Here’s an unpopular opinion. Or maybe I’m just saying that it’s unpopular because I haven’t seen so many people talk about it so far.
When it comes to running Google Ads for a service business, it seems to me that the vast majority of people have fully bought into the idea that they should be running their marketing campaigns like you’d run a factory.
You tell Google how much you’re willing to pay for a customer. You tell Google to find as many customers as possible. And Google automagically finds those customers for you using its algorithms.
I think that approach is good for Google, in that it gets us more entrenched in their way of doing things. They want us using “max conversions” bidding and applying their “AI recommendations.” And who doesn’t want a Google Ads campaign that gives them “max conversions?” I mean, it sounds good, no?
If you read my previous post, you know I can be a slow learner. I thought that letting Google have full and autoamted control over bidding and conversions was a good thing. I also knew that it meant less work for me, because I didn’t have to think so much about how the ad auctions were working. I could let Google do all the heavy lifting and then count the new customers at the end of the day.
If you haven’t guessed already, I’ve started to change my mind here.
We already know that if you follow the money, Google is invested in getting you to opt-in to as much of their automation as possible. It makes them money. They wouldn’t push it so hard if it didn’t.
We also know that costs per click have been rising over time. Which also makes money for Google. They are the fox watching the hen house.
For Google, then, it is advantageous to hide as much of the internals of what’s going on so you can’t dig into how they might be wasting your ad dollars. Gosh that sounds cynical, but I suppose that in this subject area I’m a cynic.
There’s also the magic of what it means to run a “max conversions” campaign on Google. Because you, as the advertiser, get to see exactly what it costs to get one “conversion.” It makes it seem like your ad dollars are as targeted as a rifle shot with a high power scope. What’s not to like about that?
Here’s what’s not to like, in my opinion: When we run a max conversions campaign, we optimize for that which is easy to measure rather than that which truly moves the needle for the business. It might seem like I’m just making that up, but I’ve also seen it up close when spending a budget large enough to buy a full-size American truck every month: When running with max conversions as a bidding objective, I’ve seen that Google pays more to show ads to fewer people in comparison to the same campaign running under full manual control. Which makes sense, because the algorithm is trying to find people more likely to, for example, fill out an online form. But if your business is in the business of getting contacted through multiple means (like getting called on the phone), then you might be overly narrowing who sees the ads.
I know that the Google Ads vets might be saying, “Well, you’re just not tracking enough. You need call tracking. You need server-side tracking.” And that’s a facny way of saying that, if you just add more surveillance on your customers, you’ll be able to being your cost per new customer down and make your ad account print you money. I’ll tell you right now that, for at least a little while, I actually bought into that, and it doesn’t make me feel very good to admit it.
First of all, who wants more surveillance? How often have you said to yourself, “Gee, I really wish the company from which I bought my chainsaw would send my purchase and browsing information to Google behind my back so Google can send me more ads for Chinese carburetors from AliExpress.” I don’t like it, personally. More “relevant” ads don’t make my life better. And I think, if I look into my crystal ball, which is to say if I make a wild-ass guess, that more and more people are going to start objecting to being tracked six ways from Sunday. And I also think that the backlash will be more laws getting passed making that more difficult, and more lawsuits being files, and some big players getting more than in inconsequential slap on the wrist before being forced to settle for millions of dollars. But again, that’s me looking into my crystal ball, which seems conspicuously invisible at the moment. Oh well.
I think that if you’re running Google Ads for a service business, and your goal is to get paying customers walking through the door, you might be far better served with a manual ad strategy. It requires you to think like a marketer, and you’ll need to have the stomach for it, but it can also work great. I’ve seen that, too.
The key parts of your manual ad campaign setup
1) Location radius
Your locations should be within a reasonable driving distance if people have to come to you. That might be 8 miles. I might be 45. It depends where you live. Use your judgement, but when in doubt, smart small and work your way up.
2) Location targeting
By default, when choosing lcoations, Google selects “presence or interest in” a location. That “interest in” piece is, more often than not, a money waster if you’re looking for local leads. Are you surprised? Select “presence in” only.
3) Exact match (or occasionally phrase match) keywords
Learn your match types. Exact match keywords are in brackets. [plumber near me] would match terms very close to that phrase, but not exactly. That’s because Google’s algorithm has decided that you shouldnt’ have that much manual control, and that they can send you highly relevant traffic that’s similar to that term. In general, I find that to be true.
Here’s anther example: “Plumber near me” in quotes. This is phrase match. It can match “Plumber near me” anywhere in the search query, but it can also match “Joe’s Plumbing” even if your business is “Mike’s plumbing.” When you’re getting started, this might not be what you want. Say what you will, but matching for competitor terms is not always free money for you, especially if the general search intent for your competitor’s name is to specifically find that competitor (say, because the person got a word-of-mouth referral).
I’d recommend starting with exact match keywords, and adding a few phrase match versions if you want.
4) Stay away from Broad Match keywords
Google loves to push you into broad match keywords. These are keywords that will match for wild-ass, tangential search queries. The broad match version of plumber near me might being up searches for how to unclog your toilet. That’s not a highly targeted search intent likely to get you paying customers, but it might drive a click on your ad, and then Google gets your money in exchange for… well, maybe a little bit of brand awareness? Not worth it, in my opinion.
What’s worse is that Google makes broad match the default keyword match type. If you don’t use quotes or brackets, you get to match for traffic that will never convert. I think that’s unethical, but that’s just me.
5) Placements
By default, Google wants you to opt into showing your ads with Search Partners and the Display network. This is almost always going to drive crap clicks to your website. You’ll pay more money but you won’t make more money. It’s another way for Google to pad their wallets.
Make sure only “Search Network” is selected.
6) AI Max and letting Google AI create ads
Some people choose this. My Google rep, at one point, showed me data showing that another high spending customer was making money with AI-generated ads. I still chose not to implement AI. Why? Because do you really want an unaccountable robot making marketing claims in your ad copy? Do you really want that same robot setting customer expectations and choosing its own customer intents and keywords? If you really hate to think at all, maybe it makes sense? But to me, the reputational risk to the client wasn’t worth it. AI is not accountable. And as far as I’ve seen, Google is not going to take the flak from angry customers if it makes a promise you can’t keep.
Not worth it in my opinion.
7) Use voice of customer in your ad copy
Want ads that make the phone ring and generate new business? Then you’ll be well served by writing ads that address actual problems customers are facing, in their own language. Maybe you already know what your customers are typing into Google and how they talk about their problems. But it can also be worth a quick check on online forums, Reddit, and Youtube to be sure. That’s one underrated but worthwhile step.
I’ve dabbled with letting AI do this research step for me. But then you might get fed a line of horse manure presented as confident customer research. Better to do it yourself. The up-front time is worth it.
8) Set realistic expectations
Does your service cost a lot of money? Are your competitors really strong? Do you know your website kind of stinks? Then you might have a high cost to get a new customer. If your service costs $300 but you only have $500-$1000 to spend on ads, you might find that you don’t get the return you want because you’re not able to afford the click volume you need. This applies regardless of your bid strategy.
It might be that Google Ads aren’t the right step for you right now. If you’re going to invest in advertising online, you might want to wait until you can afford to spend at least 10-15X what you predict a new customer costs you to acquire. I know that that might be an unpleasant thought experiment to engage in because there are so many unknowns. Welcome to the world of marketing. It is unpleasantly uncertain sometimes. If you’re not a big fan of thought experiments or doing math, you can go by your gut feeling. Would it feel too good to be true to get 10 customers spending $300 each for only $500 of total ad spend? If so, it might be. If you’re not convinced, Google will happily take your money so you can test things out.
Personally, I like to assume that things will be somewhat hard and expensive when getting new customers. I don’t assume I’ll get a positive return right away. And I’ve also made the error of running ads with too little budget to properly test. They didn’t work out well for me, but at least I could help Google pay out better bonuses to their executives for those quarters.
9) Set manual bids that will get you seen
You need to set bids that will show your ads to people searching for your service. That probably sounds painfully obvious. I had a classmate you called me Captain Obvious once in high school. I thought that was funny and not entirely untrue. But if your ads are only showing up on the third page of search results, you’re not going to get that many clicks, sorry to say.
In the keyword research tool, sometimes Google will tell you the the minimum and maximum bids to show up on page 1 of the search results. If you’re lucky you’ll also see a “top of page” bid. Can you afford to show up on the first page? If so, choose a bid that’s not top of page but is likely to put you on the first page.
10) Choose keywords that are “high intent”
You want people to walk in the door, right? Then you need to choose keywords where it’s obvious that the person is looking to get your service. The “near me” keywords are great for a local business. “Plumber near me,” “dermatologist near me,” car mechanic near me,” are all classic examples. You’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. Keep it simple and think about it like showing up in the yellow pages. If you never had to leaf through the yellow pages, I’m sorry. You missed out on a great and potentially chaotic but character-building childhood and coming of age experience.
11) Monitor your search terms
For every campaign you run, Google does you the service of giving you a “search terms” report. They show you, for some keywords, with what search terms they matched. You can use that information to create new exact match keywords, if you want more hyper-targeted keyword ideas. You can also use it to come up with new “negative keywords.” Negative keywords let you exclude certain words and phrases from showing up in your ads. See number 12 below for more on negative keywords.
12) Use your negative keywords
I use negative keywords a lot. You need to learn how they work, first of all. If you use the exact match [plumber in southern maine] as a negative keyword, Google will not show your ad if the user’s search is exactly that phrase.
If you use the phrase match “plumber in southern maine” as your negative keyword, Google won’t show your ad if that search query shows up as any part of the user’s search query with the words in that exact order.
If you use the broad match negative keyword plumber in southern maine, Google will not show your ad if the user’s search term contains all of the aforementioned words in any order.
Note that these negative keyword match types are more restrictive than positive keyword match types. After all, Google wants to maximize the clicks you pay for, so it would hurt their bottom line if their broad match negatives, were, for example, as “generous” in matching queries as their broad match positive kewyword counterparts.
I use negative keywords to “shape” the traffic that the campaign brings in. I tend to stick to exact and phrase match keywords. I also look for patterns that might make my job easier. For example, by excluding informational keywords like “how” and “what,” I can signifcantly reduce clicks that are less likely to lead to someone becoming a new paying customer. Oh, and I also make sure to exclude any branded terms from my prospecting campaigns, because when someone already knows who you are and is searching for you by name, there’s a good chance they’re going to become a customer already.
13) Don’t add too many keywords to start
Start with a handful of keywords that are highly relevant to your business. See if they bring people to your site. Is the phone ringing more? Is business up? If so, you may be on the right track. It might be that your list of relevant keywords is larger than a handful, but when getting started, it’s not a bad idea to stay focused. You want your keywords, your ads, and your landing page to be aligned fairly well in terms of what people ca see they’re getting.
Don’t overthink this. In my opinion, it’s just smarter not to try to be everything to everyone.
14) Use dynamic keyword insertion
You can make the user’s keyword show up in your ad. This makes your ad look relevant. Is it relevant? I hope so. If it is, this trick can help you. I don’t often speak in terms of tricks, but this is a trick and I like to use it. I do it by putting the keyword into the first headline. I write it like this: {{keyword: dermatologist near me}}. This makes the keyword the user matchd with show up as the first ad headline. If the keyword is too long to fit in the headline, the default text of dermatologist near me shows up in the headline.
Using this approach means you need to be thoughtful about your keywords. If the keyword is “best dermatologist near me,” do you really want to say that you’re the best in your own headline? That might come across as a bit too boastful. So I don’t use a keyword like that with dynamic keyword insertion. But you do you if you want to try that. Just be sure that the keyword doesn’t make any promises you can’t keep.
15) Maybe you don’t need ads
This builds on #8. Maybe the smarter way for you to get more customers is to talk to them and ask them how you can do better. Maybe it’s to ask them for personal referrals. Maybe it’s to provide helpful guidance and advice and stories from your own experience online, so people can find you. It isn’t always time to pay for ads.
Running on manual
It might seem like running your Google Ads campaign on manual mode is like driving a stick shift. Why drive a stick shift when automatic transmissions run pretty well?
Well, some of us just like stick shifts. I like having the stick in my hand. I like choosing when to shift. I like it in the winter, when I pretend I know what I’m doing in the snow up here in Sweden. I liked it in Maine, when I was a younger man driving my rear-wheel-drive Toyota pickup. I still wish I had that pickup.
But just liking to do things the manual way isn’t always a good reason to do them. I mean, it can be, because enjoying the process of things can lead to higher life satisfaction, in my book. But from what I’ve seen, manual mode on an ad campaign, which is called Manual CPC, is not a bad way to get people interested in a service I’m marketing to check out that service. People are looking for “service near me,” my ads show up, and the ads look relevant. The people click, or they might call right from the ad. Business is booked.
On the surface, it’s not as “accountable” as running a “max conversions” ad campaign, but I’ve learned to become more okay with that. Because it’s still “accountable”, but just in a harder to measure way. The ad spend and clicks and calls are still coming through, and the service business can see if their core sales numbers are moving or not. But now the ad spend and clicks and calls are associative, just like in the bad old days of marketing, before we equated marketing with mass surveillance. For some people, that’s okay. They’re going to see that things are going well, and they’re going to associate it with their marketing. I’m not going to say that the marketing caused your increase in business, if we see one, but I will say that, “Gee, it looks like we might be doing something good.” If that kind of thinking is okay with you, then you might want to try out running your campaigns with ManualCPC. It’s not as scary as it sounds, and you don’t have to commit to any kind of “learning period” for an algorithm or enable five different “AI-recommendations.” You just need to apply a bit of common sense and learn to find your way around the interface. That’s my take. Feel free to let me know if you have a different take in the comments.
Best,
Jesse
Related on the Copy for Originals site: Google Ads for lead generation sets out when Smart Bidding fits and when Manual CPC does, and Should AI fully manage your Google Ads campaigns? weighs Google’s automation against a person approving every change.
