if you have multiple campaigns.

For us, we just want to convert people. We're looking for leads. We're not looking for page views. We want customers to take action. We want people to learn about our special deals that we have, and then ideally convert them into a paying customer.

Select this conversion tracking. We'll select this form to track lead conversions. We maximize conversions. That's fine. Let's continue.

Next, Asset group. This is where using your design system in Webflow becomes so useful. Your images are already in your Assets panel, so we can use our current design system.

We'll need to fill in headlines, descriptions, and images. And to speed things up a little bit, let's look at a screen recording doing this at a rapid speed.

Okay, wow. That was much faster than I expected. Let's break down what we just did here.

We got our final URL. This is where that person will end up when clicking the ad. We have our headlines. You can choose the AI suggestions or type in your own. It's up to you.

You can add multiple different headlines, and Google's intelligence will help you alternate between these. Same thing for the long headline and the descriptions.

Now, for our images, we can have multiple options there too. Let's add another square image. So we'll click in, and we'll select one of our images from the Assets panel. We can even crop it if it's not the perfect size, so let's go ahead and add our image.

Syncing and uploading. Great. Let's scroll all the way down, and we'll continue.

That's adding all the assets. Let's move on to the campaign settings.

A few options here. It's all depending on your company and your strategy, what you put here. For us, we're a global company, so we'll choose this one here.

There's an EU political ads option here, required by Google for EU compliance. For most campaigns, you'll select No and move on. And we'll allow the URL expansion. Let's continue to set our budget.

A couple of options here. Again, this is all based on what your budget is. If you're just getting started, it's probably best to test with a smaller budget. Personally, I'm all in, so I'm doing a custom budget here. You do whatever fits you.

Let's continue. It's saving and creating the campaign, which leads us to the next step.

Review, preview, and launch our campaign. Now, here we can review our campaign. And there is summarized information of what we just created.

But let's open up the preview of our campaign. We can actually see how the ads will appear. We can preview how the campaign will be experienced on mobile and desktop on each of these platforms.

You can see all of them here together, or we can go and see how it looks on Search, Display, YouTube, or Discover.

This is a fantastic way to get a feel for how your ads are going to look on people's devices. So if you don't like something, you can go back and edit your campaign before you launch it. You can also change this while the ad is running.

For us, we're good to go, so I'm going to close out and go back to Webflow. The final thing here is to launch the campaign.

This leads us to the last and final step: monitoring and managing your campaign.

The campaign was launched successfully, so let's go and view our ads dashboard. Within Webflow, you can track impressions, clicks, and conversions right from within the app.

You can also click in and see the content of your campaign. You can always pause the campaign if you like. You have an overview of all the campaigns, and you can filter them. And if you need deeper analysis, you can always head into Google Ads directly.

That's it.

We installed and connected our Google Ads account within Webflow, we created our first campaign, we then reviewed, previewed, and launched it, and finally, we looked at how you can manage your campaigns within Webflow.

That's creating a Google Ads campaign within your Webflow site.