Google Ads management in Hamilton.

Hamilton is the largest paid search market within an hour of our office, and the one where a carelessly targeted account leaks fastest. The reason is geography. The city is not one place, and the ad platform has no idea.

One city, six search markets

Stoney Creek, Dundas, Ancaster, Waterdown, Binbrook and the lower city were separate municipalities until 2001, and a quarter of a century later people still search as though nothing happened. A homeowner in Waterdown types Waterdown. A plant manager sourcing a contractor in Stoney Creek types Stoney Creek. Aim one campaign at the city and Google serves all of them, charges a blended rate for the privilege, and gives you no clean way to see which community actually produced the work.

The cost of that shows up in the account within a fortnight. For a trade, the escarpment and the access routes decide which jobs are worth taking, so a lead from Flamborough is worth less than an identical lead from the lower city even though the click cost the same. Location bid adjustments correct that, but only once the campaign has been split finely enough for the data to exist in the first place.

We build Hamilton accounts by community. Ad copy that names the place, landing pages that match it, and bids weighted by what a job in each area is genuinely worth to you after the driving is paid for.

The setting nearly every inherited account has wrong

Google's location targeting defaults to presence or interest. In plain terms, your ad can be shown to somebody sitting in Mississauga who mentioned Hamilton in a search. For a national ecommerce brand that is useful reach. For a Hamilton contractor it is a tax.

Switch it to presence only. Exclude the places you will not drive to rather than hoping a radius sorts it out. Then read the geographic report every month, because the platform quietly widens reach again whenever it is short of volume to spend on.

Three economies, three different accounts

Hamilton carries heavy industrial, a very large trades economy, and a professional and health sector clustered around McMaster. Those buyers do not search alike and an account built for one is actively wrong for the others.

The industrial buyer searches by specification, capacity or part, usually during working hours, and the enquiry is a request for a quote on something precise. The trades buyer searches by symptom and urgency, often at night or on a weekend, and the enquiry is a phone call. The professional buyer searches by credential, compares three names, and the enquiry arrives after reading two pages.

That changes the keyword list, the ad schedule, the bid strategy and what counts as a conversion. It is also why we ask what you sell before we ask what you want to spend.

Counting the right thing

Most of the accounts handed to us are reporting conversions that are not conversions. Contact page views counted as enquiries. A thank you page that logs again every time somebody refreshes it. Calls missing entirely, which in a trades city is most of the demand. Occasionally there is no conversion tracking at all and the report runs on clicks, which tell you about traffic and nothing about revenue.

That is not a small reporting flaw. The bidding algorithm optimizes towards whatever you tell it success looks like, so a broken conversion action does not just mislead you, it actively steers the budget at the wrong people. We rebuild it before launch rather than after, with form submissions recorded server side, website and ad calls tracked separately, and the source attached to each enquiry so you can trace a job back to the page that caused it.

Performance Max, kept honest

Google's automation does some things better than a person can. Bidding is one. It adjusts for device, hour, location and intent signal thousands of times a day, and once it has clean data it beats manual bidding on most accounts.

Performance Max is the part that needs supervision. In a market with Hamilton's volume it will find reach quickly, and a good share of that reach is your own brand name, which it will claim credit for. It also wanders into display and video placements that convert on the dashboard and never on the phone. Brand exclusions, a disciplined negative list, deliberately built asset groups and a weekly look at the search terms are the difference between a campaign that adds demand and one that charges you for demand you already had.

Auto-applied recommendations come off immediately. Google adding keywords on your behalf is not the same as Google adding keywords that suit your margin.

Whether the numbers work at all

Before the structure, the arithmetic. Take your average job value, your close rate on enquiries, and the number of extra jobs you could actually service. Multiply out and you get the most you can pay for a click without going backwards.

For a company whose jobs run into five figures, paid search is almost always viable in this city even at a high cost per click, because one won job pays for a month of losing ones. For a business selling something small and one-off, the same auction is unaffordable and we will tell you so on the first call rather than three months into a retainer.

Fees, and who owns what

The fee is flat and monthly, set against what you spend and what the work involves, and written down before we touch the account. Never a slice of the budget, because an agency paid that way has a quiet interest in the budget growing whether or not growing it is right.

You pay Google for the media yourself. Everything else we create (the account, the tags, the conversion history, the audiences) is registered to your business and remains there if we stop working together, which is the part that matters on the day you decide to go elsewhere.

What the first quarter looks like

Weeks one and two are measurement and structure. Tracking rebuilt, campaigns split by community and service, landing pages checked or built, negatives loaded before a single click is paid for.

Weeks three to six are calibration. Spend is held back deliberately while the search terms report is read two or three times a week and the junk comes out. This is the period where cost per lead looks worst, and an agency that reports a triumph in week two is reporting on a sample of nothing.

Weeks seven to twelve are the real test. Enough conversions have landed for the bid strategy to work properly, the strong communities and services are visible, and the conversation turns from what is wasted to what deserves more money.

What we have built around Hamilton

AVH Foundations repairs and waterproofs foundations in Hamilton, and the site is ours. The useful detail for an advertiser is that nobody standing in a flooded basement types the name of the service. They type what they can see on the floor. In paid search that costs real money, because every symptom phrase is a separate keyword you either bid on or hand to a competitor.

McGeoch Electric works across Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville and the Waterloo Region, and Cranney Industrial sells into the aggregate and concrete sector from Brantford through Hamilton to Toronto. Residential urgency, mixed commercial, and procurement led industrial, which is three completely different briefs.

All three are live. Open them from our work page, then tell us what a job is worth to you and we will tell you whether ads make sense. If you would rather begin with a question, the contact form comes straight to us.