Why use Google Ads for Your Local Business?

Here’s a list of the primary reasons why you should consider using Google Ads for your local business and how your business can benefit from it:

• Targeted geographic ads: Google Ads offer the best way to reach and connect with local audiences in a specific region. For example, you can target people through search ads who are within a 5 km radius of your service area. Anyone who searches for one of your target queries in a specific location (town, city, state, zip code) will see your ad.
• Cost-effective: Digital ads, in general, are quite cost-effective than ‘traditional’ advertising. You can be much more targeted with full control through Google Ads. If you wanted, you could run a Google Ads campaign for ￡5 per day… That’s not a possibility with TV ads that can cost more than ￡100K to run a 30-second commercial on national television
• Fast results: Google Ads gives you instant access to clicks and traffic. As soon as your ad goes live, you start receiving traffic, which can be tracked through Google Analytics and Google Ads dashboard
• Measurable performance: Google Ads provides you with detailed analytics, including attribution, sales and conversion tracking, and traffic statistics. Metrics like cost per conversion, ROAS, etc are automatically calculated and reported in Google Ads (provided you’ve set up things correctly)
• Flexible ad formats: Google Ads offer a wide range of campaign types and numerous ad formats. You can choose from search text ads, display banner ads, videos on YouTube, shopping ads, and more. Each one has its own wide range of formats that make it easy to connect with your target audience in a format that suits you and your potential customer
• Local assets and features: Google Ads provides multiple ‘local business-friendly' ad assets such as call, location, and review assets. These assets make your ad prominent in the search results page (SERP), leading to high engagement and CTR.

7 Best Practices Local Businesses Should Follow on Google Ads

If you are getting started with Google Ads for local businesses, these best practices will help you get the most from your campaigns and Google Ads account:

1. Connect your Google Business profile

Connecting your Google Business Profile to Google Ads is a must.

If your a local business and don’t have a Google Business Profile, go and set that up.

It is essential for locally focused ads as Google pulls data from your business profile to show in Maps listings, such as the business name, location, address, service phone number, reviews, etc.

Research shows that 42% of local searchers click into map pack results, which highlights the importance of connecting your Business Profile with your ads account.

You can then connect your Business Profile from the Assets tab during campaign creation.

2. Use Location Targeting to Only Target your Local Customers

The best way to use Google Ads for local businesses is to use specific location targeting to reach your ideal customers.

For example, if you have local craft beer delivery business, you might only want to delivery to towns 20km from your business.

Specific location targeting will help control ad costs, as you won’t receive clicks and orders from people who live outside your coverage area.

Ultimately, optimising your location targeting (and exclusions) will improve conversion rate, lower cost per lead, increase ROAS, and reduces budget wastage.

3. Optimise Ad Copy with Local Keywords

A simple but highly effective rule to improve the CTR and conversion rate of your locally focused ads is to use ‘local’ keywords in the ad copy.

It provides you with two distinct benefits:

1. You can target the right search intent as more than half of Google searches have a local search intent
2. You can filter invalid clicks which helps you save cost.

Here’s an example of a Responsive Search ad (RSA) with local/regional keywords in the ad copy:

4. Utilise Ad Assets (Extensions)

Ad Assets (used to be called ‘Extensions’) are an important part in the background of a locally focused Google Ads campaign.

They’ll make your ad prominent, visually pleasing and more relevant. They’re directly correlated with CTR improvements too.

Here’s an example of various Assets used in Responsive Search ads:

You can see that these 3 ads offer a lot of additional information to the user. We can see Call Outs, Sitelinks, Seller Rating and Image assets.

All of these can (and should!) be set up at the Campaign and Adgroup level in your account.

5. Schedule ads to run during business hours

Keep in mind that your ads will run throughout the day, 24/7 by default, which means your ads might trigger when your business is closed.

Use the Ad schedule setting under your Campaign settings to set days and times when you want your ads to run:

You can add customised times for each day of the week based on your store’s timing.

Tip: If you have a Call asset running, you can control when this is visible to users, in case you’re away from the office and can’t take calls, but still want to run ads and drive users to your site.

6. Enable call tracking

Call tracking lets you track conversions generated by Call assets. The calls from ads are diverted to Google’s call forwarding number which tracks call conversions.

You can enable call reporting in account settings from your Google Ads account:

Calls are counted as conversions based on call length. You can set the call duration setting in seconds to count it as a conversion.

Tip: Setting the call duration to 3+ minutes will improve the conversion data you feed into Google. If you set it to 10 seconds, you might end up tracking wrong numbers, people calling for directions etc.

There are loads of third-party call tracking tools which are much more robust than what Google offers, and come with a range of features, reporting and in-platform analytics.

7. Track your conversions!

This isn’t just applicable to local businesses running Google Ads, but to everyone! Tracking conversions is critical when it comes to understanding the ROI that the channel provides.

Deciding on which conversions to track is specific to your business.

Here are a few examples of conversion actions you might want to track:

• Calls directly from ads
• Calls from your website
• Website form submissions
• Email clicks
• PDF downloads

You can enable conversions from your account settings under Conversions:

You can adjust all your conversion settings, ranging from view-through conversions to engaged-view conversions and more.