Questions to answer before you spend on Google Ads

A salesperson calls with a pitch: your business at the top of Google by tomorrow, and you only pay when someone clicks. It sounds fair, so you agree to a monthly budget and wait. In our experience, one of two things happens next. The money goes out on clicks from people who were never going to hire you, or the phone stays quiet for a few weeks and you switch everything off, convinced paid search doesn't work for your trade. Google Ads for business can pay their way, but only after a handful of plain questions have answers. You don't need a marketing background to answer them. You need a notepad and an hour of honest thinking about your own business.

Google Ads for business start with what a job is worth

Before you pick a budget, work out what one new customer is worth to you after costs. Take an average job from the last few months, subtract materials and labor, and write down what's left. If customers come back over time (a pool service or a bookkeeper, say), think about what an average customer brings in over the period they usually stay with you.

Then decide how much of that profit you'd be comfortable spending to win the job. That figure is the most you can pay for a new customer, and it tells you whether ads make sense for you at all. When a job leaves a thin margin, a few clicks that never turn into anything can eat the whole profit. When one job is worth a lot, you can afford plenty of clicks that go nowhere and still come out ahead. Write the figure down. Every later decision, from the daily budget to which searches you bid on, comes back to it.

Which searches mean someone is ready to hire

Search ads are paid by the click, so the words you bid on decide who you pay for. Someone typing "emergency plumber near me" or "roof leak repair Fort Lauderdale" usually has a problem today and wants someone out soon. Someone typing "how to fix a leaking faucet" wants to do it themselves, and their click costs you the same.

Sit down and write the phrases your best customers would type, in their own words. Strong signs are a service plus a place ("boiler repair Stockport") and words about urgency or booking ("same day", "quote", "book"). Weak signs are "how to", "DIY", "jobs" and "salary", which mostly bring do-it-yourselfers and job seekers.

The calendar shapes these searches too. In South Florida, "AC not cooling" and "AC repair Hialeah" pick up on the first sticky nights of summer, and in Greater Manchester "boiler not firing" climbs with the first cold snap of autumn. Those are the weeks when an urgent search is most likely to turn into a booked job, so it pays to have your phrases ready before they arrive.

When you set up keywords, start narrow. Phrase match and exact match keep your ads close to the words you chose. Broad match lets the system decide what counts as related, and on a small budget that guesswork is usually where the money goes. Add the weak words from your list as negative keywords on day one, so your ads never show for them.

Where and when your ads should show

Open the campaign's location settings and mark the area you actually serve, by ZIP code, postcode or a radius around your base. Be honest about drive time. A contractor in Coral Gables may say "all of Miami-Dade" and then turn down jobs in Homestead because the drive down the Turnpike eats half the afternoon, and every one of those clicks was paid for. A plumber based in Salford who won't cross to Oldham at rush hour should leave Oldham out of the map. Under the location options, pick the setting that shows ads to people in or regularly in your chosen area. The other option also reaches people who have only shown interest in the place, which can mean someone in another state reading about Miami.

Then set an ad schedule. If nobody answers the phone after 6 p.m., an ad asking people to call at 9 p.m. is paying for voicemail. Start with the hours someone can pick up, and widen them later only if evening searches turn out to be worth it. Give weekends the same check. In Greater Manchester, a boiler breaking on a cold Sunday is a real job worth answering, while an accountant's Sunday clicks are mostly people browsing.

Where the click lands, and how you'll count it

Many first campaigns send every click to the homepage, and that's often where the click is wasted. Send each ad to the page that matches the search, so the AC repair ad goes to the AC repair page. That page should have the phone number at the top, the area you cover, a short form and a few real photos of your own work. Open it on your phone, on mobile data, and notice how long it takes to appear. If you're waiting, so is the customer, and the back button is right there.

Next, decide how you'll count results before you spend a dollar. The ads account reports clicks on its own, but clicks don't pay your bills, so set it up to count calls and form requests. For forms, the usual approach is to send people to a thank-you page after they submit and count visits to that page as a conversion. For calls, there are two kinds to track: calls from the number shown in the ad, and calls from people who clicked through and then rang the number on your site. A tracked number on the landing page helps you tell those apart from calls that came from your Google listing or a flyer. Set a minimum call length as well, so a wrong number doesn't count as a lead.

Run a test before launch. Submit your own form and call from your own phone, then check the next day that both show up in the account. If they don't, the system will chase clicks, which are the easiest thing to buy and the least useful. Keep a simple sheet by the phone too, and when a call turns into a booked job, note where it came from. Asking "how did you find us?" takes seconds and backs up the numbers.

Who checks the search terms every week

The search terms report shows what people actually typed before they clicked your ad, and that list often drifts away from the keywords you picked. In your ads account it sits under Insights and reports. Open it once a week and sort by cost. Near the top you'll usually find phrases that cost money and brought nothing: a competitor's name, a town you don't serve, a job you don't do, someone looking for work. For a pool service in Broward, that list can include "pool cleaning jobs" and "pool chemicals wholesale", and neither of those people is about to book a weekly clean. Add each of those as a negative keyword. When a term brought a real call, consider adding it as its own keyword.

Agree who does this before the campaign starts, with a name and a day of the week. In our experience this weekly half hour is the first thing to get dropped, and it tends to slip right around the time the budget starts leaking. If you hire help, ask to see the terms they excluded last week. A short, specific answer is a good sign.

Give the campaign long enough to settle. The first weeks are mostly about learning which searches to cut, so judge it on cost per call once that cleanup has had time to work, and compare that cost with the figure you wrote down at the start.

How Pixedi handles this

At Pixedi, ad management is a separate add-on that can be added to any monthly plan for $700 a month plus the ad budget. The groundwork in this article sits closest to our Growth plan, $2,400 a month, which includes call tracking so you can see which channel brought which job, along with monthly work on where visitors drop off and one or two concrete fixes. Either way, you get one plain report a month on what we did and what changed, and you can cancel with 30 days written notice.

Your first step this week

Take a sheet of paper and write two things: what one new customer is worth to you after costs, and a short list of the exact phrases your best customers would type. Then ask whoever is pitching you ads to explain how they'll count calls and forms, and who will read the search terms each week and on which day. If the answers are clear and specific, you're ready to test with a budget you can afford to learn from. If they're vague, wait until they aren't.

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