What Small Businesses Benefit from Google Ads (and which don’t)?
It’s estimated that 80% of businesses running paid ads use Google Ads as one of their paid ad channels and I recommend a lot of my clients use Google Ads to grow their businesses, but getting benefit from Google Ads depends a lot on your industry.
In this post I’ll give some examples of what type of small businesses can benefit from Google Ads, and what type are less likely to get success.
Jump to your industry below:
Google Ads are effective for:
Google Ads are less effective for:
Small Businesses That Would Benefit from Using Google Ads
Before going into industry by industry, my top line takeaway is that Google Ads works best for high-margin, low-competition industries. If you charge a lot for your services/product and you don’t have many competitors in your target area, you should go read my guide on setting up Google Ads for small businesses immediately. You’re going to be extremely successful with Google Ads.
The less profit you make per service/client and the more people in your industry who are also advertising with Google Ads, the harder you’ll find it to make a profit by running Google Ads.
Now I’ll go through some examples of specific industries to go into more detail about how Google Ads can work for different industries.
Medical and Health Services (e.g. therapists)
I work with a lot of therapists and we’ve seen a lot of success together with Google Ads. Because you’re charging usually $100+ per session and each client might have 10+ sessions, you can afford to pay relatively high cost per click rates to get new clients. You might have a lot of competitors, particularly in big markets like New York and Los Angeles, but with a good setup, you can make a healthy profit, and you can see results quickly.
Google Ads let you target people in specific locations who are actively looking for therapy for specific issues, e.g. “therapy for anxiety in San Antonio”, so with the right messaging and a great landing page, you can convert new clients at a much more effective rate than running ads on Facebook or Instagram.
I’ve worked with group practices spending $100/day and getting 2-3 new leads per day, and I also work with many solo private practices spending only $10/day and getting 2-3 new clients a month that more than offsets the cost of ads.
If you’re a therapist, make sure to check out my guide to Google Ads for therapists here.
Travel and Hospitality (rental properties, tour operators)
If you run a local tour company or want to rent out a vacation property, you can see good success with Google Ads. Typically you’ll charge enough for your rental or tour service to make up for the cost of ads.
For a rental property owner, Google Ads will work best if you own the landing page yourself. Running ads to an Airbnb listing, for example, is very difficult since you don’t control the domain and can’t track the bookings and optimize your Google Ads setup. Create a simple website using something like Squarespace and set up proper conversion tracking and you should be able to make a profit from Google Ads. (Read about the best website builder for small businesses here.)
As a tour operator, you’ll need to have a really great Google Ads strategy. Your offering might have a lot of competition and your pricing might be low enough that it doesn’t make sense to pay for ads. You’ll need to take a clever approach and niche down to more long-tail, less-competitive keywords, focus on your highest-priced tours, or have a good upselling strategy to increase revenue from each customer.
For both a rental property and a tour operator, make sure you have lots of reviews from happy customers on your site, and visuals will likely be a huge selling point, so make sure your Google Ads include images. And also consider Meta Ads - with good images or video, Meta Ads could be overall better than Google Ads for you.
Professional Services (accountants, wedding photographers)
Any professional service business can have success with Google Ads, targeting people at the specific point they’re looking for your service. Some services can be prohibitively high in terms of cost per click, so make sure you’re targeting a specific, less-competitive niche if needed. Just don’t waste your ad budget on irrelevant searches.
Local Services (Plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, hair salons, restaurants)
Google Ads works great for targeting people in a specific location looking for a specific service. In some cases these might be extremely competitive and a good return on investment might be difficult to achieve. But it’s impossible. Make sure you have a robust Google Business Profile with lots of photos, customer reviews, and accurate info, and do whatever you can to present yourself as a more appealing option than your competitors.
For businesses with lower profit margins (e.g. restaurants), it might be difficult to achieve a positive return on investment directly from Google Ads. But combined with rewards programs, strong email marketing, and other methods of getting repeat business, you should be able to overall return a profit.
Small Businesses That Won’t Benefit from Using Google Ads
My one line takeaway for businesses that will struggle to have success with Google Ads is selling a cheap product or you have competitors with deep pockets.
Here’s a more specific breakdown by certain industries/products that won’t benefit from Google Ads:
Low-cost retail products
If you’re selling cheap products (low-cost makeup, gift items, etc.) the cost of Google Ads is very unlikely to net you a profit. You’re much better focused on SEO or building a social media following to get ‘free’ traffic.
Influencers
If your business is built around being an influencer or content creator doing affiliate marketing or branded partnerships, running Google Ads won’t make sense, since your target audience is on social media. Run Meta Ads or TikTok Ads to boost your presence, then build out your email list and drive traffic to your website from there.
Highly competitive markets with high CPC (insurance, tech sales)
This is quite a broad category, but any industry with a super high CPC will be hard for you as a small business, for example insurance. There are giant insurance companies with deep pockets who will out-bid you in every search and you’ll pay a prohibitively high amount for each click making it unsustainable to run ads.
Anything super niche
Google Ads targets people based on what they’re searching. If you sell something that nobody is searching for in Google, you’ll never spend anything and you’ll never get clients. You’d have to expand your targeting more broadly, which means your ads will need to do more convincing to get people to buy your product/service.
I once worked for a business offering coding classes for kids, but as an enrichment activity, it was too niche to grow much with Google Ads by targeting the search “coding classes for kids”. We had to target phrases like “enrichment classes for kids” and then our messaging had to explain first why coding is a good activity for kids to learn as well as convincing them why we were the best provider.
Which Small Businesses Should Use Google Ads?
Hopefully the above run-down was helpful. If your industry wasn’t specifically mentioned, leave a comment and I’ll add your specific industry to the list with my thoughts on it.
Overall, if you offer a product or service that has a high profit margin, running Google Ads is generally a successful way to grow your business. If your industry is extremely competitive or super niche, you might be better served with other marketing strategies, e.g. Meta Ads, SEO, networking.
Click here to read more about Google Ads for small businesses, and avoid making these beginner Google Ads mistakes.
