Solved: Optimising Google Ads in Manchester (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your Google Ads for Manchester. It's a common problem, pouring money in but not seeing the right kind of local customers come out the other end. Most people just throw a few keywords at a campaign, set the location to 'Manchester' and hope for the best. That's a surefire way to burn cash.

The real trick isn't just about 'reaching' people in Manchester; it's about reaching the *right* people with the *right* problem at the exact moment they're desperate for a solution, and doing it in a way that's actually profitable for you. We'll need to completely reframe how you're thinking about this, from your customer's mindset right through to the maths behind what you can afford to pay for a lead. Let's get into it.

Your Ideal Customer Isn't a Location, It's a Nightmare

Right, first things first. Let's bin the idea of your target customer being "someone in Manchester who needs my services". It's useless. It's so broad it tells you nothing and leads to generic ads that get ignored. You end up paying to show ads to tyre-kickers, people doing research for a uni project, or your direct competitors. It's a waste.

To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain. Their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening, weekend-ruining nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic; it's a problem state.

Let's make this real. Imagine you're an emergency electrician in Manchester. Your ICP isn't "homeowners in M20". It's:

• -> The family in a semi-detached in Didsbury (M20) whose power has just cut out at 8 PM on a freezing Tuesday, with two kids needing to do their homework and a dinner half-cooked. Their nightmare is a cold, dark house and the fear of a massive, unexpected bill.
• -> The landlord of a student flat in Fallowfield (M14) who just got a frantic call from a tenant about sparking sockets. Their nightmare isn't just the repair; it's the potential for a fire, legal liability, and losing their rental license.
• -> The small business owner in Ancoats (M4) whose shop's lighting has failed an hour before a big evening event. Their nightmare is lost revenue, a damaged reputation, and letting down their customers.

See the difference? We've gone from a pin on a map to a real, emotional, urgent problem. When you understand the *nightmare*, you can write ads that feel like a rescue flare. Your keywords change from the generic "electrician Manchester" (which everyone bids on) to the hyper-specific "emergency electrician didsbury", "landlord electrical safety certificate fallowfield", or "commercial lighting repair ancoats".

The competition for these long-tail, high-intent keywords is often lower, meaning your clicks are cheaper. More importantly, the person searching is desperate. They aren't shopping around for quotes to be reviewed in three weeks; they're looking for the first competent person who can solve their problem *right now*. These are the leads that convert.

Do this exercise for your own business. Forget demographics. Write down three to five specific 'nightmare scenarios' that your service solves. Who is the person? Where are they? What is the specific, gut-wrenching problem they're facing? That's your new ICP. Everything else we do, from keywords to ad copy, will be built on this foundation.

I'd say you need to understand the only number that matters: Lifetime Value

The next question people usually ask is "What should my budget be?" or "How much should a lead cost?". Both are the wrong questions. The real question is: "How much can I *afford* to spend to acquire a great new customer?". The answer lies in calculating their Lifetime Value (LTV).

If you don't know this number, you're flying blind. You might pause a campaign because you think a £50 cost per lead is "too expensive," when in reality, that customer could be worth thousands to you over their lifetime, making £50 an absolute bargain. Conversely, you might be happy with £10 leads that never turn into profitable work.

LTV tells you the truth about your marketing ROI. For a local service business, the calculation is a bit different from a SaaS company, but the principle is the same. We need to figure out the total profit you can expect from an average customer over the entire time they do business with you.

Let's break it down:

1. Average Job Value (AJV): What's the average revenue from a single job or project? Be honest here.
2. Gross Margin %: After materials, labour, and other direct costs, what percentage of that revenue is actual profit?
3. Repeat Jobs Per Year: How many times does the average customer call you back in a 12-month period? For some businesses (like emergency repairs), this might be low. For others (like maintenance or cleaning), it could be high.
4. Customer Lifespan (Years): How many years does the average customer stick with you?

The calculation is then: LTV = (AJV * Gross Margin %) * (Repeat Jobs Per Year) * (Customer Lifespan).

I've built a little calculator for you below so you can play with the numbers yourself. Adjust the sliders to match your own business metrics and see what your LTV is. This isn't just a theoretical exercise; it's the single most important number for your advertising strategy.

Once you have your maximum affordable Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), you can work backwards. If your CAC is £120, and your sales process converts 1 in 4 qualified leads into a paying customer, then you can afford to pay up to £30 per qualified lead (£120 / 4). Suddenly, that £25 lead from Google Ads doesn't seem expensive; it looks profitable. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and stops you from making emotional decisions about your ad spend.

You probably should get granular with your targeting

Now that we know *who* we're targeting (someone with a nightmare) and *what* we can afford to pay (our target CPL), we can get into the nuts and bolts of Google Ads settings. Just setting your location to "Manchester" is lazy and inefficient. Manchester is a huge, diverse city. Someone in a city centre apartment in M1 has very different needs to someone in a leafy suburb like Hale Barns (WA15).

You need to think like a local. Google gives you several ways to do this, and you should probably use a combination of them.

• Radius Targeting: This is a good starting point. You can tell Google "show my ads to people within a 10-mile radius of my office". It's simple, but a bit blunt. A 10-mile radius from the city centre covers vastly different areas with different demographics and property types.
• Postcode Targeting: This is where the real power is. You can hand-pick the specific postcode areas you want to target. Do you know that your most profitable work comes from the affluent southern suburbs like Didsbury (M20), Chorlton (M21), and Hale (WA15)? Then just target those postcodes. You can even set bid adjustments to pay more for clicks from these high-value areas. This is far more efficient than a blanket approach.
• Location in Keywords: You must combine your location settings with location-based keywords. Someone searching for "plumber" could be anywhere. Someone searching for "plumber stockport" is sending a huge signal of local intent. Your ad groups should be structured around these geo-specific keywords.
• Location Extensions: This is non-negotiable. You have to set up location extensions in your ads. This adds your business address, a map, and your phone number directly to your ad. It builds immense trust and makes it incredibly easy for a local customer to contact you. It also helps your ad take up more space on the results page, pushing competitors down.

And one more critical setting to check: under 'Location options', make sure you select "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations". The default setting often includes "People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations". This means Google could show your ad to someone in London who once searched for "hotels in Manchester". That's a complete waste of your money. You only want to pay for clicks from people who are physically in your service area.

You'll need to create a campaign structure for local dominance

Okay, so we have our 'nightmare' ICP, we know our numbers, and we've dialled in our location settings. Now we need to structure our campaigns properly. A single campaign for all your services is a recipe for disaster. It's like having a toolbox with all your tools thrown into one big pile. You can't find what you need, and you can't see what's working.

A professional account structure for a local service business should be broken down by Service Theme and then by Intent/Location.

Let's stick with our electrician example. Your account might look something like this:

Why is this so much better?

• Budget Control: Maybe you make huge profits on rewires but have tighter margins on emergency callouts. With separate campaigns, you can give the 'Rewires' campaign a much larger daily budget. If it was all in one campaign, the high volume of 'emergency' searches could eat up all your budget before a single high-value 'rewire' lead comes through.
• Ad Relevance: When someone in Didsbury searches for an "emergency electrician," they see an ad with a headline that says "24/7 Emergency Electrician in Didsbury". This is massively more reassuring and relevant than a generic "Manchester Electrician" ad. This relevance increases your Click-Through Rate (CTR) and your Quality Score, which in turn lowers your Cost Per Click (CPC). Google rewards you for being relevant.
• Landing Page Experience: The Didsbury ad should click through to a page on your website that talks specifically about your emergency services in South Manchester. The 'Rewires' ad should go to a page showcasing your installation projects. This alignment between keyword, ad, and landing page is critical for converting clicks into calls.
• Clear Reporting: With this structure, you can see at a glance which services and which areas are driving the best ROI. You might discover that North Manchester generates loads of cheap clicks but few actual jobs, while South Manchester is more expensive per click but drives all your profit. You can't see this insight if everything is jumbled together.

I remember one campaign we're currently running for an HVAC company in a competitive area. They are seeing costs of around $60 per lead. While that might sound high, a new boiler installation is a high-value job, so the ROI is fantastic. By having a separate campaign for these high-value jobs, we can push the budget hard on what's most profitable, without it being diluted by lower-value queries. This level of control is impossible with a simple, jumbled structure.

Finally, we need to talk about your offer and tracking

You can have the best campaign structure in the world, but if your website doesn't convert or you aren't tracking the right things, you're still wasting money. Your ROI isn't made in Google Ads; it's *realised* on your website and on the phone.

Your Offer: Forget the generic "Contact Us" page. When someone with an urgent problem lands on your site from an ad, they need a clear, compelling reason to contact you *now*. This is your offer.

• -> For emergency services, the offer is speed and reliability. Your page needs a huge phone number at the top, phrases like "Call Now - We'll Be There in 60 Minutes", and trust signals like reviews, accreditations (NICEIC, Gas Safe etc.), and photos of your team/vans.
• -> For project-based work like a rewire or new kitchen, the offer might be a "Free, No-Obligation Quote" or a "Free Project Consultation". Make the next step easy and risk-free. A callback widget where they enter their number and you call them back can work wonders.

Your Tracking: Clicks and impressions are vanity metrics. The only two numbers that matter are Leads and Cost per Lead. To track this properly, you absolutely must have:

1. Conversion Tracking on Forms: Any 'get a quote' or 'contact us' form on your website needs to have conversion tracking set up. When someone submits the form, it should fire a signal back to Google Ads. This tells you which keywords and ads are generating form-fills.
2. Call Tracking: This is the one most local businesses miss, and its a huge mistake. A huge percentage of your leads will come from phone calls, especially for urgent services. Google offers its own call tracking for free. It works by showing a unique forwarding number on your ads and/or website to people who came from an ad. When they call it, Google tracks it as a conversion and forwards the call to your real number. Without this, you could be getting dozens of phone call leads and your Google Ads account would be telling you the campaign is failing because it can't see them.

Getting this right allows you to optimise for what actually matters. You can tell Google, "I don't just want clicks, I want you to find me people who are most likely to either call me or fill out my form". This unlocks powerful 'Smart Bidding' strategies where the algorithm does the heavy lifting of finding you profitable customers, based on real conversion data.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below to pull this all together.

As you can probably tell, doing this properly is a lot more involved than just setting up a basic campaign. It requires a clear strategy, meticulous setup, and ongoing management to analyse the data and make adjustments. It's not a 'set it and forget it' channel.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced eye can spot opportunities and inefficiencies you might miss, implement the complex structures we've talked about correctly from day one, and manage the campaigns to maximise your return on investment.

We offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a look at your current account and strategy together. We can walk through these concepts in the context of your specific business and give you a clear roadmap for what needs to be done. It's often a really helpful session for business owners to get some clarity, wether they decide to work with us or not.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh