Google Ads

Google Ads is the auction Google runs for the top slots on its own search results page, along with placements across its display and video network. You bid on the searches you want to appear for, pay per click when someone chooses your listing, and the account, the money, and the results all belong to whoever set it up. It is the most direct form of advertising most small businesses run, because the intent is already there. Someone typed the exact thing they want, and you are offering to be the answer for a price.

That directness is also what makes it easy to waste money on. An account with no structure, generic keywords, no negative keywords to filter out irrelevant searches, no way to tell which clicks actually became customers, will spend a budget just as fast as a well built one. The difference is whether that spend produces bookings or just produces clicks.

Why it matters to you

Google Ads gives you a lever you can pull immediately, unlike organic result rankings, which build slowly over months. If you need leads this week, this is usually the fastest legitimate way to get in front of people already searching for what you offer. The tradeoff is that every click costs money whether or not it turns into a customer, so the quality of the setup underneath the account, the search campaigns, the keywords chosen, the negative keywords excluding the wrong searches, determines whether that lever is worth pulling at all.

How I set it up

I build the account fresh, in the business’s own name, structured around a small number of tightly focused search campaigns rather than one broad, unfocused campaign trying to cover everything. Each campaign gets a curated keyword list built around what the business actually does, alongside a substantial negative keywords list that stops the account from paying for searches that were never going to convert. Budgets are set daily and sized to what the business is already comfortable spending, not inflated to justify a bigger management fee.

Every campaign gets conversion tracking wired to real leads, phone taps, form submissions, bookings, so the account itself learns over time which clicks are actually producing customers and adjusts accordingly, rather than treating every click as equally valuable.

What it looks like in practice

Ad spend goes to Google directly, at their rate, never billed through me, and I take no cut of it. What I charge is a separate management fee for building and running the account. Month to month, you see the results in your plain-language monthly report, how many leads the campaigns produced and what they cost, not a dashboard full of clicks and impressions with no clear line to whether the business actually got busier.