Built to hand over: Building a New Google Ads Account To Handover to a Small Business

Client snapshot: An electrical contractor covering services such as general and domestic electrical work, commercial jobs, EV charger installation and electrical safety certificates. Details anonymised for this case study.

The brief

This client came to me through my Ads Setup Service. There was no existing Google Ads account to work with, so no history or old campaign to inherit. They had a modest £5 a day budget.

They offered several different services and would need several different ad groups, so before anything was built or went live, I looked at the website to see what it could actually support. Not every service had a page built or suitable to send paid traffic to.

On a budget this size, spreading it thinly to cover as many services as possible would have been counter intuitive. After reviewing the website and speaking to the client, five ad groups made the cut: General/Electrician, Domestic/Residential, Commercial, EV Charger Installation, and EICR/Electrical Safety Certificates.

The build

Keyword research was carried out, with data collected and pooled from an initial 2,600 keywords. These were then checked against the website and the client's actual services rather than picked on assumption. Keywords were then allocated Phrase or Exact match throughout, some location terms were built into the keywords if relevant, and where possible nothing was left to broad match to figure out. Location targeting and an ad schedule were also set up.

A negative keyword list was built in from day one too, blocking 341 irrelevant search terms before the account ever went live, things like training courses, salaries, apprenticeships and DIY guides, so budget wasn't wasted on searches that were never going to convert.

Alongside the campaign: full conversion tracking through GA4 and GTM, and advertiser identity verification completed before launch, so the account was never at risk of being paused once it went live.

What monitoring caught

Two things came up once the account was actually running.

The ad groups Domestic/Residential and General/Electrician started overlapping on the same searches, competing against each other for the same clicks. The decision was taken to merge these into one General/Electrician ad group, bringing the ad structure down to four.

A "near me" negative keyword, added to the EV Charger group to filter out people just looking to charge a car rather than install a point, turned out to be blocking genuine installation searches too, things like "ev charger installers near me." This was replaced with relevant negative keywords that target the charging intent specifically, allowing the installation searches to start coming through.

On top of that, 7 more negatives were added after a review at campaign level once the account was live. The ads were built using all 15 ad headline slots, with any repeated or similar sounding ones removed so each one was earning its place. I also discovered that the contact form itself had been firing on the wrong GTM trigger, meaning submissions weren't being counted as conversions at all. This was fixed as soon as it was spotted, and phone call extensions were added across all the ad groups as an additional conversion action, since most people are searching on mobile these days anyway.

Handover

After the 4 weeks had elapsed, a training call to walk the client through the account itself was booked in. A reference document specific to that client was also created, as well as an initial report of the data they should use for the baseline moving forward. To help them with understanding their own reports without needing to come back to me for a translation every time, I walked them through the basics of GA4 and where to compare the data.

What this means for you

The account is kept for four weeks after launch, not handed over on day one. A brand new account has no real search data running through it yet, so problems like two ad groups competing for the same query, or a negative keyword blocking the wrong thing, won't always show up until actual searches have been hitting the account for a few weeks. The four week monitoring window is what led to the competing ad groups and the blocked installation searches getting found and sorted before the handover, rather than being left for the client to discover later on.

After the account handover comes a two week period of support, where the client can ask questions or get something triple checked in the account before it's formally signed off. The setup service is there for businesses who aren't sure about ongoing management support but still want an ad account that works for their business. It's designed with the client in mind, handing over an account that's already been proven to work, not just switched on and left.

If you want your Google Ads set up this way, get in touch.