Google Ads Cork

The first leak is geography. Cork is the largest county in the country and one campaign cannot cover it sensibly. A gutter cleaner in Carrigaline buying €7.78 clicks has no use for calls out of Skibbereen, and a Bandon firm bidding on the city term is paying for people who were never going to ring it. Target the county as one block and you buy city prices for rural work and rural budgets for city searches.

The second is match type. A broad match keyword takes any search Google considers related, and related covers an enormous amount of ground. A hotel bidding at €1.21 finishes the month having paid for jobs pages, wedding blogs and people after a place with the same name in another county. Nothing on the invoice separates those from the enquiries.

The third is the page at the end of the click. Send somebody who cost €2.04 to a home page and you have asked a stranger to go hunting for the thing they already typed. Most of them leave. On a €9.65 financial advisor click, that one decision decides whether the whole account pays.

The same absence sits under all three. With no conversion tracking nobody can say which leak is costing most, bidding runs on opinion, the monthly report shows clicks and impressions, and the owner decides that paid search does not work in Cork. It works here. It was never measured here.

Take the outcome first. Somebody in Midleton looks for what you sell, your advert is the first thing on the screen with your price and your number on it, and the call that follows is logged against the keyword that produced it. At the county median of €2.04, €700 a month buys around 340 of those clicks, which is enough traffic to learn something real inside six weeks.

The build starts by splitting the county up. Cork city, the towns around the harbour and the west each get their own campaigns and budgets, because they convert at different rates and cost different money to reach. Keywords then go in on phrase and exact match only, grouped so that one advert answers one search. That grouping is what earns a quality score worth having, and quality score is how a local firm pays less than a national chain for the same spot above the results.

On an account that already runs we price that gap first. Set the quality scores against the keywords taking the most impressions and two or three of them are usually carrying the spend at the worst score in the account. Hardly any owner has been shown that list, and fixing it lowers the bill before a new keyword goes near it.

Negatives come next and they get written for this county in particular. Searches carrying jobs, courses, training, free, DIY and wholesale go out before launch, along with the town names you do not serve. A jeweller paying €2.29 across 2,900 searches a month cannot afford to fund browsing, and a car hire advertiser at €2.00 cannot afford the airport traffic that belongs to somebody else.

Then conversion tracking on calls, forms and bookings, with call tracking tying each ring back to a keyword. Only after that does any automated bidding go near the account, because Smart Bidding with nothing to aim at will buy traffic and report it as a win. Shopping and Performance Max come in where a product feed exists, remarketing where the decision takes weeks, as a €9.41 solar quote always does, and anything that cannot be tied to an enquiry stays in Search where it can be watched.

Bubblehub has been on Google Partner list since 2013. The agency started that same year, and the badge has held through every change Google has made to how it awards them.

Two people founded Bubblehub and they still run it. Whoever draws up your campaign is whoever sits in the account afterwards, so you never find yourself explaining last month to somebody hearing about it for the first time.

Our charges are on the site. The monthly report works off enquiries and the search terms that drove them, because nobody ever banked a click. The reviews here came off Google, each one showing which business left it.

You can meet us on the South Mall if you would rather do this face to face, and we advertise for firms working out of Mallow, Cobh, Youghal and Macroom. Our base is County Louth. Whichever address suits, the planning and the work are done by the same hands.

You pay two bills and they behave differently. Google takes the ad spend, all of it, with nothing added on the way past. We take a published management fee for the work, and while the spend is under €6,000 a month it stays where it is whether your budget rises or falls.

The account carries your business name and your card. We go on it as a user and come off it the same way. Everything it has learned stays where it is if you go, the conversion history, the search term record, the negative list built up over a year of Cork searches. Plenty of agencies keep clients inside a manager account of their own, and the day the relationship ends the client starts again with nothing.

The whole of this stays under our own roof. Your Cork account is planned, built, written and reported on by the same team, and the people who build it are the people who answer the phone about it. Ring with a question about last Tuesday and whoever answers was in the account on Tuesday.

What the fee buys is hours in the account. Search terms gone through and negatives added, money moved between towns as they perform differently, adverts written and tested against one another, tracking repaired after a website change, and a straight answer about which keywords should stop. In a county spread this wide the geography work alone takes hours every month.

The report names each enquiry, the campaign and keyword behind it, and what it cost. It states where the budget ran out before the day did, which is the honest translation of impression share lost to budget. It never opens with impressions and it never opens with a position. A poor month is said plainly in the first line, along with why and what we are changing.

One week of the auction can put your name over everything else on a Cork search. Search work takes months to reach the same place and then costs nothing per click once it holds. Above both of them an AI answer now names businesses, chosen on evidence nobody can bid for.

Run together they cover each other. Paid search brings enquiries in while the slower work beds down, and it hands you something no keyword tool can, a list of the searches that turn into paying customers in your trade in this county. That list decides what gets written next and in what order.

None of the AI answer is for sale. It is assembled from a Business Profile with nothing missing, reviews still coming in, and pages put into sentences short enough for a machine to repeat accurately. We do that side too, and we will point you at it when it deserves the money more than the auction does.

Three situations where the auction is the wrong call. If nobody can pick up while the ads are live, pause them, because a €2.04 click that rings out is a pure loss. If your trade has no search demand behind it, no bid will manufacture any. And on a total budget of two hundred a month, one service in one town will teach you more than spreading it thin across the largest county in the country, or skip the auction and finish the profile first.

Cork’s own search volumes point at who is worth chasing. Restaurants run 14,800 searches a month at €0.31 a click, hotels 8,100 at €1.21, massage 6,600 at €0.52, hairdressers 3,600 at €0.58 and car hire 3,600 at €2.00. Taxis, jewellers, gyms, car sales and bed and breakfasts each sit close to 2,900 searches a month, priced anywhere between €0.31 and €2.29. Cheap clicks in volume, where the page and the booking step decide whether the money returns.

At the far end sit the trades where a single job pays for a season of advertising. A financial advisor pays €9.65 a click on 480 searches, solar €9.41 on 880, a mortgage broker €8.29 on 480, an insurance broker €8.01 on 210 and gutter cleaning €7.78 on 260. None of those are won by outspending anybody. They are won by blocking every search that cannot convert and by a form short enough that a person finishes it.

Solar is the trade to watch in this county. At 880 searches a month and €9.41 a click it is the dearest real demand Cork has, it runs hardest in spring, and the campaign wants building and testing in February rather than switching on in April. Heat pumps at €5.99 and hearing care at €6.56 behave the same way, small volumes where a wasted fortnight costs actual money.

Retail and hospitality need a different build again. A furniture shop at €0.46 and a nail salon at €0.33 are Shopping and local Search work, where traffic is cheap and the margin is narrow, so the daily budget matters less than whether the stock, the hours and the directions are right on the page the click lands on.

Some of it will not pay. A business with no room to take on more work should not be buying clicks. If your whole service area is one village and the searches behind it number in the tens, the auction is a poor use of the money and the Business Profile is a better one. And until you can put a figure on a year of one customer, every bid in the account is a guess, so that sum comes before any of this.