Guide
How local search advertising works, what it costs, and what the first week looks like — from the agency that runs the accounts.
Someone standing two blocks from your door searches "pizza near me" or "physio open now" and chooses from the first few results on the screen. That person is not browsing, they are deciding, and they can act within the next ten minutes.
Google Ads is how a local business appears at that exact moment: above the regular search results, with a phone number, a map pin, and a distance the searcher can judge for themselves. Social media builds familiarity over weeks. Local search captures demand that already exists today.
A campaign is not one ad and a monthly budget. Every account we run includes the work below, and that work is the part that keeps the numbers moving.
Management is $1,000 per month, tax included, with no contracts. Ad spend is separate and stays inside your own Google Ads account, so you keep the account, its history, and its data.
We size spend around your margins and your service area rather than a flat formula, because a pizzeria and a physiotherapy clinic do not get the same value from the same click. Campaigns go live in seven days and there is no setup fee.
Day 1 to 2: a working call to agree on the offers, the service area, and what counts as a lead for your business. Day 3 to 4: keyword research, ad copy, and tracking wired into your site or booking page. Day 5: the campaign is built and reviewed with you before anything spends a dollar. Day 6: launch, deliberately on a conservative budget. Day 7: a first read on impressions, clicks, and the exact search terms that triggered your ads.
From there you get a report every week and a call whenever the numbers need a decision, rather than a monthly summary nobody acts on.
Short answers to the questions owners ask us most, written by the team that runs the accounts.
Measurement
Every call, form, and booking is tracked back to the search term that triggered the ad.
We install conversion tracking on the actions that matter to you: calls from the ad, form submissions, and Calendly bookings. Each one is attributed to the keyword and ad that produced it, so the weekly report shows leads and cost per lead rather than impressions. If an action cannot be measured, we say so before spending on it.
Timeline
Expect the first calls within two weeks, and a clear cost per lead by day 30.
Search campaigns go live in seven days, and most local accounts see their first calls or bookings within the first two weeks. The first 30 days are about gathering data: which search terms convert, which hours produce the best leads, and what a lead costs. After that we optimise against cost per lead rather than clicks.
Local search
No. A Google Business Profile and a booking page can be enough.
A website helps, but it is not a requirement. Many local businesses run profitable search campaigns pointing at a Google Business Profile, an online menu, or a booking page. What matters is that the destination loads fast on a phone, states the offer clearly, and makes the next step obvious. If your current page loses people, we fix that before adding budget.
Budget
Most single-location campaigns start between $15 and $40 per day in ad spend.
For a single-location business in Ottawa, useful data usually starts around $15 to $40 per day of ad spend, on top of the $1,000 monthly management fee. The right number depends on your margins and how many competitors bid on your keywords: a pizzeria competing with delivery apps needs less per click than a law firm. We set the budget with you, review it after the first two weeks, and change it in steps rather than swings.