Google Ads Wexford

Gorey is forty minutes from Arklow and a straight hour up the motorway to the edge of Dublin. Draw a lazy circle round it, leave the targeting on whatever Google hands you, and the budget spends its afternoon in a market with deeper pockets and buyers who were never going to drive south. The location report shows this in about ninety seconds, and in most accounts nobody has opened it.

Broad match finishes the job. Google gets the last word on which searches bring up your ad, and the money reaches Google on a click, never on a job won. A vet in Enniscorthy buys traffic from a student reading about a dog illness. A gym in New Ross buys traffic from a fellow pricing a rowing machine for his shed. Both look identical on the summary screen, and only one of them was ever going to become money.

The third leak is the calendar. Rosslare and Courtown businesses leave the budget flat from January to December, so February burns at July’s rate and the best weeks of the year are held back by a daily cap set in the quiet season. A tap with only one position is not much use to anybody.

Then there are the owners who never began, usually because somebody quoted them a monthly figure with no county attached to it. A restaurant in Wexford pays five cent for a click while an insurance broker pays €6.90. There is no such thing as what it costs. There is only what it costs you.

The thing being bought is plain enough. Somebody in Wexford town or Bunclody searches for the job you do. Yours is the advertisement sitting above everything, job and place written into the line, opening onto a page dealing with that job alone. The phone goes. Once the month closes the number of calls is there to read, with a price beside each and the exact wording that brought it.

It begins with what gets shut out. Search campaigns, one per service that pays, running on phrase and exact match. A negative keyword list read out of the search terms report every week and extended before the same waste repeats itself. Location targeting set to presence, so you buy people standing in the county instead of people elsewhere who once read about Hook Head.

Performance Max stays out until there is a product feed worth feeding, because it buries the search terms and that report is where the savings live. Retailers selling online get Shopping. Remarketing is kept for long decisions, solar and wedding work and anything a household argues over for a fortnight, and left out of trades where the person rings inside the hour.

The price of a click then sets the shape of everything. Skip hire is 69 cent a click on 880 searches a month, and that campaign is about catching volume cheaply then picking up the phone. A solar installer pays €11.37 on 210 searches, so that campaign is twenty or thirty good clicks a week and an ad that states a price bracket plainly to frighten off the browsers.

Tracking goes on before the first ad ever runs. Phone taps on the ad, calls placed from the website and completed forms are counted separately, and a test call proves each route registers before money moves. Quality score is Google’s mark for how well the three pieces fit together, and a high mark buys the same position for a smaller bid. Impression share then reveals how much of the county’s demand went past you, which is the figure that argues a budget up or holds it down.

Five things here can be checked without a phone call, and they are the five worth choosing on.

Partner status with Google has been held here since 2013, the year the agency opened. It is granted and reviewed by Google, which is why the badge sits in the header instead of in a sentence of our own. TikTok and Meta name us as partners, Shopify does the same, and LinkedIn has us certified, so the channels sitting beside search are covered by the same badges.

Prices are printed. Nobody in this county has to sit through a discovery call to learn a figure we could simply have published.

Reporting is a list of enquiries with a cost beside each and the search that caused it. Reviews shown on the site were all left on Google under a trading name you can open and read.

Wexford meetings take place on Crescent Quay in the town itself. Our head office is away in County Louth, a fact with no bearing on who works your account.

Google should invoice you, and that invoice should be the only money Google gets. Our fee is a separate line for the running of it. The two never get rolled into a single figure with a margin buried inside, because a number like that cannot be audited by anybody.

Our own side of it is priced by how much goes through the account, not by what the auction does to a click. At the budgets this county runs, the figure is identical when you double the spend for the summer and identical when you cut it to nothing in February.

That fee pays for something worth asking any agency about. Your Wexford account lives with our own staff. The one who draws the plan up writes the ads, moves the bids and puts a name to what lands at month end, and those people stay with you year after year.

The account belongs to you. Opened under your name, billed to your own card, handed over whole the day you want it back. That takes in the conversion figures, the negative lists assembled over years, and every search term this account has recorded. Those lists are the expensive part. An agency that keeps them inside its own manager account makes sure your next agency buys the same education twice with your money.

Reporting counts enquiries and what each one cost, with the searches responsible and a plain note of everything changed that month. Positions stay out. Impressions stay out. Where a Wexford campaign burns money and returns none, that sentence goes at the very top rather than page four, because a report that reads nicely is how accounts sit two years without a single bid being touched.

Paid search is the only part of Google you can turn up in April and turn down in November. For a business at Courtown or Rosslare that beats any clever bidding, because the spending can follow the season the business genuinely has. Earning a place in the unpaid results allows no such control. It builds over months, then keeps producing quietly for years after the last invoice clears.

Google now writes an answer above the pair of them, ahead of any result, and it puts business names in it. No budget buys a line there. It leans on whatever has settled the Wexford map these years past. A listing with no blank fields, reviews arriving steadily, and wording ordinary enough for a machine to quote a line of it undamaged. Ads are printed higher on the screen than the answer itself, and that is the everyday case for buying the top of it while the slow work grows underneath.

Run together, the ads are also your measuring instrument. Six weeks of real spending names the searches that turn into work across this county, and prices them, which is precisely the list the unpaid pages ought to be built from. Most of the money wasted on the slow work goes on guessing at it.

Some Wexford businesses should leave paid search alone this year. If a job is worth forty euro to you and a click is €9.05, no amount of account management rescues that. A website that crawls for six seconds on a phone at the harbour wants fixing before you pay anybody to look at it. And where nobody picks up between one and two, either the schedule allows for it or you are funding calls that go unanswered.

Line the click prices up against the search numbers and the county falls into three groups.

The high street runs on cheap clicks and large numbers. Restaurants are searched for 4,400 times a month at five cent, hotels 3,600 at 71 cent, taxis 2,400 at €0.89, takeaways 1,300 at 56 cent, barbers 880 at 15 cent. At prices like that the click barely registers and the whole job is what happens after it. A menu that opens in a second, a number that dials on a thumb, hours that hold up over a long weekend, and a booking link that does not demand an account first.

The service trades occupy the middle ground and earn back on a single customer. Vets take 880 searches a month at €2.05, hairdressers 1,300 at €1.00, gyms 720 at €0.98, skip hire 880 at 69 cent, furniture shops 720 at 39 cent. One new customer covers weeks of clicks, so the sums are comfortable. What hurts this band is the search that looks right and is not, so the negative list carries the weight.

Then the small and dear, which is where this county gets interesting. Solar at €11.37 on 210 searches, mortgage brokers at €9.97 on 90, hearing care at €9.59 on 50, painters and decorators at €9.05 on 30, insurance brokers at €6.90 on 140, financial advisers at €6.20 on 90, heating engineers at €5.36 on 110. Twenty clicks in a month can cost two hundred euro and win a job worth thousands. Everything here is settled by the landing page and the wording of the ad, because at those prices buying the same person on Monday and again on Thursday is money gone.

It does not suit every business down here. Where the trade runs entirely on repeat custom and word of mouth, paid search adds little. Where nobody is free to take a call during the working day, wait until somebody is. And where the margin on a job is thinner than two clicks, you will hear that before signing rather than after the first quarter.