Module 6 tool
One page, one row per product.
Every one of these products makes someone money. The question is fit: a high ticket, local, considered purchase with demand that already exists. The first two columns are neutral. The third one is the opinion.
| Product | What it is | Works well for | Fit for a shop like yours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search | Text ads on Google results. The customer types what they want, you choose which searches to pay for, you pay per click. | Any business whose customers search for it by name of service. Declared intent. | The baselineSomeone told you what they want and where. Controllable, measurable, and the standard everything else on this page is compared against. Most of your budget belongs here: one campaign per service, one ad group in it, one responsive search ad. |
| Performance Max | One budget spent across search, display, video, Gmail, and maps. Google decides placement. Reporting shows outcomes without showing where they came from. | Catalogs and volume. Ecommerce with hundreds of products, where averages work and any single sale is small. | Poor fitIt absorbs searches for your own shop name and credits them to itself, so the numbers look good. On takeovers the conversions usually turn out to be brand searches and cheap display clicks. If it runs at all, brand must be excluded and results read with brand removed. Ask what it displaces in the Search budget. |
| Display | Banner ads on other people’s websites and apps, shown to someone doing something else. | Awareness at scale. Retail launches. Brands with a long buying cycle and a national audience. | Poor fitThere is no intent, so results depend entirely on how results are defined. The clicks are cheap, and the cheapness is the tell. It has not earned a place in any account we manage. Retargeting past visitors is a fair use on social, covered in Module 7, and that is a different product from Google’s display network. |
| Video | Ads on YouTube, before or during videos. Paid per view or per thousand impressions. | Brand building over a long horizon, with a budget that can wait for it. | Brand spend, not lead spendIt can work, on a horizon most shops are not funding. If it is in your account, ask which budget it comes out of and judge it as brand spend. If it was sold to you as a lead channel, that is the mismatch. |
| Demand Gen | Image and video ads across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, targeted by audience rather than search. | Visual products that people did not know they wanted. Same logic as paid social. | Poor fitInterruption, not intent. Apply the Module 7 test: a considered purchase in a small metro market, reached by interrupting people who were not looking. Expect lead volume with a low close rate. |
| Shopping | Product listings with a photo and a price, fed from a product catalog. | Selling physical products online. | Not applicableUnless you sell products online. A service has no catalog. If it appears in your account, ask why. |
| Local Services Ads | The Google Guaranteed listings above the regular ads, for certain licensed trades. Paid per lead rather than per click. | Home services where Google offers the category and the lead is a phone call. | Depends on availabilityOnly where Google offers a matching category in your market. Where it exists, it is intent based and worth testing on its own line. Where it does not, anyone selling it to you is selling something else. |
| Search partners | A setting, not a product. Your Search ads shown on sites that are not Google. On by default. | Extra reach when the main auction is exhausted and the partner sites are relevant. | Off, alwaysCheaper clicks that convert worse, and rarely mentioned in a report. Off in every account we manage. Check it yourself: segment by network in your own account. A provider who does not know whether it is on has answered the question. |
| Broad match | A match type, not a product, but it gets proposed like one. Google decides what counts as related to your keyword. | Large accounts with clean conversion data and daily attention, where the machine has enough signal to learn from. | Only with daily attentionRelated is generous. Without someone reading the search terms every day it drifts into house windows, window repair, car washes, and DIY, and trains the account on the wrong customer. Exact and phrase by default. |
Three questions for any recommended channel
Intent
What intent does this reach? Someone who typed the service, or someone who was doing something else?
Attribution
How will results be attributed? Will it be credited for enquiries that were coming anyway?
Budget
What does it displace in the budget? Every dollar here is a dollar not on declared intent.