Solved: Struggling with Google Ads in Brussels (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a look at your problem with your Google Ads in Brussels. It's a really common issue, especially in dense, competitive city markets. A lot of people just throw a bunch of keywords into a campaign, set the location to a city, and hope for the best. Tbh, that's a surefire way to burn through your budget with very little to show for it.

The good news is that there's a much better way to do it. It requires a bit more thought upfront, but the results are worlds apart. It's all about moving from a vague, broad structure to something incredibly specific and granular that matches exactly what your potential customers are searching for, moment by moment. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and outline a framework that should help you get things back on the right track.

We'll need to look at your foundations: Understanding Local Search Intent in Brussels

Before we even touch the Google Ads interface, we need to get one thing straight. You're not selling a service. You're selling a solution to a problem. And in a local market, these problems are often urgent, specific, and location-dependent. Your current campaign structure probably fails because it treats all potential customers the same. It assumes someone searching for "plumber prices brussels" has the same immediate need as someone desperately typing "emergency burst pipe repair Etterbeek" into their phone at 2 AM. They are completely different people in completely different states of mind.

Forget generic customer profiles for a minute. Your Ideal Customer Profile isn't a demographic; it's a nightmare. It's the homeowner in Uccle staring at a growing water stain on their ceiling. It's the restaurant owner in Saint-Gilles whose kitchen drain is backing up during the Saturday dinner rush. Your entire strategy must be built around intercepting these specific moments of pain with a message that says, "I understand your exact problem, I am nearby, and I can solve it right now."

This means your campaign structure must mirror these different levels of intent. A broad campaign lumping everything together just can't do this. The ad copy becomes generic, the landing page is irrelevant for most searchers, and your Quality Score plummets, which means you pay more for every click. We need to break it down. Think of it as sorting your potential customers into buckets based on how desperate they are.

Here’s a way to visualise that flow from a vague problem to a specific need. Most people start broad and get more specific as they get closer to making a decision. Your campaigns need to be there at each critical step.

Your goal is to focus almost all of your initial budget on that last box: "High Intent / Ready to Buy". These are the people who are going to pay your bills this week. The other stages are for larger budgets and content-led strategies, not for direct response local ads where every euro counts.

I'd say you need a granular campaign structure...

So, how do we translate this into a practical Google Ads structure? We build it out thematically, based on the types of problems you solve. The old-school term for this was "Single Keyword Ad Groups" (SKAGs), but a more modern and effective approach is "Single Intent Ad Groups" (SIAGs). The idea is the same: get incredibly specific.

Instead of one massive "Plumbing Services" campaign, you should have multiple, highly-focused campaigns. This seperation allows you to control budgets, ad copy, and landing pages with precision. For a local service business, this might look something like this:

• Campaign 1: Emergency Services (Highest Priority & Bid)
• Campaign 2: General Repairs & Maintenance
• Campaign 3: New Installations & Quotes
• Campaign 4: Brand Name (for people searching for you directly)

Within each of these campaigns, you then create very tight ad groups. Each ad group should contain a small handful of keywords that are all variations of the exact same intent. The ad copy for that ad group then uses those keywords and speaks directly to that specific problem. The ad then clicks through to a landing page that is 100% about solving that *one* problem.

This level of alignment between keyword, ad, and landing page is what Google rewards with a high Quality Score. A high Quality Score means your ads are shown more often and you pay less per click than your lazy competitors. It's the closest thing to a "cheat code" in Google Ads.

Here’s what that structure might look like in practise for, say, a plumber in Brussels. Notice how specific it gets.

It's more work to set up, no doubt. But once it's running, it's far easier to manage and optimise. You can instantly see which specific services are driving leads and which are wasting money, allowing you to make much smarter decisions about where to allocate your budget.

You probably should get hyper-local with your targeting...

Just targeting "Brussels" as a city is a rookie mistake. Brussels isn't one homogenous area; it's a collection of distinct communes, each with its own demographic, housing stock, and level of competition. Someone in leafy Woluwe-Saint-Pierre likely has different problems (and deeper pockets) than a student in a flat in Ixelles. Your targeting needs to reflect this reality.

Instead of city-wide targeting, you should be using radius targeting. Pick your business address or the centre of your primary service area and start with a tight radius, maybe 5-10km. Then, you can add additional, overlapping radiuses around specific high-value neighbourhoods or communes you want to dominate. The real power comes from using bid adjustments. You might be willing to pay 20% more for a click from someone in a wealthy area like Uccle because they're more likely to approve a higher-value job. Conversely, you might bid 10% less in a highly-competetive area where every other business is fighting for clicks.

This local focus must extend to your ad copy. An ad that says "Fast, Reliable Plumber in Ixelles" is infinitely more powerful to someone searching from Ixelles than a generic "Plumber in Brussels" ad. It builds instant relevance and trust. Google Ads allows you to use Location Insertion to do this dynamically, but writing bespoke ads for your top 3-5 target areas is even better.

Of course, this all affects your costs. A lead in a competitive city is never going to be cheap, but a well-structured campaign can make it profitable. For instance, we're currently running a campaign for an HVAC company in a competitive area, and they are seeing costs of around $60 per lead. In contrast, one of our best consumer services campaigns was for a home cleaning company which got a cost of £5 per lead. It varies massively by industry and location. The key is to know what a lead is worth to you and to build a campaign that can acquire them profitably.

To give you a better idea of what you might expect to pay and what budget you might need, I've put together a simple calculator. Adjust the sliders based on how competitive you think your specific service is in Brussels and how many leads you're aiming for each month.

You'll need to build a fortress with Negative Keywords...

This is probably the single most overlooked but most important part of running a profitable local Google Ads campaign. A granular structure is great, but it's useless if your ads are being triggered by irrelevant searches. Every euro you spend on a click from someone who was never going to buy from you is a euro stolen from a click that could have. Negative keywords are your shield.

You need to be ruthless. Your negative keyword list should be constantly growing. Start with the obvious ones:

• DIY Terms: "how to", "DIY", "fix it myself", "tutorial", "guide", "video"
• Job Seeker Terms: "jobs", "hiring", "careers", "salary", "apprenticeship"
• Price Shopper Terms: "free", "cheap", "cheapest", "discount" (unless you are a discount provider)
• Informational Terms: "what is", "reviews", "comparison", "best" (can be okay, but often not high-intent)
• Competitor Names: Unless you are actively running a conquesting campaign, add your competitors' brand names as negatives to avoid paying for clicks from people specifically looking for them.

For a local business, you also need to add geographic negatives. If you only serve Brussels, you should add every other major Belgian city as a negative keyword: "Antwerp", "Ghent", "Charleroi", "Liège", and so on. This prevents your ads from showing when someone searches "plumber Antwerp" but happens to be physically located in Brussels at the time.

Think of it as filtering. You're telling Google what you are *not*, which helps it get a much clearer picture of what you *are*. This process sharpens your targeting and forces your budget towards only the most relevant, high-intent searches.

I'd say you should rethink your bidding and budget strategy...

With a granular campaign structure in place, you now have the power to be much more intelligent with your bidding and budget. Instead of letting Google guess what's important, you tell it. Not all leads are created equal. A lead for an emergency callout is likely worth significantly more than a lead for a routine maintenance check.

Your bidding strategy should reflect this. For your "Emergency Services" campaign, you should be willing to bid much more aggressively. This is where you might use an "Maximise conversions" strategy with a target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) that reflects the high value of these jobs. You want to appear in the top positions for these searches, no matter what, because the user is desperate and will likely call the first reputable number they see.

For your "General Repairs" or "Installations" campaigns, the user is less frantic. They might be shopping around. Here, your bids can be more conservative. You're still aiming for conversions, but you can afford to be more patient. You don't need to be in position #1 every single time.

This same logic applies to your daily budgets. If you know that emergency jobs are your most profitable service, it makes sense to allocate a larger portion of your total budget to that campaign to ensure it never stops running due to budget limitations during peak hours. A common mistake is to spread the budget evenly. You should allocate it based on profitability and volume.

We'll need to look at your landing pages...

All this work on your campaign structure is completly wasted if you send all this highly-targeted traffic to your generic homepage. It's like inviting guests to a dinner party and just pointing them to a messy kitchen. The ad makes a promise, and the landing page must deliver on that promise, instantly.

If someone clicks an ad for "24/7 emergency burst pipe repair", the landing page they arrive on needs to scream "EMERGENCY SERVICE". It should have a huge, click-to-call phone number at the top of the page. It should have trust signals like "Serving Brussels for 15+ Years" and customer reviews. It should mention burst pipes specifically. It should NOT have links to your blog, your company history, or a gallery of your installation work. The only goal of that page is to get the user to pick up the phone. All other information is a distraction and will lower your conversion rate.

For every ad group you create, you should ideally have a dedicated landing page that mirrors its message. This might sound like a lot of work, but with modern landing page builders, you can create a template and then duplicate and tweak it for each service. The increase in conversion rate from having a perfectly aligned landing page will pay for the effort many times over. Your website needs to be a conversion machine, not just a digital brochure. That means a clear call-to-action, persuasive copy that speaks to the customer's pain point, and a seamless experience on mobile devices.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Pulling all this together, here’s a summary of the actionable steps I'd recommend you take to overhaul your Brussels Google Ads campaigns. This isn't a quick fix, it's a fundamental shift in strategy from broad and hopeful to specific and intentional.

As you can see, running a truly optimised local search campaign is a significant undertaking. It's not a 'set it and forget it' channel. It requires constant analysis of search term reports, ongoing additions to your negative keyword lists, testing of new ad copy, and monitoring of bids and budgets to ensure you're staying ahead of the competicion.

Getting this structure right from the beginning can be the difference between a campaign that profitably generates new business every single day and one that just feels like a drain on your finances. The principles are straightforward, but the implementation requires expertise and attention to detail.

This is often where bringing in a specialist can make a huge difference. An experienced paid ads expert can not only implement this kind of advanced structure far more quickly but also bring years of experience from other accounts to know what to look for, what to test, and how to interpret the data to make faster, smarter decisions.

If you'd like to go through your account together and discuss how this strategy could be specifically applied to your business, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We could spend 20-30 minutes on a call, share screens, and identify the biggest opportunities for improvement in your current setup.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh