Local PPC services that produce calls, not clicks

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How to buy local PPC management

1. Separate the management fee from the media. Ask for the fee and the ad budget as two figures. Some firms quote one combined number, which hides how much is actually reaching the auction. At small local budgets the fee can be a large share of the total, so you need both numbers to judge whether the arrangement makes sense.
2. Set the geography properly on day one. Location targeting is where local budgets leak fastest. Confirm the radius or the list of areas, exclude the places you will not travel to, and check that targeting is set to people in your area rather than merely interested in it. Then review the location report yourself in month one.
3. Fix the landing page before increasing spend. A paid click that lands on a generic homepage converts far worse than one landing on a page about the exact service searched for. Agree who builds the pages and whether that is inside the fee, because a manager with no page control is optimising half the account.
4. Turn on call tracking and actually listen. Local paid search mostly produces phone calls, so record and review a sample each month. Listening to ten calls tells you more about lead quality than any dashboard, and it usually reveals which terms attract enquiries you cannot serve.

What moves the price

Management fees for local accounts come in three shapes: a flat monthly fee, a share of ad spend, or a hybrid with a floor. Flat fees suit small stable budgets and are the easiest to compare. A share of spend is common above a certain budget and is worth watching at the small end, because a share of a modest budget rarely covers the hours a properly maintained account needs, which is why very cheap management often means a lightly touched account. Beyond the model, scope drives the fee: the number of campaigns and locations, whether landing pages and creative are included, and whether call tracking and reporting tools are inside the price or billed separately.

The competitive market you are in moves the media half. Click prices in trades, legal, medical and home services can be many times those in less contested categories, and no amount of management skill changes the auction. What management skill changes is how much of your spend goes to searches that could become customers. Ask any provider how they will prevent waste specifically, since the concrete answers, negative keyword lists, tight match types, location exclusions, dayparting around when your phone is answered, are the ones that mark someone who has actually run local accounts.

What to ask before you sign

Ask who owns the ad account. It should be yours, with the provider granted access, so that campaign history, conversion data and audience lists stay with you when the relationship changes. Ask who does the day to day work and how many accounts that person carries, because local accounts are frequently run by software with a monthly glance from a human. Ask for two references in your trade and in a comparable market, and ask them the only question that matters, which is whether the phone rang with the right kind of work.

Then agree what is being counted before the first click. A conversion should be an enquiry you would be pleased to receive: a call over a set duration, a completed form, a booking. Set a baseline for cost per enquiry and cost per booked job so month two can be compared against something real. Ask what the provider would pause if performance dropped, because a manager who has never paused anything is not managing, and a plan that only ever proposes more budget has stopped being advice.

Questions people actually ask

What is a sensible minimum ad budget for local paid search?

Enough to gather a readable number of clicks and conversions each month in your category, which in expensive trades means a materially higher figure than in cheap ones. If the management fee is a large share of the total, the account is unlikely to justify itself, and putting the money into your listing and website first will usually go further.

Should we run local service ads as well as search ads?

Where they are available for your trade and area, they are worth testing alongside search, since they charge by lead rather than by click and appear above standard results. They require verification of licence and insurance, so allow time for that. Compare them on cost per booked job, not on cost per lead.

How quickly should a new account start working?

Structure problems show within days and lead quality within two to three weeks at reasonable volume. Give a new account a month before judging trends, but review the search terms report in the first week, because that is where you find the money going to searches nobody should have paid for.

Do we need separate campaigns for each location?

If the locations have different service areas, different phone numbers or different opening hours, yes, because otherwise you cannot read or control them separately. For a single business serving one metro, one well structured campaign with tight geography usually beats several thin ones splitting the same budget.

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