Two Kinds of Stuart Customers, Two Setups
Stuart businesses usually advertise to one of two audiences, and Google Ads treats them differently. Home service companies, medical offices and law firms want people who are physically in their area, so we target by presence, draw a radius or ZIP list around the towns they serve, and exclude everywhere else.
Businesses that cater to tourists, such as the fishing and boating charters, sailing trips, scuba outings and nature tours the city is known for, need the opposite: people searching from somewhere else about a trip to the “Sailfish Capital of the World.” Those campaigns target interest in the area, use trip-planning keywords and often run well before the visit.
When one campaign tries to serve both audiences it tends to pay for the wrong clicks, so we separate them from the start and judge each against its own customers.
Wasted spend usually traces back to a few settings. Broad match keywords without a negative list show your ad for searches you never meant to buy, such as job seekers, DIY questions or a competitor’s name. Ads that send people to a homepage instead of a page about the service lose visitors who were ready to call. And without conversion tracking, nobody can say which keywords produced customers.
We fix those first: tighter match types, a negative keyword list that grows every week, landing pages that match the ad, and call and form tracking through Google Tag Manager and GA4. Auction insights then show which advertisers you meet most often in Stuart searches.
