Somebody's furnace quits on a Tuesday and they grab their phone. That search is worth more than anything else you could spend the money on. My job is making sure you're there for it, and nowhere else.
Most accounts I open have the same handful of problems. None of them are exotic, and none of them get fixed by spending more.
Somebody types in another company and your ad shows anyway. You pay for the click, and that person was never calling you.
Someone searches for one specific service and lands on your front door instead of the page about it. Google notices. Your cost per click goes up and your placement gets worse.
Covering a whole region when your trucks won't cross the water for a service call. Every one of those clicks costs the same as a real one.
One person filling out a form three times counts as three leads. Clicks on the directions button count as conversions. The numbers look better than the phone sounds.
I read the search terms report. Honestly, that's most of it. Every week I go through what people actually typed to trigger your ads, and I cut what shouldn't be there. Competitor names, people looking for a job rather than a plumber, out of area searches, folks hunting a $49 coupon. Negative lists get long. That's the job.
Then the parts that need building. Keywords grouped by service instead of dumped in one pile. Ad copy that matches the group. Each group pointed at the page for that service rather than your front door.
Tracking gets checked too. If your conversion numbers are counting duplicate form fills, every decision after that is made on bad data. I'd rather fix the measurement first and find out the account is smaller than it looked.
Then monthly reporting that says what happened and what I'd change, in plain language, without a forty slide deck.
Turn on broad match because the recommendations panel says it'll improve your optimization score. Apply All is how accounts end up paying for searches that have nothing to do with the business.
Chase volume either. I'd rather bring you fewer, better leads than a bigger number in a report.
Service businesses where leads matter and the jobs are worth something. Home services and the trades, restoration, professional services.
Works best if you're already spending on Google and suspect it isn't working. Also fine if you've never run ads and want someone to start it properly rather than learning on your dime.
Read-only access, or just last month's search terms report. A couple of days later you'll know what I'd cut and what I'd put the budget behind instead.
