Transcription
If you're a local service-based business who is wanting to drive more leads for your business in 2025, you really need to make sure that you've got your Google Ads strategy set correctly. And the reason for this is because, unfortunately, for many local service-based businesses, they're fighting two really big battles.
And the first thing is that they may have a very limited budget. And secondly, they also may have a really high level of individual CPCs. It's not uncommon for some services like plumbers or electricians to have CPCs well above $50 for an individual click. So, if you've got a small budget but high CPCs, you can burn through your budget very, very quickly.
And it's because of those two reasons that in this video, I'm going to be running you through the exact five steps that we go through in order to build profitable Google Ads campaigns for local service-based businesses.
Now, let's start with step one of the Google ad strategy that you need to be using so you've got fewer wasted clicks and more qualified leads for your business. The first one is that you need to start with search.
Now, even in 2025 when Google is heavily pushing campaigns like Performance Max and Demand Gen, if you're new to Google Ads or if you've got an established local service-based business whose marketing on Google Ads, the majority of your budget spend will actually be allocated to search campaigns.
Now, I'm not saying that you don't want to be using other campaign types like Performance Max. Just saying that it needs to be done in the right way, and you wouldn't do that until you've already built up a really solid foundation with your search campaigns.
And the reason for why this is so important, especially for service-based businesses, is because search campaigns offer you the greatest control and targeting over your keywords and your ad copy. And especially if you're in one of those niches with a really, really high CPC, you've also got other opportunities to be able to add in CPC bid limits, build out extensive negative keywords, and really, really make sure that your keyword targeting is matching your ad copy. And the best way that you can do that is with a search campaign.
Now, when it comes to building a successful search campaign, what you really, really want to make sure is that you are showing the most highly relevant ads, which is sending people to the most highly relevant landing pages from their initial search inquiry. So, this is where you need to make sure that you've got really well-defined ad groups.
So, if you've got a service-based company that is running different types of services, I would break those different services into different ad groups. That gives you these core benefits of being able to really specialize the ad copy and the landing page so that the user is getting a really clear flow that when they complete their initial search, you're showing them highly relevant ad copy and then when they're going to the landing page, you're really reassuring them that they are in the right place.
Now, what this also allows you to do is that once you've built up the really, really good conversion data inside of your account, you know the ad copy that works, you can then start to look at these other types of campaigns. But right at the start, you want to be starting with search.
And that brings us to step number two. And this is all about focusing your search campaigns or focusing your ad spend on the correct keywords and the correct locations. And unfortunately, this is where a lot of service-based businesses lose money without even realizing it.
Now, there's two main areas that I want you to be looking at, and we're going to go through a screen share so you can check these settings. First thing you want to make sure that you're getting right comes with your location targeting. Unfortunately, some businesses think just because they pick the right postcode or the right zip code or the right suburb that that is where their ads are getting spent. But when it comes to location targeting, Google gives you two options. Firstly, there's a presence only option. So, people living in those current areas and then there's also that presence and interest. And this is where people can lose money because that then allows Google to effectively open up their spending to really anywhere as long as they're also showing some location intent.
And the second thing has to do with keyword targeting. Now, historically, if you had some exact match keywords, you could be really really confident that that's the type of phrases that Google would be searching. But now, as Google has opened up that targeting, so even exact match targeting includes close variance and it targets the meaning of the keywords, you really do need to make sure that your keywords strategy is really dialed in so that you are targeting the most specific users for your search term. And so that this is as practical as possible, let's jump into a screen share so I can take you through how to get these settings right.
All right. So the first thing you want to make sure that you're getting right is if you go into your search campaign settings. So just go into the settings little icon here. And you want to be going through to your locations. And what you really want to be making sure here is you can see through here they're targeting three different cities in Canada. But what they've also got here which is the right setting is that they've also gone into the location options and also set this out to only target people who are regularly in your included locations.
Now the reason for why this becomes really really important for a service base especially if you're targeting a specific area like let's just say it's got something to do with their house maintenance. You want to make sure that you're targeting people who really really live in that area not just people who have shown some search interest in that area. So that's a big way that you can stop some waste to spend right at the start.
The next area comes into your keyword targeting. Now, before we get into the way to actually structure your keywords, let's firstly go into two ways that you can stop any wasted spend right from the start. And this one, if you go into your complete overview, then go into admin. What we're going to be doing here is we're going to be setting up some negative keywords. And the way that you can do this is set up accountwide negative keywords.
Now, when we do our accountwide negative keywords, what we're really looking at is we're looking at taking away those searches which we know are just not going to convert. So with here we got things like discounts, download, FAQs, free images, logos, reviews. For many service-based businesses, you'd also be wanting to add in things like howto or DIY because you wanting to really filter out that target of people who are looking at doing it themselves rather than hiring a professional like you.
So firstly, account level negative keywords can be a great way to stop any wasted spend right from the start. And then the next way of making sure that you're getting real good success with your Google Ads campaigns is to have a really really good balance between your exact match and your broad match keywords.
Now, when it comes to broad match keywords, we don't use any one or two word broad match keywords. We'll generally use three words as a bare minimum. I usually like to have four or five, but the reason for that is cuz remember the way that Google ads targets now, it targets the meaning of these keywords. So the reason for why we use exact and broad match together is the broad match is allowing us to really reach out into new potential customers. And then the exact match is us adding in keywords that we know convert for this business.
Now for service-based businesses and their keyword targeting, this question does come up a lot as to whether you should even be using broad match. For me, when it comes to broad match keyword targeting, it really comes down to the individualized service. And if you're running a really really niche service that is related or it's got similar meanings to other related services that you don't offer, that's a case where I would not use broad match. I would only go with exact match. But it is important to keep in mind that exact match will generally have a higher CPC. And that's where you just need to get the right balance between making sure that you are having the correct targeting that's not too limited, but at also at the same time that you're not wasting that traffic. And that's where your account level negative keywords can really save you a lot of money right from the start. And also don't forget to add in those campaign level negative keywords by reviewing your search terms and then adding in extra negative keywords.
Now, it's also important to note that if you want to make sure that you're not missing out on any really, really important optimization actions for your search campaigns so that you can see the best results with Google Ads. If you follow the link in the description below, you can get access to my full Google Ads optimization checklist, which takes you through all of the different optimization actions that you need to be completing for success with Google Ads.
All right, so now we've gone through that you need to start with search and then inside of your search campaigns, you need to make sure that you've got that location and the keyword targeting set correctly so that you're not wasting any money. Now let's talk about step three, which is all about making sure you got really, really specific ad copy.
For many service-based businesses, especially if you've got high CPC, you actually need to have a bit of a mind shift here because what you want to be doing, you want your ad copy to actually pre-qualify people so that you you're in effect generating less clicks. And let me give you a perfect example. Let's just say you're running a service where you run a higher price point of say $400, whereas you've got many other competitors that run a lower budget quality service for under $100. That's the case in the ad copy. I'd be making it really, really clear that we're offering a higher priced service. Saying something in your ad copy like prices start at $399.
Now, that will give you less clicks because some people will see the ad and realize that they're priced out of it. So, they won't click on your ad. But, especially if you're paying high CPCs, there's no point of getting a click for someone who isn't in your budget range. So, when it comes to your ad copy, what you really, really want to be focusing on here is that not just having really, really specific ad copy that matches their user intent. So we usually have one headline which is devoted to really matching what the user has searched. So we've got a keyword focus or a service focus. We then want to reserve the other headlines for these two core things. Firstly, we want to really really be clear on our unique selling points. We want to make sure that we're communicating a difference that our service or a difference that our company has that other businesses don't have. And secondly, we also want to be adding that pre-qualification of price, especially if you're running a higher price service as opposed to a lower service.
Now, if you are running a lower or a budget friendly service, that's what I'd also be leading off with. So, what you really, really want to be thinking about when you're writing your ad copy is think about your end customer in mind. Who is your goal customer? And how can I write ad copy that is going to be appealing to them? With service-based businesses with their ad copy, it's not about appealing to the masses. It's about appealing to the core customers that you want to attract because remember you don't want to be paying for clicks, especially if you've got a small budget if the person who's clicking on that ad is not your ideal customer.
And now that brings us to point number four, and that is all about display remarketing campaigns. Now, if you're unaware what a display remarketing campaign is, is that's the image-based ads. If you've ever been on a business's website and then for the next, you know, 7 days or 2 weeks, you go around the internet and you're checking sports results or checking the weather or checking what upcoming shows are coming up in your city and you see that business's image ad wherever you go. That is that display remarketing.
And in 2025, this is a heavily underutilized campaign, especially for service-based businesses. Now, let me just really break down why I love this. Because remember at the start we were saying that many service-based businesses have a real issue with high CPCs and low budgets. The benefit and the beauty of a display remarketing campaign is that once you've got someone to visit your website if they haven't converted yet what you want to be doing is you want to be targeting them with image-based ads giving them that constant reminder of your business and your service and that they haven't either booked in that problem yet or they haven't booked in that service yet.
Now, one of the negative feedbacks I hear about display campaigns a lot is people say that, you know, they just don't get any conversions from it. But what you really, really need to focus on is that just think about how a display campaign works. Someone may have been to your website, they then may see your ads another three or four times. They then may complete another search, click on the search ad, and then convert. And in that exact case, what happens is is the conversion doesn't go back to the display campaign if they hadn't clicked on your display ad. But what it does do is it goes through to a what's called a metric view through conversions.
So when you're assessing the success of your Google Ads campaign, especially for your display campaigns, you need to be looking at two core metrics. The first one is your view through conversions. The second one is you want to look at the total account performance in larger segments of time. So what I'm talking about is that when I start a display campaign, I'm not looking at judging the success of that campaign for at least 60 days. And what we're then looking at is what's been happening in that account 60 days before versus 60 days after starting that display campaign. Because what generally happens is that you see with your display campaigns is that the individual campaign line may be saying that it's even losing money but the total cost per conversion can be heavily dropping down for the total business.
Let me give you an example. We had an IT-based business that we were marketing and they were getting leads but that cost per conversion was coming at $150 based off their search only campaigns. Ideally they needed that to be below 100. So what we did is we just by launching a display remarketing campaign after 2 months of running that campaign. So in the third month they started to see their cost per conversion rapidly decline to below that $100 mark. Now the display campaign was just breaking even. But what we were able to inform that client is that when we were looking at the view through conversions and also looking at the total account data, it was clear that the display campaign was providing some great success for their business.
Now, there are some important settings that you need to get right with the display campaign. You want to make sure that you've got an audience, a website visitors audience of at least a thousand users. And then you also want to make sure that you've turned off your optimized targeting and you're just setting it as a targeted-based display campaign.
All right. Now, that brings us to step number five, and this is all about scaling your local service-based campaigns. Now, remember at the start of this video, I said how service-based businesses need to be careful with using Performance Max. Now, I want to clarify. I'm not saying that you should not use Performance Max, but what I'm saying is you need to use it in the right way. And this all comes back to understanding how to scale or increase your spend inside of a Google Ads account because there's only two ways that you can scale any account.
The first way is that you increase the budgets where you're seeing good results. So, if you're seeing some really good keyword targeting, you're getting really good conversion metrics, the easiest way to scale your account and get more conversions is to increase your budget on those campaigns. But unfortunately at some point you'll hit what I call CPC resistance. And what CPC resistance is is that when you increase your budget your CPCs increase. So you can no longer scale. So for example, you increase your budget by 10% but your CPCs go up by 20%. You can no longer just increase your performance by increasing your budget. You then need to lean on a second way of getting more conversions for your business and that's through going down the path of reaching out to colder audiences. And this is where Performance Max can be a really really great campaign type.
But one thing I do need to stress for local service-based businesses is a common complaint that people get about Performance Max is that it gives them low-quality or spammy leads. Now the way to solve this is that you need to make sure that you are using really really specific targeting for your Performance Max campaigns. And the most important thing is offline conversions. Now, what offline conversions are, it's where you are reporting back to Google the actual conversions that led to real leads. So, the way that you do this is by uploading different customer lists. You want to be making sure that you're not just targeting people who are filling out your forms, but you're actually targeting the type of people who actually become customers of yours.
So, once you've got your offline conversions set up, you need to make sure that when you start with a Performance Max campaign that you're using campaign specific goals. So, for a service-based business, when it comes to Performance Max, we won't set it to just forms or phone calls. We only target those offline conversions. Then, you also need to make sure that you're only bidding on new customers. And then, finally, you need to make sure that you've added your own company as an excluded brand.
So, if you're a service-based business and you want to see success with Google Ads in 2025, make sure that you start with search. Step two, make sure that you've got your keyword targeting and your location targeting really set right. Step three, make sure that you've got really, really specific ad copy which speaks to your ideal customer. Step four, don't forget the power of retargeting with display ads being that constant reminder that once someone has visited your website that they're seeing your ads for the next 30-60 days. And then finally, when you do get to that point where you do need to scale because you're seeing that CPC resistance, reach out to Performance Max, but make sure you're doing it in the right way.
Thank you so much for joining me. My name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy. And remember, if you want to get that plan on how to optimize all of your campaigns inside of Google Ads, make sure you follow that link in the description to get access to my Google Ads optimization checklist. And if you want to make sure that you've got your search campaigns set up the right way, go through and watch this video right here. See you next time.