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Google Ads and paid local

Paid search is the fastest way to find out whether your offer converts, and the fastest way to spend money finding out nothing at all. This category starts with the question most agencies skip, which is whether you should be running ads in the first place, then covers the arithmetic that decides it: minimum viable spend, cost per lead against cost per customer, and what management should actually cost. After reading it you should be able to look at your own account and tell whether it is losing money on structure, on landing pages, or on an offer that was never going to work.

Start here

All twenty articles on Google Ads and paid local

In reading order rather than by date. 20 published so far, and the rest are written and scheduled. Titles without a link are not live yet.

  1. Should a small business run Google Ads at all

    Only if three things are already true. People search for what you sell, the page you would send them to already converts the visitors it gets, and somebody answers the phone.

  2. What Google Ads management should cost

    The number matters less than the structure. Management is usually billed one of three ways, a flat monthly fee, a percentage of your ad spend, or a hybrid, and each one quietly points.

  3. Minimum viable ad spend for a local business

    There is no universal dollar figure. Your monthly budget has to buy enough clicks to produce enough leads that you can tell working from not working.

  4. Why ads to a bad landing page lose money faster

    Because paid traffic multiplies whatever the page already does, and a weak page treats every visitor the same whether they were free or expensive.

  5. Local Services Ads: how they differ and who they suit

    Local Services Ads sit at the very top of the results, above regular search ads, and you pay per lead instead of per click.

  6. Negative keywords and the money they save

    A negative keyword tells Google never to show your ad for searches containing that word.

  7. Reading your search terms report

    The search terms report shows the exact phrases people typed before your ad appeared, which is not the same as the keywords you chose.

  8. Cost per lead versus cost per customer

    Cost per lead is ad spend divided by inquiries. Cost per customer is ad spend divided by people who actually paid you.

  9. Seasonal campaigns and when to turn them on

    Turn a seasonal campaign on before demand arrives, not when it arrives.

  10. Competitor bidding on your brand name

    Google allows it and there is no button to make it stop. A competitor can buy ads that appear when someone searches your company name, and your only reliable defense is running your.

  11. Call-only campaigns for service businesses

    A call-only campaign shows an ad that dials your phone instead of opening your website.

  12. Ad copy that filters out the wrong customers

    Write ads that tell the wrong customer not to click. Name your minimum job, your price band, your service area, or your specialty in the ad itself.

  13. Conversion tracking setup before you spend a dollar

    Install conversion tracking before the campaign goes live, not after the first disappointing month.

  14. Budget pacing and why your ads stop mid-month

    Google Ads spends against an average daily budget, not a monthly one. It can spend more than that on a busy day and less on a quiet one, and it will not exceed your daily budget times.

  15. Geographic targeting mistakes that waste half your budget

    The biggest one is Google's default location option, which shows your ads to people merely interested in your area rather than located in it.

  16. Remarketing for businesses with low traffic

    Google will not serve a data segment until it has at least 100 active users in the last 30 days, per network.

  17. When to pause a campaign instead of optimizing it

    Pause when the gap between what a customer costs and what a customer is worth is too large for tuning to close.

  18. Google Ads scripts and automation worth using

    For a small local account, automated rules do almost everything worth automating and require no code.

  19. Managing ads yourself: what it realistically takes

    A well built local account takes a few focused hours a month, plus a much larger block to build it properly the first time.

  20. What to hand over when you change ad managers

    Ownership of the Google Ads account itself, admin access to your analytics and tag manager, the call tracking account, the conversion action definitions, the landing pages and where.

Be honest with yourself

When this category is not your problem

If you cannot answer the phone or reply to a form within the business day, do not start ads. You will pay for leads and then lose them, which is worse than not having them, because it costs money to feel busy.

And if your margin per customer will not cover a cost per lead several times higher than you expect, the arithmetic does not work at any budget. Check the numbers before the account, not after.

Where to go next

Send your last full month of search terms to eric@seod.com and I will tell you roughly what share of that spend went to searches that were never going to buy. It is usually more than owners expect, and the fix is normally free.

Call Eric Email Eric