Local PPC: how to run Google Ads for a local business

The most important local setting is also one of the easiest to overlook. Google lets you target countries, areas within a country, and a radius around a location. For a local business, that usually means a list of cities or ZIP codes you serve, or a radius around your address.

A few rules from Google's location targeting help page are worth knowing before you choose:

• A radius has to be at least 1 km around a location.
• If you target a very small radius or area, Google warns your ads might only show intermittently or not at all.
• There are two broad options for who counts as "in" your area. "Presence or Interest" reaches people in your locations and people who have shown interest in them. "Presence" is narrower.

Google recommends broad targeting as a best practice on Search, but it also says to consider "Presence" when you only want to target users in specific locations. For a plumber, a dentist or a restaurant, that is often the right call, because someone researching your city from another state may never become a customer.

Every search runs an auction, and Google ranks ads by something it calls Ad Rank. Google lists six factors behind Ad Rank: your bid, the quality of your ads and landing page, the minimum thresholds an ad must meet, how competitive the auction is, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your ad assets.

The context factor matters a lot for local PPC advertising. Google says that when calculating Ad Rank it looks at the search terms, the person's location at the time of the search, their device and the time of the search, among other signals.

The quality factor is the one most local businesses can improve fastest. Google says higher quality ads can often lead to lower CPCs, which means you pay less per click when your ads are more useful.

Google sums up its view of your ad quality in Quality Score, reported on a 1 to 10 scale. Its three components are expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. One detail surprises people: Google says Quality Score is an aggregated estimate and isn't used at auction time to determine Ad Rank. Treat it as a diagnostic, not a lever.

Google rates each component as above average, average or below average. If one says "below average," fix that one thing. Google defines ad relevance as how closely your ad matches the intent behind a search, and landing page experience as how relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click. Sending every click to your homepage, instead of a page about the service they searched for, can drag both down.

Google Ads uses an average daily budget for each campaign. Google explains that actual spend on a given day can exceed your average daily budget by up to 2 times, which it calls overdelivery. Over a month, though, you won't be charged more than your monthly charging limit: the average number of days in a month, 30.4, times your daily budget.

Google's own example: a $10 daily budget means a maximum of $304 for the month, even if some days run up to $20. Plan your budget around the monthly number, and don't panic when one busy day spends more than you expected.

Google suggests choosing an automated bidding strategy based on what you want. If you want leads, calls or bookings, Google points to its conversion strategies, including Target CPA, which set bids automatically to get more conversions. If you mainly want website visits, Google's clicks strategy focuses on getting more clicks while spending a target amount.

For most local businesses, conversions are the goal. Track them before you rely on these strategies, so the bidding has real results to aim at.

Local searchers want to know three things fast: can you help, are you close and how do they reach you. Ad assets help answer that. Google describes assets as extra information such as a phone number, or more links to specific pages on your site, and it estimates how they will affect performance when it calculates Ad Rank.

1. Set location targeting to the area you actually serve, and consider "Presence."
2. Build one ad group per service, each with its own landing page.
3. Add a call asset and links to your most useful pages.
4. Set up conversion tracking before you scale.
5. Check Quality Score components weekly and fix the weakest one.
6. Judge spend by the monthly limit, not by one day.

Local PPC rewards the businesses that stay specific: the right area, the right service and the right page.