Ads Lab
Notes from running paid channels for local service businesses: what we tried, what we measured, and what we changed.
You pay for clicks every day, and you suspect something in the account is deciding more than your budget is. Written for owners and the people who manage their search budgets, these notes record what we tried and what we changed afterward. The posts are short and specific, written for the moment something in the account looks wrong.
The notes come from running paid search for local service businesses. One looks at the ceiling on a Google Ads IP exclusion list, where we draw the line on collapsing addresses into ranges, and why one signal is never enough to block a visitor. Another covers a relaunched campaign that is enabled yet silent. A campaign, its ad groups and its ads each hold their own status, so a pause can hide in any of three places. That post includes a go-live checklist and the report that proves the campaign can serve. It also admits what we got wrong during an expansion. The IP note goes on to describe a feature we planned for turning refunds into verdicts.
We say plainly when something is our opinion, and the exclusion cap is checked against Google's own help page. Both notes are about small settings that quietly decide whether money gets spent: a list with a hard cap, and a status buried three layers deep. Neither one needed a bigger budget, only a closer look at how the account was set up.
Before you blame the ads, check the status at every layer of the campaign and keep your exclusion list under its cap. Then see how we run paid search for service businesses on our PPC management page.
Start here
Your Google Ads IP exclusion list has a ceiling
An exclusion list fills up fast if you only ever block one address at a time. Here is where we draw the line on collapsing addresses into ranges, and why we never trust a single signal.
Three places a relaunched campaign can still be paused
A relaunched campaign can read enabled and still serve nothing, because its ad groups and ads carry their own paused statuses. Here is our checklist and the report that shows what is running.
Every post in Ads Lab
Three schedules that must agree: ads, phones and your listing
Your ad schedule, your phone hours and your listing hours should say the same thing. Here is a five minute check, and what a one hour gap costs.
Your Google Ads IP exclusion list has a ceiling
An exclusion list fills up fast if you only ever block one address at a time. Here is where we draw the line on collapsing addresses into ranges, and why we never trust a single signal.
Three places a relaunched campaign can still be paused
A relaunched campaign can read enabled and still serve nothing, because its ad groups and ads carry their own paused statuses. Here is our checklist and the report that shows what is running.
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