10 Tips for Winning at Local PPC

Local PPC is very important to me: helping community members profit by contributing to their community is both satisfying and scalable.

From small and medium-sized businesses driving sales in their own shops, to national brands steering a trend somewhere local, and everything in between, there are clearly right and wrong ways to leverage your PPC budget.

Here are my top 10 ways to win at local PPC.

1. Declare your local listings!

Google My Business (GMB) has come a long way over the years.

Leaving your brand’s local listings open to the disgruntled and thus wreaking havoc on your brand is not only bad branding, but it can also cost you a powerful SEO/PPC marketing channel.

GMB allows you to:

GMB data helps inform ad placements and provide reviews.

Unfortunately, GMB does require a physical address (no P.O. Box) – some businesses choose to use their home address or main office, while others forgo GMB.

To declare your location, request a postcard with a unique code (usually arrives within 10-15 days).

It is worth noting that Microsoft Advertising does not require that the declared listings contain location extensions.

2. Setting up campaigns based on location and service

Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, but the structural choices ultimately boil down to the following:

Are all of your service areas the same?
Are there distinct market metrics that require more control over budget allocation?
If the different areas you serve represent very different market opportunities (due to affluence, demand, and other factors), you will need to base your campaigns around the local market and group your ads as your service.

If you offer services that represent very different margins, volumes, and other factors that affect your ability to serve your customers, then you need to run service-focused campaigns.

Ad groups are a different way of appealing to these services/allowing you to stratify your audience segments in order to place ad copy. In this case, all locations would be centralised into one ad campaign.

A major determining factor is whether you claim GMB for each location (and whether you can claim one GMB per location).

As mentioned earlier, GMB opens up additional locations for ads to be displayed, expanded, and ways to interact with your audience.

You can’t tell Google which locations to serve in, so ideally there would only be one GMB listing per campaign.

3. Include local insider knowledge in your creative

This may seem obvious, but it’s painfully obvious that very few businesses are able to capitalise on their authentic local relationships and knowledge.

Which of these two adverts do you think works better:

Whilst the second advert has ‘personality’, it does not clearly express local intent. In addition, the location extension also makes a difference (Boston vs. Lynn).

The first advert may be ‘boring’, but it clearly states that it is a ‘Boston’ business.

By embedding real ‘local’ knowledge in an advert, businesses can take the edge off a tired viewer and turn them into an excited prospect.

Here are some examples of what we’ve used with great success:

4. Location targeting by profit centre

Not all locations have the same value. Confusing real value with perceived value is a dangerous and wasteful path.

Every location bids differently. While it’s true that not every location will be vastly different, many locations will be $2-3 higher/lower per click according to WordStream’s latest Google Ads Benchmark report. (Disclosure: I work for WordStream.)

Google Benchmark

While some fluctuating prices won’t hurt a campaign, large differences in large-scale auction prices (think hundreds/thousands of clicks) will start to impact you and Google/Microsoft/Facebook.

Budget wants a job, which means that combining a location that represents high value (and higher average cost per click) with another location that represents a quantity but lower quality of leads (and potentially lower average cost per click) can result in a loss of display share.

Not every location is worth the budget it receives (either because it already has a steady stream of customers and can no longer support them, or because the price of the lead is out of line with the conversion rate/profit centre).

Sometimes it makes more sense to combine geographically close locations and run a single strong campaign.

There is also value in combining locations into different profit tiers (high, medium and low) so that you can budget for the value of each market.

Taking this approach means that you can’t guarantee that your budget will reach the specified locations, but it does mean that your campaigns will work better.

5. Localised landing pages

Potential customers are willing to give local SMEs a degree of implicit trust, and national brands have to work hard (and actively invest) to achieve this.

Don’t lose it on the landing page!

Ultimately, landing pages/websites are essentially virtual shops, and prospects want to feel just as at home in your virtual shop as they do when they visit your shop in person.

Landing pages always need to check the following boxes:

Local landing pages should consider the following:

When building your website, you must decide whether you want to build a single site with pages for each location or one domain for each location.

It can be tempting to use a localised domain name, but be aware of what you’re giving up:

That said, if you choose a single domain name, you will need to give up the following:

6. including search partners

A long time ago, when SERPs had a right-hand side, exact meant precise, and adverts were 70-character haikus, search partners were purged from accounts.

Who would want their ads to appear in onsite search results?

Today, search partners get even more interesting:

Excluding search partners hurts your local business. Yes, the aggregated metrics may look ‘bad’, but your quality score won’t be negatively impacted by a loss of CTR.

By turning on location extensions (from your GMB listings), you can unlock all of these benefits.

7. Ability to audit new business by location

Google and Microsoft Ads need data to drive their algorithms – which means campaigns need to run most of the time (even with low budgets/schedules).

An important question to consider when deciding to utilise PPC for your local business is ‘how many new customers are you currently acquiring and how much can this number grow to?’

Different locations have different capacities for growth, so it’s important to be honest with yourself about your true potential and desired results.

Assessing capacity starts with whether you are a contractor business or a local shop with a fixed number of people to serve (depending on physical space and staff).

8. Choose your competitors carefully

Depending on your industry and location, there may be more competitors than are worthy of your active attention.

When you choose to include competitors in your competitor activity/tracking auction insights, be sure to consider the following:

It can be tempting to exclude or go after all competitors, but this can lead to budget issues.

If you exclude all competitors, you end up missing out on potentially valuable SERPs.

If you aggressively target all of them, only a few will get budget and the rest will drag down the quality of the campaign.

Instead, select 5-7 competitors that you know are equal threats and opportunities for your business.

Create an ad group for each competitor and set those competitors as negatives elsewhere in the campaign.

By taking this approach, you can ensure that your campaign budget can support the competitors you’ve chosen and that you can profit from the strategy, rather than having your general service campaigns dragged down by lower click-through and conversion rates.

Each competitor gets an ad group because you want to be able to craft specific messages about why you’re better. (Important note: you won’t be disparaging your competitors, just highlighting the specific benefits your customers will receive by choosing your product).

These campaigns are perfect for ad group level expansion because you need to highlight the specific value of your competitors.

9. Invite community members to share your space and create social moments

This may seem like more of a ‘social’ technique, but a big part of PPC success is bidding on offers.

While some businesses will invest unlimited amounts of money in creating demand and brand affinity, there’s a lot of value in getting people to talk about your brand naturally.

By becoming a community hub, you not only provide a service (industry knowledge, hosting events, etc.) but you also create:

These events are perfect for YouTube Live or Facebook Live. this content can then be converted into YouTube display placements to help communicate to your market why you are so great/they need you.

You can also layer special audience segments in your search campaigns based on users who have watched the video/ad/subscribed to your channel.

10. Budgeting your bottom line

The worst mistake most local businesses make is to create budgets that don’t support their activities.

We’ve discussed prioritisation before, and this is the most important application: only run campaigns for products/services that have the potential for positive ROI.

Ideally, each campaign should be able to accommodate at least 10 clicks per day (a 10% conversion rate is really good for non-branded search).

If you set your search budget/campaign structure with a display share of less than 30%, then the entire effort is likely to be wasted because you’re not securing enough potential displays, getting enough clicks, and getting enough conversions.

Whether you prefer phone leads or form fills will greatly affect budget requirements. If you only value phone calls, you can opt for call-only campaigns.

Call-only campaigns are much more expensive than traditional search campaigns because you are selecting only mobile SERPs (which require aggressive bidding).

If you’re on a budget, I’ve found that adding call extensions and selecting search partners that use MB Sync drives are equally valuable and overpriced.

In either case, you’ll need to use bid adjustments to direct your budget to or from the devices, locations, and times that work best for your business.

Automated bidding can do this for you, but at the local level, machine learning may not scale well enough to outperform your business acumen.

If you do opt for smart bidding, make sure your budget is 15-20 per cent more than you would normally have to build a dataset and adhere to a learning period.