Google Ads training: an 8-week in-house curriculum

Google Ads training usually brings to mind a video series or a certification exam. Both are useful, and both leave the same gap: a team that recognises the buttons in the interface but cannot decide where to move the budget. This article turns Google Ads training into an eight-week in-house curriculum. Each week carries one topic, an exercise tied to it, and a question to be answered at the end of the week. The aim is not a certificate but a person who can make decisions in the account.

The logic: teach decisions, not buttons

The curriculum rests on two principles. First, every week closes with an exercise done in a real account; a lesson that is only watched is not remembered a week later. Second, the weeks are arranged as a chain of decisions: structure and measurement come first, bidding and budget last. Reverse that order and the team starts adjusting bids before it knows how to measure properly, and cannot explain why the result changed.

You do not need to start with an account's live budget. A small campaign on a limited daily budget is enough for most of the exercises; what matters is seeing real data. Running the training entirely on simulation switches off the surfaces with the highest teaching value, such as the search terms report.

Weeks 1-2: account structure and campaign objectives

The first two weeks go to vocabulary. The hierarchy between account, campaign, ad group and ad; campaign types and what job each type does; how campaign objectives relate to those types. Confusing these layers leads to optimising in the wrong place for every week that follows.

Week 1 exercise: draw the current account structure as a diagram on a single page and write a one-sentence purpose next to each campaign. Week 2 exercise: pick a campaign objective and verify from the official help documentation which campaign types it is available in. Question of the week: how many campaigns in this account have a purpose that cannot be written in one sentence? You can find the basic concepts together in our what is Google Ads article.

Who will deliver the training should also be settled at the outset. When the person actually running the account is the trainer, the weekly exercises attach to real decisions; if there is no such person, the exercises must still be done on your own account even when working with an outside trainer. Training run on another company's screenshots stops the team from seeing the oddities in its own data.

Weeks 3-4: keywords, match types and search terms

Week three is keyword selection and match types: what exact, phrase and broad match do, and which one takes effect when they are used together in the same list. Week four reaches the most instructive surface of the training: the search terms report. The gap between a keyword and what the user actually typed becomes concrete there.

Week 3 exercise: separate an ad group's keywords by match type and write down which queries are expected to match which keyword. Week 4 exercise: open the last thirty days of the search terms report, split expected and unexpected queries into two lists, then decide which of the unexpected ones to exclude. Question of the week: how much of the spend went to queries whose purpose is not written down anywhere in the account?

Weeks 5-6: ad copy, landing page and conversion measurement

Week five is the fit between ad copy and landing page. The learning objective here is not creativity but consistency: does the promise made in the ad and the first screen of the landing page say the same thing? Week six is conversion measurement, and it is the curriculum's most critical week, because a badly defined conversion quietly corrupts every optimisation decision that follows.

Week 5 exercise: put three ad texts beside their own landing pages and note the promise-to-page fit. Week 6 exercise: list the conversion actions in the account, and write down whether each really corresponds to a business outcome and which are counted as primary. Question of the week: are a form submission and a phone-number click counted at the same value in this account, and is that right?

These two weeks are also where teams resist most, because reviewing the conversion definition usually reveals that the measurement setup is flawed. Say at the outset that finding this is a success of the training; otherwise the finding is taken as a personal error and quietly covered up.

Weeks 7-8: bid strategy, budget and reporting

Week seven is bid strategies and budget logic: the difference between manual bidding and automated strategies, a strategy's learning period, and why changes made during it blur the result. Week eight is reporting: which measure is explained to whom. The table shown to management and the table the account manager looks at do not have to be the same.

Week 7 exercise: find a campaign's bid strategy and the date it was last changed, then compare the period after that date with the period before. Week 8 exercise: write a one-page monthly report template containing at most five measures, each with a line explaining why it is there. We detailed the variables that set cost in our Google Ads cost article and the weekly operating routine in our ads management article.

The competence check at the end of week eight

Rather than an exam, three open questions give a better result at the end of the curriculum. First: which campaign took the largest share of spend in this account last month, and what is the justification? Second: which conversion action is counted as primary, and what does it correspond to on the business side? Third: if you were to make one change this week, what would you change and how would you measure the result? Someone who can answer all three with reasoning is ready to take the account over.

These questions are also useful when assessing an outside candidate; we compiled a similar set for interviews in our specialist selection article. Most teams that complete the training choose to run a defined part of the account in-house rather than all of it; you can see how scope can be shared on our paid media service page.

Where certifications sit in this curriculum

Google's free training platform, Skillshop, offers product certifications and works well as a companion resource to this curriculum. A certificate is not proof of the ability to make decisions in an account, though; it measures product knowledge. In practice the best result comes from assigning the relevant Skillshop modules as reading alongside the weekly exercises. Position the certificate as a by-product of the curriculum, not its goal.

Sources

• Google Skillshop: free e-learning and certification programmes for Google products.
• Google Ads Help — Your guide to Google Ads: basics, mobile, optimisation and best-practice topics.
• Google Ads Help — Campaign objectives: how objectives match campaign types.