A new local account has to decide how it pays for clicks before it has learned anything. Most of Google's bidding options are automated, meaning Google sets each bid. Manual bidding is the alternative. The business owner, or whoever runs the account, picks a price ceiling per click for each keyword or ad group and moves it by hand.
Manual bidding gets treated as the beginner setting, something to outgrow in a few weeks. For most local businesses it's the opposite. It's the setting that protects the budget while the account is too small for automation to read, and many single-location businesses will reasonably stay on it for good.
This chapter explains why, how to set and read manual bids, and the point where automated bidding earns its place. It builds on Chapter 6, which started the account in exact match on the searches that book jobs. We call that campaign Isolation, and manual bidding is how it's paid for.
Google Says Target CPA Can Start With No Conversion History. It Also Says Not to Judge One Until 30 Conversions Are In.
Target CPA is Google's automated bidding toward a cost per conversion you choose. Google's help page is encouraging about it: "Advertisers can start using Target CPA with no conversion history, and Target CPA is effective for campaigns of all sizes."
The same page, further down, gives the advice for checking whether it's working: "For evaluation, we recommend you measure performance for the last 30 days, including at least 30 conversions."
Both statements can be true. Google will happily run the strategy on a new account. But a business that gets 5 or 10 calls and forms a month has no way to tell whether the target is working. A month of data from an account that size isn't enough to judge, and in the meantime the bidding is steering by very little.
That's the line we draw. A local account stays on manual bids until it brings in about 30 quality conversions a month, the calls, booked appointments and forms that Chapter 1 set up to count. It's our method, not a Google requirement, and it matches the bar Google gives for judging the result.
Manual Bids Let a Plumber Bid High on "Emergency Plumber Near Me" and Low on Searches That Rarely Bring a Call.
With manual bidding, Google calls the number you set the maximum cost per click. You can set one for a whole ad group or a different one for each keyword. You often pay less than the maximum, and you can change it at any time.
For a first bid, a local account can borrow from Keyword Planner, which prints a top-of-page price range beside most searches. Google builds the range from what advertisers have paid for top-of-page placement in the location you target: roughly a fifth paid less than the low figure, roughly four-fifths less than the high one. In the St. Louis market, the ranges look like this:
- "Emergency plumber near me": about $35.78 to $84.20.
- "Plumber near me": about $20.26 to $73.86.
- "Dentist near me": about $3.84 to $15.94.
- "Gym near me": about $1.44 to $8.08.
The range itself tells you something. An emergency plumbing click can cost ten times a gym click or more, because the plumbers bidding on it are chasing much bigger jobs. Whether a given price is worth paying comes from the math in Chapter 3.
Our approach on a new account is to bid toward the high end of the range on the ready-to-hire searches. On a new account Google has no history on how the ads and page perform, so the bid carries more of the weight, and a low bid can leave the ad below the top of the page or off it. As the account learns which searches turn into calls and which don't, the bids come down on the ones that rarely book and stay up on the ones that do.
On the Searches That Book Jobs, a Manual Bid Should Reach the Top of the Page 75% to 90% of the Time.
A manual bid needs a way to tell whether it's high enough. Google Ads reports that in a set of columns that aren't in the default view:
- "Search top IS": out of every search where the ad could have appeared among the top ads, the share where it did.
- "Search abs. top IS": the same idea for the single first slot, the first of the top ads.
- "Search lost top IS (rank)": how often the ad didn't show anywhere among the top ads because its Ad Rank, the bid plus ad and page quality, came up short.
- Quality Score: the 1-to-10 rating from Chapter 4.
Our aim on the keywords that book the most work is to show among the top ads on roughly three searches in four, up to nine in ten. When a plumber's "emergency plumber near me" keyword sits well under that, it is losing ready-to-hire callers to someone else, and the lost-to-rank column says the shortfall is the bid or the ad and page, not the budget. In our experience, pushing to 100% rarely pays: the last few top spots cost far more than the rest.
The auction insights report lists the rival plumbers, roofers or dentists showing up in the same auctions, with a rate for how often each one finishes above you. Now and then it reveals an auction that the job behind it can no longer pay for. If a water heater click starts costing more than a water heater job can return, by Chapter 3's math, a lower bid and fewer of those clicks is the profitable answer.
Our plumbers guide walks through the same columns with auction insights for one trade.
Automated Bidding Earns Its Place at About 30 Conversions a Month. Its Target Comes From What a Lead Already Costs.
When the account holds at roughly 30 quality conversions month after month, Google's automated bidding finally has a record to learn from. Isolation doesn't get converted. A new campaign, Exploration in our terms, runs next to it:
- Its keyword list is short on purpose: the three to five searches that have produced the most booked jobs in Isolation, carried over.
- Those keywords run in broad match, so Google can reach the related searches Chapter 6 described.
- Maximize conversions sets its bids, with a target cost per acquisition as the guardrail. That target is Isolation's real cost per lead over recent months, whatever it is.
Google says Smart Bidding strategies go through a learning phase of about 7 to 14 days and advises against frequent changes to budgets or targets while it runs. Don't change its budget or target for those two weeks. Do read its search terms daily for the first month and add negatives as junk shows up.
Isolation keeps running the whole time. It protects the searches the business already knows book jobs, at a price it already knows it can pay.
Maximize Conversions Tries to Spend the Whole Daily Budget. On a Thin Account, That Money Buys Guesses.
Maximize conversions, the strategy Exploration runs on, has a help page that is plain about one behavior: "Maximize conversions will try to fully spend your average daily budget."
On an account with steady conversions, that's the point. The strategy finds the clicks most likely to convert and spends to get them. On an account with a handful of conversions a month, it still tries to spend the full budget, with far less to go on about which clicks are worth it. The spending is the goal; the judgment behind it is thin.
Practitioners report the opposite problem too. On a brand-new account with no conversions at all, some find that conversion-based bidding barely spends, because it has nothing to aim at. Either way, the account isn't getting what a manual bid on a known, ready-to-hire search would get it.
A Local Account That Never Reaches 30 Conversions a Month Still Grows on Manual Bids.
A small-town plumber, a single dental office or a two-person cleaning company may never reach 30 conversions a month from Google Ads, and that's fine. It isn't a failure of the account. It's the size of the market. The plan for those businesses is to keep getting better inside Isolation:
- Stay on manual bids and exact match, and keep adding real searches from the search terms report every week, as Chapter 6 laid out.
- Run a brand campaign, covered in Chapter 5. In our experience, searches for the business's name are some of the most reliable conversions an account gets.
- Count the actions that matter: calls, booked appointments and forms. Page views and email clicks can be tracked for reference without being what the account is judged on.
- Combine before you split. Several small campaigns each with a few conversions teach Google less than one campaign with all of them. Widen the area or merge services before adding new campaigns.
- Report booked jobs to Google Ads through the Chapter 1 setup, so even a small account records which calls turned into paid work.
For the conversion action an account bids toward, Google's lead-quality advice uses a lower bar of 15 in the last 30 days, across the whole account. A growing local account may reach that well before it reaches 30. Some practitioners we studied are comfortable leaving small accounts on manual bids; one tells owners who want to keep it simple that manual bidding "will work perfectly fine." Our healthcare guide shows how the cost per patient from manual bids becomes the target once an account is ready.
Next: Nine of 12 Local Businesses We Checked Ran Ads Promising Something Their Own Website Never Said.
Bidding decides what a click costs. The ad decides whether anyone clicks and whether they stay once they arrive. Chapter 8 covers ad copy for local businesses, starting with a pattern that showed up across most of the businesses we studied.
Every chapter is on the guide's home page. If you'd rather have someone manage the bids, our Google Ads management runs every new local account on manual bids until the conversions are there to support automation.
