Most of the Google Ads advice you read is about budgets, keywords and bidding. All of that matters, but it skips over the bit the customer actually sees: the advert itself. A few lines of text sitting at the top of the search results, competing with three or four rivals, with a couple of seconds to earn a click. Get that wrong and it barely matters how well the rest of the account is set up.
The odd thing is how little time most business owners spend on it. I regularly open an account and find the advert was written once, when the campaign was first built, and never touched since. It reads like a company slogan rather than an answer to what someone just typed. So here is how I approach writing an advert that brings in the right people, based on what I see working across local accounts.
Answer the search, don't describe yourself
When someone types "emergency electrician Gloucester" into Google, they are not looking to be impressed by your mission statement. They want to know you cover Gloucester, you can come out today, and you are the sort of person they can trust in their home. An advert that opens with "Established 2011 – Quality You Can Rely On" tells them almost nothing.
The strongest headlines echo the search back at the person. If they searched for an emergency electrician in Gloucester, then "Emergency Electrician in Gloucester" as your first headline does more work than any clever line. It confirms they are in the right place, and Google tends to reward that relevance with a better position and a lower cost per click too. Match the words to the intent behind the search, not just the keyword.
Give a reason to pick you over the ad above and below
Relevance gets you noticed. A reason to click gets you the customer. Your advert is sat in a row of near-identical competitors, and if all of you say roughly the same thing, people default to whoever is top or whoever they have vaguely heard of.
So the second job of the advert is to answer "why you". This is where a genuine detail beats a generic boast. "No call-out fee" means something. "Free quote within 24 hours" means something. "Gas Safe registered, based in Stroud" means something. "Best service in the area" means nothing, because everyone says it and nobody can prove it in a headline. Pick the one or two things that are actually true about your business and would matter to someone deciding between you and the next firm. If you are not sure what those are, think about what your existing customers say when they explain why they chose you.
Put off the wrong people on purpose
This is the part that feels counterintuitive, so owners rarely do it. A good advert should discourage the wrong clicks as much as it encourages the right ones. Every click costs you money whether or not it turns into work, so an advert that quietly filters people is doing you a favour.
If you only take on full bathroom installations and never small repairs, say so. If your minimum project is around £2,000, a line like "Full renovations from £2,000" will stop the bargain-hunters clicking and wasting your budget. A driving instructor who only teaches automatic can put "Automatic lessons only" right in the advert and save themselves a stack of pointless enquiries. You are not trying to get the most clicks. You are trying to get the clicks most likely to become customers, and gently waving everyone else past.
Use the room Google gives you
Responsive search ads let you provide a good number of headlines and several descriptions, and Google mixes them to suit each search. A lot of accounts only fill in three or four headlines and leave the rest blank, which hands Google less to work with.
It is worth writing a proper spread. Some headlines that name the service and place, some that carry your reason to choose, one or two with a clear next step like "Get a Free Quote Today", and your phone number as a headline if you take a lot of calls. Then add the assets underneath: sitelinks to your main service pages, callouts for things like "Fully Insured" or "Same-Day Response", and a location asset if you serve a defined area. These extras cost nothing, they make your advert taller and harder to scroll past, and they push the competition further down the page.
Make the advert and the landing page tell the same story
Here is where I see good adverts undone. The advert promises "Free 30-minute consultation", the click lands on a generic homepage with no mention of it, and the visitor leaves confused. The message has to carry through from the search, to the advert, to the page. If your advert leads on emergency call-outs, the page it opens should be about emergency call-outs, with the phone number obvious and a form that takes ten seconds.
This is the single biggest reason accounts get plenty of clicks and hardly any enquiries. I have written about that gap in more detail in why your Google Ads get clicks but no enquiries, and it is closely tied to the quality of the landing page you send people to. A brilliant advert pointed at a weak page is money down the drain.
A quick example
Take a fictional but typical case: a local roofer whose advert reads "Roofing Services – Quality Workmanship – Call Us Today". It is not wrong, it is just invisible. Nothing in it answers a search or separates them from anyone else.
Rewritten, the same roofer might run headlines like "Roof Repairs in Cheltenham", "Free No-Obligation Quotes", "Leaks Fixed Fast, Fully Insured" and "Family Firm, 20 Years in the Trade", with a description that mentions the areas they cover and the fact they answer the phone themselves. Same business, same budget, but now the advert speaks to the person searching and gives them three real reasons to pick up the phone. That is the difference between an advert that fills space and one that fills the diary.
Write, test, then leave it alone
Once you have a decent advert running, resist the urge to fiddle every few days. Give it enough clicks to mean something, then look at which headlines Google is actually serving and which are quietly getting the enquiries. Change one thing at a time, judge it on enquiries rather than clicks, and keep what works. Small, patient improvements to the advert compound over months.
If your ads are getting clicks but the enquiries are not following, the advert is often the first place worth looking, and it is one of the cheapest things to fix. We offer a free Google Ads audit that goes through exactly this, alongside the wasted spend and tracking, and tells you plainly where your budget is going. No account access needed and no obligation to carry on with us afterwards.