Google Ads for Business | The Web Alchemist

Maybe you’re already paying for Google Ads. Maybe you’re still deciding. Either way, a lot goes on between setting a budget and the phone ringing, and most of it happens out of sight. This page walks through the auction, the campaign types that suit service firms and shops, keywords, ads, bidding, tracking and landing pages, using Google’s own help documentation throughout. You don’t need a marketing background.

In brief

Every search is a fresh auction. Your bid matters, but so do your ad, your landing page and the search itself, so the top bidder doesn’t automatically win.
Quality Score is a 1 to 10 diagnostic, and Google says plainly it isn’t an input in the auction.
Match types and negative keywords decide which searches you pay for. The search terms report shows you what they were.
Automated bidding is only as good as your conversion data, and in the UK that depends on proper cookie consent. The landing page matters as much as the ad.

How the Google Ads auction decides who appears

Type a search and Google holds an auction for the ad slots on that results page. In Google’s words, “Each time an ad is eligible to appear for a search, it goes through the ad auction,” so the outcome can change from one search to the next.

Where your ad lands, and whether it shows at all, comes down to what Google calls Ad Rank. Your bid feeds into it. So does the quality of your ads and landing page. Then there are the Ad Rank thresholds (the minimum standard an ad has to hit), how competitive that particular auction is, and the context of the search, meaning the words used, the person’s location, their device and the time of day. The expected impact of your ad assets and other formats counts too. What falls out of Google’s own guidance is that a relevant, well-built ad can win a better position at a lower price than a competitor who’s just throwing money at it.

It’s also why you rarely pay your full maximum per click. Google’s definition of cost-per-click bidding says your maximum CPC is the most you’ll typically be charged for a click, and that you’ll often pay less. Two firms can set the same maximum bid and pay very different amounts, because their ads and pages are judged differently.

Quality Score and what it is for

Inside your account you’ll see a Quality Score from 1 to 10 at keyword level. Google builds it from three parts. Expected clickthrough rate is how likely your ad is to get clicked. Ad relevance is how closely the ad matches what the searcher meant. Landing page experience is how relevant and useful the page is once they arrive. Each part is rated against other advertisers whose ads showed for exactly the same keyword over the last 90 days.

The bit a lot of people miss is that Google calls Quality Score “a diagnostic tool” and states that “Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction.” Treat it like a warning light on the dashboard. A low score points at the weak link, the ad copy or the page behind it. Fix that and stop chasing the number.

Campaign types that suit most businesses

Google Ads has plenty of campaign types. For service businesses and smaller retailers, three are worth getting your head round first.

Search campaigns

Google describes Search campaigns as “text ads on search results that let you reach people while they’re searching on Google for the products and services that you offer.” You show up at the moment someone’s looking. An accountant bidding on searches for help with year-end accounts, or an industrial supplier bidding on a specific part number, is reaching people who’ve already decided they need something.

Performance Max

Performance Max is, in Google’s words, “a goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all Google Ads inventory from a single campaign.” That covers YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Google recommends it when a business has specific conversion goals, such as online sales or leads. Because so much of the targeting is handed to automation, it leans heavily on accurate conversion tracking and decent creative. A firm that can only take work within a small radius, or wants to see exactly which searches it’s paying for, may be better off starting with a Search campaign.

Local Services Ads

Local Services Ads are a separate Google product with their own help centre. Google’s UK help page lists the United Kingdom among the countries where they run, with eligible categories including electricians, plumbers, roofers, carpet cleaning, handyman and landscaping services, plus a group of legal categories currently limited to Greater London. They don’t work like pay per click. You “pay only for leads related to your business and the services that you offer,” and those leads come in as calls and messages. Businesses that pass Google’s screening can show the Google Verified badge.

Keywords, match types and negative keywords

Keywords tell Google which searches your ads are relevant to. Match types control how loosely it reads them. There are three current match types, and it’s worth reading Google’s own definitions because older ones still float about.

Broad match, where ads “may show on searches that are related to your keyword, which can include searches that don’t contain the direct meaning of your keywords.”
Phrase match, where ads “may show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword,” including more specific versions of it.
Exact match, where ads “may show on searches that have the same meaning or same intent as the keyword.”

Notice that even exact match is about meaning and intent. It isn’t a literal word-for-word filter. Broad match casts the widest net, and Google’s guidance says “It’s critical to use Smart Bidding with broad match,” so each search gets judged on its own signals at auction time.

Negative keywords pull the other way. Google says they “let you exclude search terms from your campaigns and help you focus on only the keywords that matter to your customers.” Its own example is an optician selling glasses who adds ‘wine glasses’ and ‘drinking glasses’ as negatives. A hotel probably doesn’t want to pay for job searches. A trades firm might want to filter out people looking for training courses. Watch out, though. Negative keywords don’t match close variants, so plurals and misspellings may need adding separately.

You find them in the search terms report. It lists the searches, used by a significant number of people, that triggered your ads. Google’s advice is that if a search term “isn’t relevant enough to the products or services that you offer,” you add it as a negative keyword. Checking it regularly is one of the simplest habits in account management, and it should be a standing part of any ongoing PPC management arrangement.

Writing ads and using assets

Google stopped letting advertisers create or edit expanded text ads on 30 June 2022 and now steers everyone towards responsive search ads. You give it up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions (at least 3 headlines and 2 descriptions), and Google mixes them into different combinations, testing which work best for which searches. Headlines can run to 30 characters and descriptions to 90. Any headline might end up next to any other, so each one has to make sense by itself. Headlines that each take a different angle, like the service, the area, a reason to trust you and a next step, give the system far more to work with than fifteen rewordings of the same idea.

Assets, which Google used to call extensions, add extra bits around your ad. The usual ones for smaller businesses are sitelinks to specific pages, callouts for short selling points, call assets showing your number, location assets showing your address and structured snippets listing services or product ranges. Google says “There’s no cost to add additional assets to your campaign,” although clicks on them are charged as normal, and they only appear when they’re predicted to help and your Ad Rank is high enough.

Your ad copy has rules to follow as well. The CAP Code, enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority, covers “‘pay per click’ ads on search engines.” Rule 3.1 says marketing communications “must not materially mislead or be likely to do so,” and rule 3.7 says advertisers must hold documentary evidence for objective claims before the ad runs. Claim the cheapest prices or the fastest response and you need proof sitting behind it. This is general information rather than legal advice, and sectors like finance and healthcare have extra rules on top.

Budgets and bidding strategies

You set an average daily budget for each campaign. On any one day a campaign can spend up to twice that to make the most of busier periods. Over a month, Google says you “will have spent no more than 30.4 times your average daily budget.” So £20 a day means a monthly ceiling of about £608, with some days over £20 and some under.

Bidding is where most of the automation lives now. Google’s Smart Bidding strategies “use Google AI to optimise for conversions or conversion value in every auction.” The main ones are listed below.

Maximise conversions, which tries to get as many conversions as it can while spending your budget.
Target CPA, where you give Google an average cost per conversion to aim for. Some conversions cost more and some less, but it tries to hold the average at your target.
Maximise conversion value and Target ROAS, which work on the value of each conversion and suit online shops that record order values.

The catch is the word ‘conversion’. These strategies can only chase whatever you’ve told Google counts as a result. If tracking’s missing, or counting the wrong thing, like every visit to the contact page instead of actual enquiries, the bidding will chase the wrong outcome very efficiently. A restaurant counting menu views as conversions will get loads of menu views and not many bookings.

Conversion tracking, enhanced conversions and consent

Google’s help centre describes conversions as the actions you choose to treat as valuable, “like a purchase, sign-up or phone call.” For a trades or professional services firm that usually means form enquiries and calls, including calls from the ad itself, calls to a number on your website and taps on a phone number on mobile. For a shop it means completed orders, ideally with their value.

Enhanced conversions make it more accurate. Google explains the feature runs first-party data, such as the email address someone types into a form, through a one-way hashing algorithm called SHA256 before sending it to Google. There’s a version for leads that ties website form data to sales you record offline, handy when the real result, a signed contract say, happens later on the phone.

In the UK, all of this sits under the cookie rules. The ICO’s guidance on storage and access technologies doesn’t mince words. “If your service uses storage or access technologies for the purposes of online advertising, you must get consent. You cannot rely on any of the exceptions.” Google’s consent mode is how your website tells Google tags what each visitor agreed to, and the tags behave differently when consent is refused. Its reference documentation says the ad_user_data setting “is required for measurement use cases, such as enhanced conversions and tag-based conversion tracking,” and Google notes default behaviour can differ for visitors in the EEA, Switzerland and the UK. If your cookie banner isn’t wired up to consent mode, the conversion data your bidding relies on may have holes in it. Treat this as general information and take advice on your own setup.

Landing pages decide what the click is worth

Landing page experience is one of the three parts of Quality Score, and it’s also where your money either becomes an enquiry or disappears. Google’s advice is to give people what they came for. Its example couldn’t be simpler. Someone who clicks an ad for flannel shirts should land on a page of flannel shirts. It also recommends keeping the message consistent between ad and page, making pages work properly on mobile and speeding up load times.

Sending every click to your home page throws a lot of that away. Someone who searched for boiler servicing and clicked an ad about boiler servicing should land on a boiler servicing page, with prices or a clear route to a quote. A general welcome page that makes them hunt is a waste of the click. Same goes for a dental clinic advertising implants, or a venue advertising wedding packages.

This is where paid search and conversion rate optimisation overlap. Improve the page and every campaign pointing at it does better. There’s more in our guide to getting more enquiries from your website. Page speed plays a part too, and our guide to website speed and performance explains how to measure it. For the design side, the article on UX considerations for business websites this year is a good companion.

PPC and SEO, and when each fits

Paid and organic results sit on the same page but play by different rules. Google Search Central says “Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, or rank it higher,” so buying ads won’t buy you a better organic position. What paid search gives you is control. You pick the searches, the message and the budget, and you can switch a campaign off whenever you like. Organic visibility takes longer to build but keeps working without a cost per click.

Really, the two work best together. Paid search suits new services, seasonal demand, short promotions and competitive terms that would take ages to rank for. Search engine optimisation suits the steady core of what you do and the questions people ask before they’re ready to buy. Our guide to SEO for business websites covers the organic side in detail.

Common mistakes worth checking for

These are the ones to rule out first, and you don’t need any specialist tools to spot them.

No negative keywords, or a list nobody’s touched in months. Without regular trips to the search terms report, broad and phrase match will pick up irrelevant searches.
Everything sent to the home page. A proper page for each main service or product group nearly always serves the searcher better.
No conversion tracking, or tracking the wrong thing. Automated bidding without reliable conversion data is guesswork with a budget attached.
Consent not connected. A cookie banner that doesn’t pass choices through to consent mode can leave UK conversion data patchy.
Too many campaign types at once. Start with a focused Search campaign and it’s far easier to learn what works before widening out.
Claims you can’t back up. Ad copy falls under the CAP Code, so objective claims like ‘cheapest’ or ‘fastest’ need evidence behind them before the ad runs.

Getting help with Google Ads

Plenty of owners run their own accounts once they’ve got their heads round the above. Others would rather hand over the keyword reviews, tracking and testing. If that’s you, we offer Google Ads management for businesses, and because landing pages matter so much, that work sits naturally alongside improving the pages themselves. Based in the county? There’s more on our PPC service for Gloucestershire businesses.

Rather talk it through first? Get in touch with a question about your account.

How Google Ads Works for a Business