Google Ads in South Africa: what it is, what it costs and how to get leads from it

Google Ads is the fastest way to put your business in front of people who are already searching for what you sell. This guide explains how it works in plain language, what it really costs, and how to tell whether it suits your business. If you’d rather have it set up and managed for you, see our Google Ads service.

What Google Ads is

Google Ads is Google’s advertising platform. When someone searches for “plumber Cape Town” or “accounting software for small business”, the first few results marked “Sponsored” are ads. Each advertiser chooses the searches it wants to appear for, writes a short ad, sets a budget, and pays only when someone clicks.

That makes search advertising different from social media ads. On social media you interrupt people who weren’t looking. On Google you appear when someone has just told you, in their own words, what they want.

How the auction works

Every time someone searches, Google runs an instant auction between the advertisers who want to appear. The winners are chosen by two things, not money alone:

• Your bid: the most you’re willing to pay for a click.
• Your ad quality: how relevant your ad and landing page are to the search, and how likely people are to click.

This means a well-run account with a relevant ad and a good page can beat a bigger spender, and often pays less per click. It also means sending people to a weak page quietly makes everything more expensive.

What Google Ads costs

There are two separate costs. Keep them apart when you compare quotes.

What you pay per click depends on your industry, how many advertisers compete for the same searches, your location, the quality of your ads and pages, and even the time of day. Nobody can give an honest fixed price per click without looking at your market, so be wary of anyone who does.

How to work out a sensible budget

Work backwards from what a customer is worth. For example, if a new customer is worth R5 000 to you, and about one in ten enquiries becomes a customer, then each enquiry is worth around R500. If your ads can bring enquiries in for less than that, with room to cover your management fee, the numbers can work. This is an illustration of the method, not a prediction for your business.

Types of campaign

• Search: text ads shown when people search your keywords. The best first campaign for most service businesses.
• Performance Max: Google places ads across Search, Maps, YouTube and more. Works best with good conversion data.
• Shopping: product listings with images and prices for online stores.
• Display and YouTube: visual ads, useful for reminding past visitors about you.

Tracking what matters

Clicks are not the goal. Enquiries are. Good tracking records phone calls, form submissions and WhatsApp clicks, so you can see your cost per lead and, over time, your cost per customer. Without it, nobody can tell which ads earn money and which waste it. See our guide to lead follow-up on WhatsApp for what to do once the enquiries arrive.

Common mistakes

• Sending ads to the home page. A focused page for each service converts far better. See our website service.
• No conversion tracking, so decisions are guesswork.
• No negative keywords, so you pay for searches like “free”, “jobs” or “DIY”.
• Slow follow-up. An enquiry answered in minutes is worth far more than one answered tomorrow.
• Set and forget. Accounts need regular attention as competitors and searches change.

Is Google Ads right for you?

It tends to work well when people already search for what you sell, a new customer is worth enough to cover the cost of winning one, you can reply to enquiries quickly, and you have a page that makes it easy to get in touch. It’s a poor fit when nobody searches for your product yet, margins are very thin, or the budget is too small to gather useful data.

Questions

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