Google Ads and PPC management in New York City

Pay per click means what it says. Your ad shows when someone searches for what you sell, and you pay when that person clicks. It is the quickest way to reach people who are ready to call, and the quickest way to waste money, because a wrong click is billed the same as a right one. Our job is to buy the right clicks, count what they turn into and show you the count every month.

Advernation was started on New Year’s Eve 2007 in Flushing, Queens, by Christopher Maddaloni, a former electrician, and has been in Manhattan since 2016. He describes the work as serving the businesses he once worked for: trades and local companies that live on the phone ringing.

How Google Ads decides which ad shows and what a click costs

Google runs an auction every time someone searches, and the top place does not simply go to the highest bidder. Google’s help pages say that Ad Rank, the set of values that decides whether an ad is eligible to show and where, is worked out from six things: your bid, the quality of your ads and landing page, the minimum thresholds an ad has to reach, how competitive that auction is, the context of the person’s search, and the expected impact of your ad assets and other formats.

Two lines on the same page matter to a budget. What you actually pay for a click is often less than the maximum you set, and higher quality ads can often lead to lower costs per click. That is why two businesses on the same block can pay different prices for the same search.

Google also shows a Quality Score for each keyword, from 1 to 10, built from expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google is plain that the score is a diagnostic tool and not itself an input in the auction. We read it the way an electrician reads a meter: it shows whether the ad, the keyword or the page is where the fault is.

You control the spend with an average daily budget for each campaign. Google may spend up to twice that figure on a busy day, and by the end of the month it will have charged no more than 30.4 times the daily budget. A $50 daily budget is at most $1,520 in a month.

What we manage

Paid advertising is several different products, and each one does a different job. Here is what each is for, what we do in it and what a plan starts at.

Every plan below includes call tracking and recording, conversion optimization based on your goals, ad writing, ongoing performance reviews and custom reporting. What differs from one to the next is where the ad appears and who sees it.

Search engine advertising

Search ads are the text ads on a results page. They reach people at the moment they are looking for your product or service, on Google and, through Microsoft Advertising, on Bing. If you have no patience to wait for SEO and want action, this is the option that acts now.

The work is in the keywords. Google matches a keyword to searches in three ways: broad match shows your ad on searches related to the keyword, phrase match on searches that include its meaning, and exact match on searches with the same meaning or intent. Negative keywords do the opposite and exclude search terms from a campaign. An electrician who is not hiring adds jobs, salary and apprenticeship as negatives and stops paying for those clicks.

The ads are responsive search ads: we write up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for each, and Google tests the combinations and learns which perform best.

A search plan adds ad placement on Google or on Microsoft’s network, keyword research and custom keyword lists, daily monitoring, split testing of the ad copy, and both web and mobile search ads. Search advertising plans start at $500 per cycle.

Display advertising

Display ads are the banner and text ads people see while they read, watch and browse. They reach people who are not on a search engine looking for you. Google says its Display campaigns can reach people across 35 million websites and apps and on its own properties, such as YouTube and Gmail.

Display is for getting your name and your website address in front of the right people on related sites, and keeping it there. You control which kinds of sites and which audiences see the ad. It does its best work beside search advertising: search catches the person who is looking today, and display builds the recognition that makes them pick your ad when they do look.

A display plan covers reach across websites, apps, ad networks and ad exchanges, on desktop and on mobile devices. Banners and graphics are made for an extra fee. Display advertising plans start at $500 per cycle.

Re-targeting and remarketing

Re-targeting shows ads to people who have already been to your website. Somebody read your service page, was on the fence and left without calling. Afterward your ad appears on the sites and apps they use, so that yours is the name they remember when they decide.

Google used to call this remarketing and now calls the audiences your data segments. The same lists work on search, where they let us bid on keywords we would not normally bid on, only for people who visited your site recently. One limit is worth knowing first: Google requires a list to hold at least 1,000 cookies before it can be used to tailor search ads, so a small local site may not have the traffic for search re-targeting at the start. We check your numbers before we recommend it.

A re-targeting plan covers easy integration with your website, reach across top websites, networks and exchanges, mobile ads and landing page optimization. Re-targeting plans start at $400 per cycle.

Mobile app advertising

Mobile app advertising puts your ad inside the apps people use on their phones and shows it to people who are within a set distance of your store or location. It is for brick and mortar businesses that want foot traffic: the ad carries your business details and a call to action, and it reaches someone who is already nearby.

On Google the distance is set with radius targeting. Google requires a radius of at least 1 kilometer and warns that a small radius may show ads only now and then, or not at all. We draw the circle around your neighborhood and not around the borough.

A mobile app advertising plan covers reach across mobile apps, including premium and specialty apps, GPS targeting of nearby customers with ads shown by real-time distance from your business, ads that show your business details with a call to action, mobile call tracking and a digital marketing team manager. Mobile app advertising plans start at $500 per cycle.

Local Services Ads

Local Services Ads are Google’s pay per lead ads for local service businesses, and for most trades they are the first paid product to set up. They are shown prominently in search results when someone looks for a service you offer in an area you chose. You do not pay for clicks. In Google’s words, you only pay when a customer gets in touch from your ad.

Google defines what counts as a lead. Its examples of valid leads include a phone call you answer or return, a missed call during your business hours where the customer stays on the line for more than 20 seconds, a message, a voicemail and a booking request. Charged leads are reassessed and may be credited back automatically if Google later judges them low quality.

The ads carry the Google Verified badge, which Google describes as a single badge for all Local Services advertisers. As part of that change Google discontinued the Money Back Guarantee that went with the older Google Guarantee badge. To earn the badge a business passes Google’s screening, which may include background, business registration, insurance and license checks.

Position is not bought with the bid alone. Google ranks these ads in an auction that takes into account the bid and the quality of the profile: your rating, your number of reviews, your average response time, your photos and the verification checks you have completed. Missed calls count against you. So managing these ads is less about keywords and more about the business itself: reviews, answering the phone, and keeping the profile, the hours and the service areas right.

Google is also moving Local Services Ads into the main Google Ads platform, as a Performance Max campaign type built for pay per lead goals. It is doing so in phases, by kind of business and by country, and select home service advertisers in the United States, such as plumbing, HVAC and electrical, were in the first phase. You still pay for valid leads and not for clicks, but setting a maximum cost per lead by hand is no longer supported. If your account has moved, we go through the settings Google carried over.

Shopping, video and Performance Max

We also run shopping ads, which are product listings for retailers, video ads on YouTube, and Performance Max, a goal-based campaign type that reaches all of Google’s inventory from one campaign, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps. Performance Max leaves most decisions to Google’s automation, so it needs accurate conversion tracking and somebody reading the results.

Microsoft Advertising

Microsoft Advertising runs search ads on Bing. It can import campaigns directly from Google Ads, everything or only the campaigns you select, and keep them in step with recurring imports. We learn your objectives, create the account and keep optimizing it on its own results. We do not set it and forget it.

Facebook and Instagram ads

Paid social is bought differently. Nobody is searching, so the ad has to find the person, not the other way round. We run Facebook and Instagram campaigns as part of our social media marketing service, and that page explains how Meta’s ad auction and its lead forms work. For how the paid channels fit together, see our advertising agency NYC page.

Which campaign to start with

Start where the customer already is. For a business people search for when they need it, that is search ads or Local Services Ads. The rest come second.

Campaign	Who sees it	Good for	Its limit
Search ads	People searching for what you sell, on Google or Bing	Calls and requests now	Every click costs money, right or wrong, so the keyword list has to be kept clean
Local Services Ads	People searching for a local service in the areas you chose	Trades and local services: you pay per valid lead, not per click	Screening comes first, and position depends on reviews and on how fast you answer
Display ads	People browsing websites, apps, YouTube and Gmail	Getting a name seen by the right audience	They were not looking for you, so it does not convert like search
Re-targeting	People who have already visited your website	Bringing back the visitor who did not call	Needs enough visitors to build a list
Mobile app advertising	People near your location, inside the apps they use	Foot traffic for a shop or a storefront	A radius of at least 1 kilometer on Google, and small areas can run thin

What we do, month by month

The first month

• Analysis. We look at the account you have, or at the market if you have none: what people search for, what competitors run and which searches carry the intent to buy. We agree with you what counts as a result.
• Tracking. Conversion tracking goes in before the first ad runs. Google lets us count purchases, sign-ups and phone calls, and for calls we set a minimum length, so that a wrong number is not counted as a lead.
• Build. Campaigns by service and by area, keyword lists and negative keyword lists, the ads, and landing pages that say what the ad said.
• Launch. Most ads are reviewed by Google within one business day. Then the data starts coming in.

Every day

We work on your ad management every day. Somebody looks at the spend, the search terms and anything that has stopped running, and fixes it before it costs you a week of budget.

Every month

• The search terms people actually typed are read through. The wasteful ones become negative keywords and the good ones become keywords.
• Ad tests are settled: the versions that win stay and the ones that lose are rewritten.
• Bids, budgets and landing pages are changed toward the campaigns, hours and areas that produce calls and sales.
• You get the report, with what we will keep working on and where we think the account should pivot.

What PPC management costs

Our PPC plans start at $500 per cycle for search, display and mobile app advertising, and at $400 per cycle for re-targeting. A cycle is one test of a campaign, and you set its length: a day, a week or a month. Banners and graphics for display campaigns are an extra fee. Your quote states the length of the cycle, what the plan covers, and which part is our fee and which part pays Google for the ads.

That last point is not a courtesy. Google’s rules for agencies say a management fee charged separately from the cost of the ads must be disclosed in writing before the first purchase and shown on every invoice.

Two more things about price. There are no contracts. And what a click costs is not ours to set: it comes out of the auction described above, so a search that many New York businesses want costs more than one that few do. How agencies usually charge for this work is in our guide to Google Ads management pricing, and prices for our other services are on the pricing page.

Your account and your data stay yours

Before you hire any agency, ours included, know what Google requires of all of us:

• A separate Google Ads account for each business the agency manages. Your campaigns are not mixed into anybody else’s.
• At a minimum, your right to know the number of clicks, the number of impressions and the total cost of your Google ads, with the exact amount Google charged shown apart from the agency’s fees.
• Your account’s customer ID whenever you ask for it.

Hold us to all three. An agency that will not show you the account is telling you what its reporting will be like.

How long it takes

Ads can be running within days: most ads are reviewed by Google within one business day, and the first clicks follow. What takes longer is knowing what works. The first weeks buy data: which searches turn into calls, which ads get chosen, which hours and which neighborhoods pay. We do not promise a cost per lead before the first click, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

PPC and SEO run on different clocks. Ads stop the day the budget stops. SEO takes months to build and keeps working afterward. We usually recommend both, and our guide to SEO and PPC sets the two side by side.

What we need from you

• Access to your Google Ads account, if you have one. If you do not, we create one for your business.
• Access to your website, or to whoever maintains it, so that the tracking and the landing pages can go in.
• The services you want more of, the ones you do not want, and the areas you serve, down to the ZIP code.
• What a new customer is worth to you. It decides what a lead may cost.
• Someone who answers the phone. A call that rings out was paid for like any other.
• A monthly ad budget you are comfortable with.

How results are reported

You get a report every month. It shows the paid traffic, the conversions that matter, such as phone calls and lead submissions, and the keywords and ads that produced them. Calls are tracked and recorded, so a lead in the report is a call you can listen to. The report is there to help both of us decide which areas to keep working on and which direction to pivot to. If you want to look for yourself between reports, ask us for access to the account.

PPC for a New York City business

New York is five boroughs, and very few local businesses serve all of it. The first job in a New York account is to stop paying for clicks from places you will never drive to. Google lets us aim a campaign at a borough, a list of ZIP codes or a radius around your address, so the budget goes where your trucks or your customers are.

The second job is the phone. Someone searching for an emergency electrician or plumber is usually holding a phone and wants to call somebody now. For trades we build the account around calls: call assets on the ads, call tracking behind them, and Local Services Ads beside the search ads.

For the unpaid side of local search, see local SEO. Our pages for each trade cover what its customers search for.

Results from accounts we have run

Different Roads to Learning came to us unhappy with the agency managing its PPC. We took over its Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and SEO and redid the entire PPC campaign around the searches that drive sales, with negative keyword lists and location extensions. Within three months its organic traffic had doubled.

For Silver Gold Refinery, a client since 2008, we built the website and ran local SEO, SEO and PPC together, and it reached first place for “Gold Refinery NYC”. For Medlin Ramps, a website redesign with SEO, PPC, social media and YouTube took the business from very few leads a day in 2016 to 3 to 10 a day. All of our studies are on the case studies page.

Questions people ask