The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has caused a lot of revenue loss among small Canadian businesses that must stay closed during lockdown periods. Making the shift to selling online can be difficult to understand and confusing to get into, especially when there is so much research that needs to be done on who your audience is, what they are searching for, and tracking trends that directly impact your business. With this said, if you are looking to advertise your business’ services, goods, or even just your website, you will need to set up a Google AdWords campaign in your digital marketing strategy. While this might sound simple, it involves a lot of different factors for it to be successful. So, here is a checklist you can follow to help you through. New to Google AdWords? Learn These Terms First If you are completely new to Google AdWords or online marketing in general, you will need to learn a few basic terms first as these will be used a lot during your Google AdWords set up process and during the campaign duration. 1. Keywords: these are the phrases or search terms that are typed into search engines, such as Google or Bing, which cause your ad to appear in the search results. When you are setting up a Google AdWords campaign, you need to have done prior research into the keywords you think others are searching for and match with. 2. Bids: you don’t pay for your advertisement to show up in the results, but rather, when an individual clicks on the ad (this varies depending on which type of advertising you are using). The “bid” is the maximum amount of money you are willing to pay for someone else’s click. 3. Ad Ranking: this is a metric you will be able to see which determines where you ad will show up in relation to others. The ranking is determined using the “bid”, the “quality score” and a few other factors. 4. Quality Score: this is another metric that tells you how relevant the keyword phrases you picked are to both your advertisement and your landing page (website). You want a good quality score as this can help improve your ad ranking and lower how much your bids cost.