Running Google search ads for your business, and what actually matters
A search ad only exists at the moment someone types the exact thing you do into Google, which is a different kind of advertising than every other kind.
Updated
Most advertising interrupts someone who was not thinking about you. A billboard, a radio spot, a post in someone's feed. A search ad is the opposite. It only shows up because someone already typed the exact thing you do, right now, into a search box. That is the whole reason search ads are worth talking about separately from everything else.
Why search ads are different
The ads above the results are bought, not earned. You are paying for placement in front of someone who searched for the thing you do, at the moment they searched for it. That is a fundamentally different transaction than most marketing, which is paying to be seen by someone who was not looking for anything. Intent is the whole product here.
What someone types matters more than what your ad says
A search ad shows for the words a person actually typed, matched against a list of words you chose. Get that list wrong and you are paying to be shown to people who were never going to call you. This is the part most owners skip, because writing a clever ad feels like the work and choosing the right words feels like an afterthought. It is backwards. The words decide who sees the ad at all; the ad itself only decides whether they click.
Where a small budget quietly disappears
The classic way a modest budget gets eaten is paying for searches that were never going to become a customer. Someone searching for "free," someone looking for a job with your company, someone reading a how-to article and doing it themselves. Excluding those searches, called negative keywords, is unglamorous and it is most of what separates a budget that lasts the month from one that runs out on the fifteenth.
The page the click lands on decides whether the money was wasted
A good ad that lands on a slow page, a confusing page, or a page with no obvious way to call or book has done half its job and thrown away the other half. The click is the expensive part. What happens on the page after the click is free, and it is where most of the actual outcome gets decided.An estimate request widget or a booking widget on that page gives the click somewhere obvious to go, instead of a visitor who has to hunt for your phone number.
Why speed matters once the click happens
Someone searching at nine at night is not choosing you over nobody. They are almost always comparing you against two or three other businesses that also showed up, and whoever answers first tends to get the job regardless of who had the better ad. The ad gets you the click. What you do in the minutes after it is a separate and equally important problem.
What this actually costs
The tool
Google PPC
Show up first when someone searches for exactly what you offer (ad spend billed separately)
Managed for you
The fee covers running and tuning the ads: choosing the words, writing and testing what the ad says, excluding the searches that waste money, and watching what is actually happening week to week. The money you spend on the ads themselves is separate and goes straight to Google, not to us.
What we will not promise
No return on a dollar, no cost per lead, no timeline for when it starts working. Anyone who quotes you a number before the campaign has run is guessing with your money. What we will do is run it inside your own account, tell you plainly what the searches and the numbers show, and change course when something is not working instead of leaving it running out of habit.
How your account stays yours
The ads run inside your own Google Ads account. Your money, your account, your history. You link us in as a manager from inside your own account settings, which is never a password handed over. If you do not have a Google Ads account yet, we can help you start one.
You link the account
From your own Google Ads account, you add us as a manager. Nothing runs until this step is done, and nothing about it requires giving up a password. The portal assistant walks you through exactly where to click if you get stuck.
We set up the campaign
The words that trigger your ads, the words we exclude, and the ad text itself, built around the work you actually do rather than a generic template.
It goes live and we tune it
We watch what searches are actually showing your ad and adjust the word lists and the ad text as real data comes in, rather than setting it once and leaving it.
A realistic starting budget
Below a certain monthly ad spend there simply are not enough clicks to learn anything. A handful of clicks a month tells you nothing about whether the words or the ad text are working; it takes a real sample size before any of it is more than noise. Ask us what a realistic minimum looks like for your trade and your area before you set a number, since it varies a lot by how competitive the searches are where you work.
Silence after a quote almost never means no. It usually means not yet, and nobody asked again.
Both the usual answers are wrong. There is a middle option that keeps the qualifying without the silence.
Most enquiries arrive when nobody is there to take them. This is what it costs and the smallest fix that works.