Google Ads for local businesses: a primer

The campaign types that matter for local businesses

Google has roughly a dozen campaign types. Local service businesses really only need to think about three of them, and ignore the rest until those three are tuned:

• Search campaigns — the classic "show my ad when someone searches for X". Your bread and butter.
• Local Services Ads (LSA) — the "Google Screened" listings above the map pack. Pay per lead, not per click. High-intent.
• Performance Max — Google's blended-everything campaign type. Useful in narrow cases; almost always over-pitched by your Google rep.

Search campaign structure that works

The most common mistake we see in audits is one giant campaign with one giant ad group containing every keyword the business can think of. That structure cannot be optimized — every keyword competes against every other for budget, and the bids you really want to push are diluted by the ones you do not.

A tighter structure looks like this:

• One campaign per service line (e.g. "Carpet Cleaning", "Office Cleaning") so you can budget separately.
• Inside each campaign, ad groups by intent (e.g. "near me" vs branded vs commercial).
• Each ad group has 5–15 tightly related keywords, not 200.
• Negative-keyword lists at the campaign level to filter common time-wasters.

Negative keywords are where the money is

Most local-business ad accounts we audit are bleeding 20–50% of spend to searches that have no chance of converting — DIY queries, brand names of products you do not sell, free-X searches, jobs/employment queries, and so on.

A solid negative-keyword list for a typical local service business has 100–500 entries. Building it takes a few hours of going through the search-terms report, then 15 minutes a week to maintain. The ROI of this exercise is consistently the highest of anything we do in an account.

Local Services Ads (LSA) — the underrated channel

LSA is Google's pay-per-lead product for service businesses. The ads appear above the map pack with a "Google Screened" badge, and you only pay when a customer calls or messages you through the ad.

Setup is a hassle (background checks, license uploads, insurance verification), but once you are approved, LSA leads are usually cheaper and higher-intent than Search clicks. Most local businesses we work with run both LSA and Search; the channels complement each other.

Conversion tracking — the part everyone skips

You cannot optimize what you cannot measure. The minimum viable setup for a local business is:

• A conversion action for form submissions (counts a real lead).
• A conversion action for phone calls from ads (use Google's call tracking).
• A conversion action for clicks on your tel: link from the website.
• Smart Bidding tied to those conversions, not to clicks.

Common mistakes that quietly burn budget

• Running broad-match keywords with no negatives. Broad match is fine if your negatives are sharp; it is a budget vacuum without them.
• Geographic targeting set to "presence or interest" instead of "presence". Half your spend may be going to people who are not in your service area.
• Letting the Google rep move you to Performance Max without understanding what you are giving up (visibility into placements, control over geographic targeting, search-term reporting).
• Running ads to a slow website. Ad cost goes up if the landing page is slow — Google penalizes Quality Score on poor mobile performance.