Google Ads Management
Google Ads Management
That Pays For Itself.
Google Ads management is the work of running your paid search account: choosing keywords, writing ads, setting bids and budgets, building negative keyword lists, and tracking which clicks turn into revenue. Done well, the account spends less and produces more leads each month.
The question everyone asks
How Much
Google Ads Cost.
Google Ads has no minimum spend and no monthly fee. You set a daily budget, you are charged only when someone clicks, and you can change or stop it at any time. What you pay per click is decided by an auction against everyone else bidding on that search.
That auction is why there is no single answer. Cost per click depends almost entirely on what a customer is worth in your industry.
What drives your cost per click
- Industry. Consumer categories like retail and restaurants sit at the low end, often around a dollar or two. Legal, insurance and medical are the most expensive in search, sometimes over fifty dollars for a single click, because one signed client is worth thousands.
- Competition. The more advertisers bidding on a keyword, the higher the floor. A term with four serious bidders costs a fraction of one with twenty.
- Quality Score. Google rates how relevant your ad and landing page are to the search. A better score means you pay less than a competitor for the same position. This is the lever most accounts never pull.
- Location and timing. The same keyword costs differently in Manhattan than in rural Nebraska, and differently on a Tuesday morning than a Saturday night.
How to set a budget that makes sense
Work backwards from a customer, not forwards from a number you are comfortable with. Take your average sale value, multiply by your profit margin, and decide what you can pay to acquire one customer while still making money. Then take the rate at which your leads turn into customers. If one in five leads closes, and you can afford two hundred dollars to win a customer, then a lead is worth forty dollars to you.
That forty dollars is the real number. Everything in the account gets judged against it.
One warning. A budget too small to collect data cannot be optimised. If your target cost per lead is forty dollars and you spend three hundred a month, you are getting roughly seven leads, which is not enough signal for anyone, human or algorithm, to learn from. Either fund it properly or put the money somewhere it can work.
Campaign types
What We Run
Inside Google.
Search campaigns
Text ads shown to people typing what you sell. This is the highest-intent advertising available anywhere, because the person has already decided they want the thing and is now deciding who from. Most accounts should get search right before they touch anything else.
Shopping campaigns
Product listings with an image, price and store name, pulled from a product feed you supply. Retailers often assume poor shopping performance is a bidding problem. It almost never is. It is a feed problem: missing attributes, weak titles, no product type, bad images. We fix the feed first, because that is where the returns are.
Performance Max
Google's automated campaign that runs across search, shopping, display, YouTube, Gmail and Maps from one set of assets. It performs well when it is fed good creative and fenced in properly. Left alone it will spend heavily on your own brand name and report that as a win. Brand exclusions and account-level negatives are not optional.
YouTube campaigns
Video shown to audiences you define. Attention is cheap compared with search, but the person was not looking for you, so payback is slower. Best used to build demand or to re-engage people who already visited, not as a first lead source.
Display and retargeting
Banner placements across millions of sites. As cold advertising it is mostly wasted. As retargeting, shown to people who already came to your site and left, it is one of the cheapest ways to recover a sale.
Local Services Ads
A separate product where you pay per lead rather than per click, and carry the Google Guaranteed badge. It sits above everything else on the page for home services and trades. Different setup, different verification, and worth having where you qualify.
The Process
How We Manage
An Account.
Fix tracking
Before anything else. Duplicate conversions and untracked calls make every later decision wrong.
Cut waste
Search term reports mined, negatives built, brand protected from campaigns claiming credit for it.
Rebuild
Campaigns restructured around your margins, ads rewritten, traffic pointed at pages that match the search.
Scale
Budget moved toward what performs, reported as spend, clicks and recorded conversions.
Common questions
Google Ads
Questions.
How do Google Ads work?
You choose the searches you want to appear for and set a maximum you will pay for a click. When someone searches, Google runs an instant auction among the advertisers bidding on that term. Position is decided by your bid multiplied by your Ad Rank, which includes how relevant your ad and landing page are. You are charged only when someone clicks, and usually less than your maximum bid.
How much do Google Ads cost?
There is no minimum spend and no platform fee. You pay per click, and the price is set by auction. Cost per click runs from roughly a dollar in low-competition consumer categories to well over fifty dollars in legal, insurance and medical, where a single customer is worth thousands. Your own cost is driven by your industry, how many competitors are bidding, your Quality Score and your location.
Are Google Ads worth it?
They are worth it when a customer is worth more than what it costs to acquire one, and when you can track which clicks became customers. They are not worth it if your budget is too small to gather data, if your landing page does not convert, or if you cannot tell which leads closed. Fix those three first, because paid traffic magnifies whatever is already happening on your site.
Can I bid on a competitor's brand name?
Yes, you can bid on competitor brand keywords in Google Ads. What you cannot do is use their trademarked name in your ad text, which Google will reject on a trademark complaint. Expect them to bid on your name in return, which raises what you pay to appear for your own brand. It works best as a targeted play, not a default.
What is a good click-through rate?
It depends on position and search type far more than on your industry. Branded searches, where people type your company name, often clear fifteen or twenty percent. Competitive non-branded search terms sit far lower. A low rate on a broad keyword usually means the keyword is wrong for you, not that the ad is bad.
Why is my budget spent by lunchtime?
Usually one of three things. Broad match keywords pulling in searches you never intended to buy. No dayparting, so you are paying full price at hours when nobody converts. Or a Performance Max campaign quietly absorbing your brand traffic. All three are visible in the search terms report within a few minutes.
How do I cancel Google Ads?
Pause the campaigns in your account and the spending stops immediately. There is no contract with Google and no cancellation fee. If you want the account closed entirely, that is done in account settings, but pausing is usually the better choice because it preserves your conversion history if you restart later.
Should I run Google Ads or do SEO?
Both, in that order. Ads produce leads this week and stop when the budget stops. SEO takes three to six months and then keeps working. Running ads while SEO builds means you are not waiting six months for the phone to ring, and the keyword data from the ad account tells you exactly which pages the SEO work should target.
Works alongside
The Rest Of
The Engine.
Go Rogue Team Strategy Session
Want To See What
You Are Wasting?
The free audit reads your live Google Ads account and shows the search terms buying you nothing, the tracking that is double-counting, and the campaigns worth more budget. You keep it either way.
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