Search advertising reaches people while they are actively looking. The intent is already there, so the work is relevance, hygiene and control, not persuasion from a standing start.
Google Ads puts your business in front of people who are already searching for what you sell. That is its strength and its limit. Because the intent exists before you arrive, you are competing on relevance, price and trust rather than on attention alone.
It also means the budget moves quickly. When the keywords are loose and nobody reviews the search terms, you pay for clicks from people who were never going to buy, and the account looks busy while the bank account stays flat.
We start from the words people use and what those words reveal about where they are in a decision. Someone searching for a broad category term is in a different place from someone searching for a specific model, a comparison, a price or a local provider. Each deserves its own ad, its own landing page and often its own budget.
Ad copy then has to answer the query in the headline and carry that promise through to the page the click lands on. Mismatch between ad and page is the most common reason a campaign has traffic and no revenue. The visitor clicked because the ad promised something specific, and the page has to deliver exactly that.
Negative keywords do more for profitability than any bid adjustment. Search terms reports show what people actually typed, and most accounts carry a long tail of queries that will never convert: job seekers, freebie hunters, competitor research, and words with a different meaning in another industry. Every one of them competes with the budget that should be buying customers.
Bid strategy comes second. Target cost per acquisition and maximise conversions only work when the conversion data is clean and the conversion action is the one that matters. Setting a target against a soft conversion, like a newsletter signup, teaches the account to buy the cheapest version of the wrong thing.
Search gives the most control: keywords, match types, negatives, ad copy and landing pages, all visible and adjustable. Shopping suits product catalogues, where the feed, the image and the price do the persuading. Performance Max hands targeting to the algorithm and works well when the feed, the conversion signal and the creative assets are already in good shape.
Using Performance Max to compensate for a weak account usually makes the account weaker. It is powerful in proportion to the quality of what you give it, and opaque when something goes wrong. We use it deliberately, alongside campaigns whose behaviour we can inspect.
Search works when people are already looking for what you sell, and when the economics of a click can support a real cost per acquisition.
It is a poor fit for products nobody searches for yet. That demand has to be created elsewhere first, usually with paid social.
Broad match will find traffic, just not always the right traffic. Without a maintained negative list and a weekly look at the search terms report, the account pays for queries that were never going to convert and hides the waste inside a rising cost per click.
The homepage cannot mirror the promise of twenty different ads. When the ad says one thing and the page says another, the visitor leaves. A dedicated landing page per intent group usually changes the result more than any bidding change.
A high click-through rate on a cheap keyword can still lose money. The numbers that decide whether a campaign survives are cost per qualified lead and cost per acquisition, measured against the margin of the thing being sold.
Performance Max needs a reliable signal to optimise towards. Without accurate conversion tracking it will spend the budget on whatever engagement is easiest to find, and report it in a way that makes it hard to see what happened.
We map the queries that indicate real buying intent, and separate them from research traffic that never converts.
Campaigns are structured around intent, margin and the pages that exist, with tracking verified before launch.
Ads answer the query directly, and the landing page continues the same promise without a change of subject.
We add negatives weekly, cut the keywords that only spend, and move budget towards what produces customers.
It depends on the cost per click in your market and what a customer is worth to you. The honest calculation is whether the budget can produce enough conversions to judge the campaign within a reasonable period. We work that out with you before proposing anything.
Search usually produces data faster than social, because intent already exists. The first weeks are about collecting clean conversion data and cutting waste, not about hitting a target. We report what the numbers show rather than promising a timeline we cannot control.
Your website can work if a page already matches the intent of the ad closely. If it does not, a dedicated landing page is usually the higher-return fix. We will tell you which applies instead of rebuilding a site that was fine.
It can be, once the feed, creative assets and conversion tracking are solid. It is a poor starting point for a new account with thin data, because it gives you the least visibility exactly when you need the most. We introduce it when the foundations can support it.
Book a call and we will go through your account, your search terms and your conversion tracking, and work out where the money is going and what to change.