What is Google Ads: campaign types and a 2026 starter plan
What is Google Ads, what are its six campaign types for, and how should a business starting from zero plan its first 60 days? Measurement first, budget second.
By Roozbeh Nazari · CEO
The shortest answer to "what is Google Ads": Google's auction-based advertising programme that lets you run ads on its search results, on YouTube, in Gmail, on Maps and on millions of partner sites, paying mostly per click or per conversion. That definition is accurate but incomplete, because what Google Ads is for a business depends entirely on which campaign type it chooses and what it measures. In the same account, one campaign can capture concrete demand while another spends the budget on vaguely defined "reach". This article maps the campaign types to business questions and proposes a 60-day starter plan for a new account that puts measurement before budget. The figures are at the level of principle, not examples; every sector's costs differ, and writing an estimate here would mislead.
How Google Ads works
Google Ads is an auction: several advertisers bid for the same query or the same audience, and the display order is decided by bid, ad quality and expected impact together. The advertiser can choose to pay per click, conversion, impression or view; bidding can be manual or automated. Google's own guide describes the programme as a way to "reach new customers and grow your business"; in practice it is a visibility purchasing system in which you decide the moments you appear. The key concepts: campaign (the container for budget and goal), ad group (a set of keywords or an audience), ad (text, image, video), landing page, and conversion (the valuable action you measure). Of these five layers the most neglected is the last; in an account with no conversion definition, automated bidding strategies do not know what to optimise, and spend drifts toward collecting clicks.
Six campaign types, six business questions
Google's "Choose the right campaign type" page lists six types: Search, Performance Max, Display, Video, App and Shopping. Each answers a different business question. Search campaigns are used when you offer something people are already searching for; they capture demand, they do not create it. Performance Max reaches all of Google's inventory from one campaign and distributes with AI toward a target conversion; it works if you have a strong conversion signal, and it is unclear what it will learn if you do not. Display campaigns carry a visual message to an audience that is not searching for you yet; they are for awareness and remarketing. Video campaigns target views or actions on YouTube; in trust-heavy fields such as health and B2B they are valuable for doctor or team videos. App campaigns are for mobile app installs and in-app actions. Shopping campaigns run on a product feed and are not used outside retail. For a new account our recommendation is to start with Search only, because Search produces the cleanest conversion data and the other types use that data as fuel. Our paid media service is built in exactly this order: demand capture first, expansion second.
The 2026 starter plan: the first 60 days
The first 10 days are for measurement and no ads run. Google Analytics 4 is linked to Google Ads, conversion actions are defined (form, phone, WhatsApp click, appointment), and where possible a field is opened in the CRM for offline conversion import. Skip this step and every later decision rests on guesswork. Between day 11 and 30 a single Search campaign is opened: a narrow keyword set, tight match types, a separate landing page per ad group, and a simple bidding strategy suited to the learning period, manual or "maximise clicks". During this period the search terms report is read every day and irrelevant queries go on the negative list; that list is the account's first real learning. Between day 31 and 60, if enough conversions have accumulated, the bidding strategy moves to target cost per conversion and a Display or Video campaign is added for remarketing. Performance Max is not opened in this window; in our observation, PMax budget opened early in accounts with no conversion history tends to spread to non-brand impressions. Our analytics and data service builds the measurement layer of these 60 days independently of the ad account, because the measurement infrastructure should outlive the ad agency.
Budget and expectation management
In Google Ads the budget is set daily and the monthly total does not exceed roughly 30.4 times the daily budget, though a single day can go up to double. In new accounts the budget should be set by asking "how many conversions can we observe", not "how many clicks will we get": automated bidding strategies do not run steadily before they see a meaningful number of conversions. That is why a narrow campaign on a small budget is the right start, not a broad campaign on a small budget. Two warnings on the expectation side: Google Ads does not create new demand, it makes existing demand visible; if there is no search in your sector, there is no Search campaign either. And ad quality depends on landing page quality; a click sent to a slow, language-less page with a broken form is the site's problem, not the campaign's. This is why in the starter plan the landing page audit comes before campaign setup; our conversion-focused landing page article lists the items of that audit with a health example.
Common starter mistakes
Five mistakes appear in almost every new account: going live without defining conversions; opening with broad match and no negative list; sending every keyword to one ad group and one landing page; switching to Performance Max in the first week; and reading the report from the Google Ads panel without comparing it with GA4 or the CRM. What they have in common is growing the budget before seeing what the account has learned. The practical answer to "what is Google Ads" lies here too: set up wrong, an expensive click counter; set up right, the fastest feedback tool that shows which demand a business is actually answering.
An extra note for health and other sensitive sectors
In fields such as clinics, law firms and finance, Google Ads' policy layer comes before campaign setup. The healthcare and medicines policy requires certification for some services, closes some targeting options and rejects ad copy that contains outcome promises; Türkiye's health promotion regulation prohibits the same statements. In these sectors the starter plan gets two more steps: a pre-review of ad copy and landing page for policy compliance, and a ready rewrite flow for a rejected ad. Rather than trying to push a rejected ad through on appeal, rewriting the copy in informational language usually gets a faster result. In these fields one more sentence is added to the answer to "what is Google Ads": a tool that can be used by those who read the rules first.