Setting up a Google Ads account takes about twenty minutes. Two of the decisions inside those twenty minutes cannot be reversed afterwards, and one of them has a cost attached that applies to Nigerian accounts specifically. This page is about getting those right, in order, before you spend anything.
Step 1. Decide your currency before you open the account
Google sets your account currency permanently when the account is created. Its own wording is that the setting cannot be updated because it is used to determine how you are billed. The only way to change it later is to abandon the account and open another one, losing whatever history the first one built.
The naira is a supported Google Ads currency, so this is a real choice and not a formality. Google also notes that your currency options depend on the country you registered the account in, and that some countries allow only certain currencies.
Which to choose comes down to how you will pay and where your customers are, and there is a specific cost attached to the naira that you should know about before deciding.
Step 2. Know the charge that applies to naira accounts
Google publishes that from 1 January 2024, Google Ads accounts using the Nigerian naira as payment currency are subject to operating charges if ads are served to users outside Nigeria. The charge applies only to the portion of spend that came from impressions or clicks outside the country. It is added on top of your budget rather than taken out of it, it appears monthly on your invoice and on your transactions page, and tax such as VAT applies to it.
We are not going to print the percentage here, because it has already changed once and you should read the current figure from Google's own page rather than from ours. It is small. The point is not the size of it.
The point is what it should make you do, which is tighten your location targeting to Nigeria. You almost certainly wanted that anyway, since an impression in another country was never going to walk into your shop, and now there is a second reason. Google will not refund charges that arose from legitimate clicks matching the targeting you set yourself, so the targeting is the control.
Step 3. Get your verification documents matching, before you are asked
Google states that all advertisers will eventually be required to complete advertiser verification. You can be selected for it at various points, and a suspended account cannot be appealed until verification is complete, which is the worst possible moment to discover a paperwork problem.
For a Nigerian organisation, Google's published requirement is a registration document, meaning a certificate of incorporation or registration, together with photo identification for the authorised representative. For an individual advertiser, a Nigerian government-issued photo ID, and Google's list includes a passport, a National ID card, a driver's licence and a voter's card.
Google requires the documents to be valid, in colour, clear and well lit, and to match your payments profile. Match, not resemble. This is where Nigerian businesses fail verification, and it is almost always the same failure: the business name on the CAC certificate and the name typed into the Google payments profile are not character for character identical. An ampersand instead of the word and, Limited instead of Ltd, a missing middle word.
Open the certificate, copy the name from it exactly, and paste it. Do this before you are asked rather than after.
Step 4. Sort out how you will actually pay
Google documents three payment settings: postpay, where you are charged after your ads run, prepay, where you add funds first, and monthly invoicing. Which are available depends on your country, your currency and your payment setting.
On cards, Google states that in addition to certain credit cards it accepts debit cards carrying the Visa or Mastercard logo, and that prepaid cards are not accepted on automatic payments. Nigeria does not appear on Google's published list of countries where prepay is unavailable, which is not the same as a guarantee that it is available to you. Google keeps a payment options tool for checking what applies to your country and currency, and that tool is the answer rather than anybody's article, including this one.
This is worth five minutes of your attention because Nigerian card restrictions on international transactions are a practical obstacle that has nothing to do with Google. Find out what will work before your ads stop mid-campaign over a declined charge.
Step 5. Understand where your ad will actually go
Google's policy requires that your destination works on common browsers and devices, that it can be crawled, and that it is reachable from the locations you are targeting. Usually that means a working page.
There are two documented routes without a normal landing page, and they matter in a market where plenty of good businesses have no website.
A call campaign can run with the final URL left blank, so the ad only allows clicks to call. Google still asks for a verification page displaying your phone number, so you need something, but not a site.
A Smart campaign can use your Google Business Profile as the destination instead of a website. If you have a verified profile and no site, this is the version of Google Ads that is actually open to you today.
Step 6. Set a budget, and know what Google will and will not do with it
Google states there is no minimum ad spend. What it does publish are two ceilings. On most campaigns it will not spend more than twice your average daily budget on a given day, and not more than 30.4 times your average daily budget in a month, 30.4 being the average number of days in a month.
Read that properly, because it catches people out. Your daily budget is an average rather than a cap. A day that spends double is Google working as documented, not an error, and it balances against quieter days across the month.
Step 7. Leave it alone for long enough to mean something
Google describes its automated bid strategies as needing to calibrate, and says it can take a few conversion cycles, typically one or two, for a strategy to settle, depending on how much conversion data is there. It adds that its algorithms keep learning even after the status stops saying Learning.
A conversion cycle is however long it takes someone to go from clicking to buying in your business. For an event centre taking bookings months ahead, that is not days. Judging the account in the first week is judging noise, and changing everything in the first week guarantees you never learn anything from it.
Two things to check before you start, not after
First, whether the category you are in needs permission. Google requires certification for gambling, healthcare and medicines, financial services, cryptocurrency, political content and alcohol, among others. On betting, Google permits ads for online gambling licensed by the appropriate state authority in an eligible state, and its published list of eligible Nigerian states is Cross River, Ekiti, Lagos and Oyo, with certification required first. On alcohol, Google restricts ads to locations explicitly allowed to show them and keeps that list on a separate page, so read the current list rather than assuming either way.
Second, and more important, whether you should be advertising at all yet. Google states that it costs nothing to appear in its organic results, and that advertising with Google has no effect on your presence there. Those are two separate systems. If your Business Profile is unverified, if your details are wrong, or if the website on your listing does not open, you will be paying to send people somewhere that is already failing the people arriving for free. Fix the free route first. It is cheaper, and it is still working at three in the morning when the ads have stopped.