How do I reduce my client acquisition costs with Google Ads?

Client acquisition cost is what you spend on advertising to win one new client. Most of the savings come from cutting waste, not from finding cheaper clicks.

Start with your search terms report, which shows what people actually typed before clicking your ad. In your account, go to Insights and reports, then Search terms. Click the Cost column heading so your most expensive searches come first.

Read down the list. Anything that looks irrelevant, add as a negative keyword, which tells Google never to show your ad for searches containing it.

The most effective method is to add single-word negatives on broad match. A single word set to broad match blocks any search containing that word, in any order, so one entry can block off a large family of wasted searches. For example, adding "free" as a negative blocks everything with "free" in it.

Two cautions. First, check the word doesn't also appear in searches that turn into enquiries before you block it. Second, negatives don't cover plurals or misspellings, so add those separately if you need them.

A few bad searches are normal. If most of them look irrelevant, negatives won't fix it, because the problem is your keywords. Use exact match only. A match type controls how closely a search has to match your keyword, and exact match is the strictest.

Pin your service into headline 1, for example "Driveway Repair", and a call to action into headline 2, such as "Get Your Quote Now". Pinning locks a headline into a position.

The call to action attracts people who are ready to take that step and puts off people who are only browsing. Fewer time-wasters clicking means a lower cost per client.

Conversion tracking tells Google when someone enquires, so it can learn what works. If it's set up wrongly, everything else you do is guesswork.

Automated bidding needs data to learn from. If you only get a handful of enquiries a month, it has very little to go on, and you'd waste a lot of money waiting for it to learn.

The fix is to track engagement conversions, smaller actions such as scrolling to the bottom of a page or clicking a call-to-action button, and give them a tiny value compared with your main conversions. Google can then learn from those signals before real enquiries arrive.

Client acquisition cost depends on more than your ads. If you pay $100 per lead and one in four leads becomes a client, each client costs you $400. If you get that to one in two, it falls to $200 without touching your ads. So how quickly you follow up and how well you quote matter too.

Read your search terms and block the irrelevant ones with negatives. Use exact match. Put a call to action in headline 2. Make sure tracking works. If you've too few conversions, add smaller engagement conversions with tiny values.