The auction in plain language
When someone searches "emergency plumber Hackney," Google scans every ad campaign that's told it to show for that search. For each candidate, it calculates a score that combines three things: how much you've offered to bid, how relevant your ad is to the search and how good Google thinks the experience will be when the searcher clicks. Multiply those together, sort the candidates by the result and the top ones are shown. The actual amount you pay is usually less than your bid - just enough to beat the next advertiser down the list.
This means a small business doesn't have to be the highest bidder to win. A plumber whose ad says "Hackney plumbers, same-day callout" with a landing page that says exactly the same thing will beat a national chain whose ad says "Premier plumbing services across the United Kingdom" with a homepage that doesn't mention Hackney. The chain might be bidding twice as much. The small business wins because its score is twice as good.
The three pieces of the relevance score
Google calls the relevance score "quality score" and shows it on a one-to-ten scale per keyword. It's made of three components and each one is a thing you can directly improve.
- Expected click-through rate: how likely the platform thinks people are to click your ad when it's shown
- Ad relevance: how closely your ad text matches the keyword and the search
- Landing page experience: how relevant, clear and quick the page on the other end of the click is
Notice that two of the three are about copy and one is about the landing page. The bid is upstream of the auction. The score is what you can move once you're in it. A small business that gets the keyword, the ad and the landing page lined up around the same specific phrase typically lifts its quality scores from threes and fours to sevens and eights, which roughly halves the cost per click for the same position. That's the largest free improvement available in the platform.
Where Google's defaults work against a small business
Three defaults are quietly expensive on small accounts. First, broad match - the keyword matching mode that lets the platform show your ad on searches that share a theme with your keyword rather than the words themselves. On a national budget with a strong negative-keyword list, broad match can work. On a small budget without one, it spends most of the money on irrelevant searches. Chapter three covers the fix.
Second, automatic bid strategies that need conversion data to work. The platform will offer to optimise for conversions, target a cost per acquisition or maximise conversion value. All of these depend on having at least thirty conversions a month for the algorithm to learn from. Below that threshold, automated bidding bids randomly and burns budget. Manual cost-per-click bidding is slower to set up and almost always more efficient on a small account in its first quarter. Chapter five covers when to switch.
Third, smart campaigns - the simplified campaign type Google pushes hard for new advertisers. They hide the keywords, hide the search terms and run on broad-match equivalents with automated bidding. Everything that makes a small account work happens behind a curtain you can't open. Don't use them. Use a standard search campaign even if it takes an extra hour to set up. The visibility is worth it.
Account structure for a small business
A small business Google Ads account should be small. One campaign per offer. Three to five ad groups inside it, each tightly themed around one cluster of related searches. Five to ten keywords per ad group. Two ads per ad group. That's it. Most small accounts we audit have ten times the structure they need, with overlapping keywords across ad groups and the same searches being bid on multiple times. The simplification we recommend below isn't poverty - it's discipline. A focused account with twenty keywords routinely outperforms a sprawling account with two hundred on the same budget.
What to do this week
Sketch the account structure on paper before you open the platform. Write down the one offer you'll advertise. Underneath it, write three to five tightly themed clusters of searches a customer might use. Inside each cluster, list five to ten specific phrases. Two ads per cluster. That's the account. Walking in with this on paper saves an evening of getting lost in the platform's setup wizards, which are designed for businesses with more time and money than yours.
In the next chapter we work out which phrases actually go in those clusters, using how customers actually search rather than how you'd describe the work. The earlier eBook Search Ranking covers the wider keyword research habit and is worth a re-read alongside this.
