Google Ads Clare

Most Clare accounts I am handed were built one afternoon years ago and never touched again. The keywords sit on broad match, which hands Google the decision about what your ad shows for, and Google is paid by the click rather than by the enquiry. So a plumber in Ennis pays for somebody reading up on boiler warranties, and a wedding venue pays for a student’s essay. Nobody notices, because the only line anybody reads says clicks went up.

Then the map. Ennis is twenty five minutes from Limerick city and Shannon nearer again, so a radius drawn around either swallows a city with more advertisers, higher bids and customers who will never cross the water to you. The default setting worsens it, reaching people merely interested in your area as well as those standing in it. Half a Clare budget can go on Limerick before anybody checks the location report.

The third fault is the landing page, nearly always the home page. Somebody searches for one specific job, clicks an ad about that job, and lands on a page listing eight services with a form at the bottom. They leave. The click is paid for either way, and at these prices a tree surgeon has handed over €9.54 for somebody to read two lines about when the company was founded.

Then the owner who never started, who heard a figure from a cousin in another trade and decided paid search could not work here. With clicks at seven cent in some Clare trades and over seventeen euro in others, a figure heard second hand tells you nothing about your own.

Start with the result. Somebody in Ennis or Kilrush searches for the exact job you do. Your ad is the first line on the page, naming the job and the town, and the click lands on a page about that job with your number across the top. They ring. At month end you see how many rang, what each cost and which search sent it.

Getting there begins with subtraction. Search campaigns only, one per service that earns, on phrase and exact match so you pay for the words you picked. A negative keyword list that grows every week, because the cheapest improvement in any account is the search you stop buying. Location targeting set to presence rather than interest, drawn around the roads you genuinely drive, with Limerick city outside the line unless you want it inside.

Performance Max stays switched off unless there is a product feed to justify it. It hides the search terms, and in a county with these volumes that report is the one you cannot lose sight of. Shopping goes in where a Clare business sells online and the feed is clean. Remarketing goes in where the decision takes weeks, which here means wedding venues and solar.

The click prices decide the shape. A hotel click is 65 cent against 3,600 hotel searches a month here, so that account runs on volume, ad scheduling and filling the shoulder weeks. A solar installer pays €13.35 on 110 searches, so that account is a few clicks a week at the outside, every one qualified, with the price bracket said out loud in the ad to keep browsers off it.

Conversion tracking goes in before anything goes live. Calls from the ad, calls from the website, forms, and where the phone system allows it, the calls that ran long enough to be real. Quality score follows from the ad matching the search and the page matching the ad, and a better one buys the same spot for less. Impression share then shows how much demand you are missing, which is the number that decides whether the budget rises.

The Google Partner badge at the top of the screen dates from 2013, which is when the agency started trading. Google issues it, Google takes it back, and you are free to check that for yourself. We carry partner standing with Meta, Shopify and TikTok as well, which starts to matter the day a hotel here wants Instagram running beside the search.

Every fee is printed on the site, so a Clare business can work this out at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, without a discovery call built to find its ceiling.

The report counts enquiries and the searches behind them. A click has never once been a customer and an impression never paid anybody a wage. Every review you see was left on Google by a business happy to have its name sitting beside it.

Clare meetings happen on Abbey Street in Ennis, so there is a table to sit at without driving to Dublin. Head office sits in County Louth.

Two different sums leave a Clare bank account every month, and confusing them is where this usually goes wrong. One goes to Google for clicks. The other pays somebody to run it. Our management fee covers the second. The first we never touch. Google bills your own card at the price Google set, and not a cent is added on the way past.

That matters more in a small county than a large one. The fee answers to the size of the account rather than to the price of a click, so it holds where it is when the auction turns dear and holds there when you cut the budget back. Advice about your budget arrives straight because of that.

The fee buys one more thing worth stating plainly. Every Clare account is run here by our own team. Whoever builds it writes the ads, reads the search terms on a Monday and writes up what the month produced, and the same faces stay on it for as long as you keep us.

The account opens in your name, on your billing details, and stays that way. Go elsewhere next year and you take it with you, along with the conversion history, the negative keyword lists and years of search terms. Agencies that run client campaigns inside their own manager account keep every bit of that, and the next agency starts from nothing while you pay for the same lesson twice.

The report counts enquiries, cost per enquiry, and the words people typed before they got in touch. Not impressions, and not the position the ad held on a Tuesday. If a campaign is spending and not producing, that goes in the first paragraph with what is being done about it, because the polite version of that report is how accounts end up untouched for two years.

Ads put you at the top of a Clare results page this afternoon. Set a budget, the ads go live, and an enquiry can land before you close up. It stops the day the card stops. The work that earns a place in the results underneath takes months and keeps paying long after the invoices end. Two different purchases, and most Clare businesses should own both.

Above the pair of them Google now writes an answer that prints ahead of every result, with business names inside it. No budget buys a place in it. It is assembled out of what the map has read for years, a listing finished to the last field, reviews still arriving, and pages stating in plain words what you sell and where. Ads still appear above that answer, which is the practical reason the top is worth buying while the slow work takes hold underneath.

The order that usually works here is ads first, then everything else. Six weeks of paid search tells you which searches produce enquiries and what each is worth, and that list is what the pages should be written about. Guessing without the data is where the wasted year goes.

There are times to say no. If your site takes six seconds to open on a phone, fix that before buying traffic for it. If nobody answers between twelve and two, the ad schedule has to know or the money goes in the bin. And if your trade shows ten searches a month in the county, as mortgage brokers do here, a whole month of Clare demand is smaller than one day of a city budget, so the targeting goes wider or the money belongs elsewhere.

The click prices sort the county into three kinds of business, each needing an account built differently. The visitor trades are cheap to advertise and enormous. Hotels run to 3,600 searches a month at 65 cent, wedding venues 320 at 65 cent, restaurants 260 at seven cent, bed and breakfasts 90 at 83 cent. At those prices the click is nearly free and the whole job is the page it lands on. Rooms, dates, the price, the drive from the cliffs, and a booking button that works with a thumb. These accounts have a season, so the budget should climb in April and be near zero by November.

The property and home trades sit in the middle and pay back on the job. Skip hire is €2.79 a click on 140 searches a month, plumbers €1.08 on 110, tree surgeons €9.54 on 40, garage doors €4.71 and heating engineers €4.43. One job covers a fortnight of clicks, so the arithmetic is comfortable, provided the ad says what you do and the negative list keeps you clear of job adverts.

Then the small and expensive. Solar panels at €13.35, mortgage brokers at €17.29, blinds at €6.90, financial advisers at €6.00, accountants at €4.50. Ten to a hundred and ten searches a month, and a click that costs what a newspaper ad used to. These accounts live or die on the landing page, because you cannot afford to buy the same person twice over. Name the price bracket and put the qualifying question in the ad.

It suits some Clare businesses badly. Sell one thing to fifteen buyers in the country a year and paid search will not find them here, and we would tell you that instead of billing for the attempt. If your margin on a job is under fifty euro the sums do not come out. And if the phone cannot be answered the week the ads go live, wait.