Frequently Asked Questions About Google Ads

Small and mid-size local service businesses are my sweet spot. Most of my clients are spending somewhere between $500 and $10,000 a month on Google Ads. If you are a large company looking for a big agency I am probably not the right fit. But if you are a local business in Metro Detroit where every lead matters that is exactly who I built this for.

I am based in Novi and work with businesses all over Metro Detroit. That includes Troy, Farmington Hills, Royal Oak, Ann Arbor, Southfield, Livonia, Dearborn, Sterling Heights, and the surrounding areas. I also work with clients remotely across Michigan and nationally for the right fit.

It really depends on the scope of your account, your industry, and what is already set up. The easiest thing to do is book a free strategy call. I will look at your current situation and give you a straight answer about what makes sense. No pitch, no pressure, just an honest look at your account.

At a big agency you usually get handed off to a junior account manager who is running 40 or 50 accounts at the same time. With me you get direct access and someone who personally knows your campaign inside and out. I also do not lock clients into long term contracts. You stay because the results make sense not because you signed something that forces you to.

I focus mostly on HVAC companies, law firms, and local service businesses like contractors, home services, and medical practices. These are businesses where the phone call is the lead and Google Ads when it is built correctly can be structured to drive exactly that.

It depends on where you are starting from. If you are starting from scratch plan on 30 to 60 days before the campaign is fully dialed in and generating consistent leads. If you already have an account with structural problems things can improve faster once those get fixed. I will always give you a realistic timeline on the first call not a number designed to get you to sign up.

The most common causes are broad match keywords triggering irrelevant searches, a negative keyword list that was never properly built, landing pages that do not match what the ad promised, and bid strategies that optimize for clicks instead of conversions. Most accounts I audit have at least two of these problems running at the same time.

It depends entirely on your industry and your average job or case value. An HVAC company with a $4,000 average job can afford a much higher cost per lead than a business with a $200 average transaction. A general benchmark for local service businesses in Metro Detroit is somewhere between $50 and $150 per lead for a well structured campaign. If you are paying significantly more than that it is worth getting a second opinion on your account structure.

Impression share is the percentage of auctions your ad was eligible to appear in that it actually showed up for. If your impression share is 20 percent it means your ad only appeared in 1 out of every 5 searches it could have. Low impression share usually means your budget is too tight, your bids are too low, or your Quality Score is dragging you down. It is one of the first metrics I look at when auditing a new account.

Broad match has its place but it needs to be managed carefully. Without a strong negative keyword list and regular search term report reviews broad match will drain your budget on irrelevant searches fast. I have seen accounts where broad match was serving ads for completely unrelated searches and the business owner had no idea. It is one of the most common structural problems in accounts that are underperforming.

Google Ads are the traditional text ads that show based on keyword searches. You pay per click and have a lot of control over targeting, bidding, and landing pages. Local Service Ads show above traditional ads for certain service categories, you pay per lead instead of per click, and Google puts a Google Guaranteed badge on your listing. For home service businesses and certain professional services Local Service Ads can be a strong complement to traditional Google Ads when the category is available.

Your landing page is one of the biggest factors in whether Google Ads works for you. Sending traffic to your homepage almost always hurts performance because the homepage tries to speak to everyone and ends up converting nobody. A dedicated landing page built around the specific thing someone searched for will consistently outperform a homepage. It also directly affects your Quality Score which in turn affects how much you pay per click.