Taking over Google Ads before peak seasonTTaakkiinngg oovveerr GGooooggllee AAddss bbeeffoorree ppeeaakk sseeaassoonn

Your peak season is when your customers search the most. A badly tuned account gets expensive fast, and there's no time left to fix it calmly.

Take an imaginary example: an air conditioning installer near Montpellier, in the south of France. His season starts with the first hot days. His Google Ads account was set up two years ago, and nobody has touched the campaigns since. The account is spending, but too few quote requests are coming in.

Here's the order to follow. You can use it a few weeks before your own season, whatever your trade.

Why does an account wear out?

A campaign isn't a poster you put up and forget. Your customers change how they search, your competitors move and your offers evolve.

There's also a mechanism fewer people know about. You pick keywords, say “air conditioning installation.” But everyone types a search their own way, and depending on your settings, Google can show your ad on searches related to those words. Not all of them will bring you a customer.

If nobody sorts through them, those searches pile up. The account keeps spending, just not always in the right place.

Don't add budget yet

When quote requests don't come in, the first instinct is to spend more. That's the wrong order: if part of your money is going to the wrong place, a bigger budget mostly sends more money there.

It's like a leaking pipe: turning the tap up won't fill the bucket any better. You have to find the leak first.

Another instinct to avoid: wiping everything and starting over. The account remembers everything you've tried, good and bad, and that memory is exactly what you need to read.

The takeover can follow this schedule, without a single extra euro of budget.

Three checks before you touch the account

Before any adjustment, ask yourself three questions. They'll spare you bad surprises in the middle of the season.

Who owns the account?

The account should be in your name. It's your history, and it should stay yours if you change providers. To give someone access, you don't need to share your password: Google Ads lets you invite a person by email and remove their access whenever you want.

What is the account really measuring?

A call, a form sent, a quote request: those actions should show up in Google Ads. They're called conversions, the actions you've decided to count. If Google Ads counts something else, like a simple page view, all your numbers are telling you a false story.

When does your season start?

Look at when your inquiries took off last year. That date is your deadline. Anything that touches your campaigns and keywords has to be done before then.

First week: stop paying for nothing

The first week goes to two cleanups: keywords that cost money without bringing in a single quote request, and searches that have nothing to do with your trade.

Start with the search terms report. It shows a good share of what people typed before seeing your ad. Only the rarest searches are left out. If you only open one report in Google Ads, make it this one.

Back to our installer. Someone who types “air conditioning training” wants to learn a trade. Someone who types “air conditioner manual” wants to figure out the one they own. Neither will ask for a quote, and their clicks get billed like any others.

Add those searches to your negative keywords: the list of terms your ad should no longer appear for. Add synonyms, singulars and plurals too, since Google won't exclude those for you. Almost all of those clicks then stop.

This cleanup doesn't cost an extra euro, and the money stays available for the right searches.

Second week: talk to people who want a quote

Next, rewrite the ads to invite a quote request rather than a casual visit. A few words decide who clicks. For example:

A clear ad puts off some of the curious, and that works in your favor: you pay for every click, so it might as well come from someone with a project.

There's another possible gain. Google takes the quality of your ad into account, not just the price you offer. An ad that answers the search well can rank better and cost you less per click.

That leaves the bid: the most you're willing to pay for a click. Tighten it around the areas and hours that produce real quote requests.

An installer has nothing to gain from paying for a click from someone they can't get to. As for timing, the ad schedule in Google Ads lets you choose the days and hours your ads run.

Once the season starts: small moves

Once the season is under way, keep fine-tuning the account with no budget increase. The big changes have to happen beforehand.

Take bids, for example. Google can also set them for you. If you change that method, it can take up to a week to find its footing. Your ads keep running, but in the middle of the season, you don't want to lose those days.

During the season, stick to small moves: a search to exclude, an ad to replace, an area to drop. That's why you start a few weeks ahead, not the day before.

Why the cost of a quote request can drop with no extra budget

The math is simple, and it holds for every account. Here's an example with illustrative figures, not a real result.

Two things are at work. When the ads score better and useless searches are excluded, a click often costs less: the same budget buys more of them. And when the ads speak to people with a project, a bigger share of clicks turns into a quote request.

To judge your own account, compare the cost per quote request, not the number of clicks. Click-through rate matters too: it's the share of people who click among those who see the ad. If it rises, your ads make people want to click more often.

Be wary of quick comparisons. Two back-to-back periods are never quite comparable: demand and click prices change from one month to the next. Also compare with the same dates last year. It's the best way to set the season aside.

Before you spend more,spend better

Your checklist before the season

If your season starts in a few weeks, check these five points now, in this order.

Add budget only once this sorting is done, if your quote requests are profitable and you can handle them all. A quote request you paid for and never answered is the most expensive click of all.

If your season is coming up and you'd rather hand this work off, our advertising page explains how we go about it.