Why layout matters before anything else
Google splits your money by campaign, and it learns inside each one. Put every service into a single campaign and the system will favour whichever enquiries are cheapest to win, which are rarely the jobs you most want. A tidy layout is how you tell Google what each dollar is for, so you stay in charge of the spending.
Structure also makes problems visible. When a furnace-repair campaign slumps while the heat-pump campaign thrives, you see it in a minute. When both live in one pile, the average hides everything. Think of the account as a filing cabinet: one drawer per service, one folder per type of searcher, nothing stuffed in sideways.
One campaign per service, one ad group per intent
Take a heating and cooling company in Abbotsford. Furnace work, air conditioning and heat pumps are different jobs with different margins, so each gets a campaign and a daily budget of its own. Inside a campaign, split by what the searcher is trying to do: fix something today, replace something old, or compare quotes for a big project.
Keep ad groups small, with a handful of closely related searches each. If a group needs ten unrelated headlines to cover its keywords, it is two groups. This discipline feels fussy for a week and then pays back every month, because each ad can speak directly to the phrase that triggered it.
- Campaign: furnace repair. Ad groups: no heat tonight, furnace not igniting, furnace servicing.
- Campaign: furnace replacement. Ad groups: new furnace cost, furnace installers near me, high-efficiency upgrades.
- Campaign: air conditioning. Ad groups: AC repair, AC installation, ductless systems.
- Campaign: brand. One small group for people searching your own business name.
Keywords: start tight, widen with evidence
Begin with phrase match and exact match keywords built from real customer wording, such as emergency furnace repair Abbotsford or drain cleaning Chilliwack. These show your ads for searches close to what you typed and keep the early spend predictable. Broad match can find searches you never thought of, but it needs recorded conversions to steer by.
Add negative keywords from day one, at campaign level and in a shared list for the whole account. Review the search terms report weekly while the account is young. When a new phrase brings in real enquiries, promote it to its own keyword and ad group. This is how an account grows from evidence instead of guesses.
Ads and assets that match the group
Responsive search ads let you offer Google a set of headlines and descriptions to combine. Write them from the ad group’s own searches: if people typed furnace not igniting, say so in a headline, and send them to the page about that problem, not your homepage. Pin your key message, such as your service area, so it always appears.
Add the assets that make a local business look real: a call button, your location, links to your main service pages, and short callouts about same-day visits or free quotes. Phone assets deserve extra care, because most urgent trades searches happen on a phone. Check that the number rings somewhere a person will answer.
Locations, budgets and bidding, in that order
Target the places you would drive to, not the whole province. A roofer in Mission may happily cover Abbotsford and Maple Ridge but not Hope, and a Chilliwack clinic may draw from Agassiz and Rosedale. Draw the map around your real service area and use the people-in-your-area option so those who are only curious about the region do not cost you money.
Set each campaign’s budget by the margin on its work, not by an even split. For bidding, begin with a cap on cost per click or the simplest conversion-based option, and move to cost-per-lead targets only after the account has recorded a steady run of real conversions. Automation gets smarter when the structure beneath it is clean.
Letting automation in, on your terms
Google keeps adding automated tools that widen keywords and write ad variations for you. They tend to work better on accounts with clean campaigns, honest conversion tracking and clear negatives, because those accounts give the system good signals. Build the structure first, then switch automation on one campaign at a time and compare it against the manual version before you trust it with the whole budget.
- 01Broader keyword matching tested in one campaign at a time
- 02Automatically generated headlines checked against your own wording
- 03Separate budgets protecting your most profitable services
Questions & answers
Start with one for each main service you want more work in, plus a small one for your own business name. Three or four is plenty at the beginning. Splitting into many more campaigns spreads a modest budget so thinly that none of them collects enough data to learn from.
Ideally each service has its own page, and ad groups within that service share it. The page should repeat the promise in the ad, show the phone number and make the next step obvious. Sending every click to a homepage forces visitors to hunt for what they already asked for.
Split by service first, because that is where margins and intent differ. Handle the city through location settings. Create a separate campaign for a town only when something genuinely changes there, such as a travel fee, a different offer or a different budget.
Yes, the controls are open to any business owner, and the structure above is something you can build in an afternoon. The cost is time and the weekly review that follows. If you would rather hand it over, ask for our free marketing audit and we will show you what we would change first.