Google search ads management, one service and one city at a time.

With Google search ads you choose the keywords, your text ad appears on the results page when someone searches for one of them, and you pay only when the ad is clicked. Within my Google Ads management, no other ad type gives you as much control: you pick the services, the cities, the hours and the wording.

How the auction decides who shows

Every search runs an auction, and the highest bid doesn’t automatically win it. Google weighs your bid together with how relevant it judges your ad and landing page to be for that search. An advertiser with a closely matched ad and page can sit above one who bids more. That’s why I work on relevance, which costs nothing per click, before I work on bids.

Since every search runs its own auction, a cost per click can’t be quoted in advance.

Match types: how loosely Google reads a keyword

A match type tells Google how far it may stray from the keyword you entered.

All of them have loosened over the years, so the keyword list no longer tells you what you bought. The search terms report does. I put what doesn’t belong into negative keyword lists grouped by theme: job seekers, do-it-yourself questions, parts and supplies, other companies’ names.

One service, one ad group, one page

Say a plumbing company wants more tankless water heater installations in Carlsbad. I give that service an ad group of its own, with its own ads and its own landing page. The keywords are about tankless installation only. The ad says so in the headline, and the click lands on a page about tankless installation with the phone number at the top, never on the home page.

A well-built service area page can do both jobs, ranking on its own and receiving ad clicks, and the same keyword research feeds both.

Bidding: manual first, automated when the data is sound

Automated bidding sets a bid for every auction, aimed at a goal such as calls. It works from the conversions the account records, so it’s only as good as those records. A small account in one trade may record few real calls in a month, which gives the automation little to learn from. So I start with bids I set myself and get call tracking counting only real customer calls. Automation comes after that, as a measured test.

Schedules and service areas

Ads should run when someone can answer and where a truck will go. An ad schedule limits the hours. With manual bidding I can also raise or lower bids by city, so a company based in Kearny Mesa can pay more for a click nearby than for one in Oceanside if the drive makes the far job less profitable. Search ads won’t fix a slow phone response or a price people refuse.

Turning search ads down as rankings come up

Search ads cover the gaps in your unpaid rankings, and those gaps should close. When a rank grid shows a service starting to rank in a city, I lower the bids for that service there, then check that total calls from the city held. If they did, that money is freed. If calls dropped, I put the bids back.