A Search campaign is the most basic kind of Google ad and the one most worth getting right first. It sits at the campaign-type layer and works like a newspaper's classified section: the customer goes looking on Google, and your answer appears exactly when they search. The reason Search ads so often feel like money down the drain is almost never the tool itself. It is usually a handful of missing safeguards at set-up: keywords bought too broadly, no negative keywords, one ad group crammed with unrelated terms. Get those safeguards right and even a modest budget lands only on people who want you right now. The neighbour who just searched "teeth cleaning Burnaby" clicks through, while someone searching "dental assistant jobs" never sees you and never burns your budget. Below, a Burnaby dental practice walks us through each safeguard and the kind of waste it quietly blocks.
Who is this article for? ❓
If your Vancouver business is the kind people actively search for, such as a dentist, lawyer, repair service, tutor or physiotherapist, and you are about to run, or already running, Search ads but feel the money isn't doing much, this is worth a few minutes. It won't walk you through clicking around the dashboard yourself; it helps you understand why Search ads leak money and which safeguards plug the leaks, so you can judge whether an account is set up well and talk sensibly with whoever manages it for you. If you sell impulse retail and want to lead with product images, Shopping ads are a better fit, and you can skip this one.
First, be clear which layer you're adjusting
"Running Search ads" sounds like one thing, but it's several layers stacked together, and the money-saving safeguards live on different layers. Blur them and you'll fix one while leaving another wide open:
- Campaign / type: you've chosen a Search campaign, which decides your ad appears in Google's search results, as text. This layer only sets "where, and what it looks like".
- Ad group: a small cluster of keywords sharing the same intent, paired with a matching ad. The first money-saving safeguard lives here: one theme per group.
- Keywords & match types: which terms you bid on, and how broadly they match other people's searches. Buying too broadly is the number-one source of leaked spend.
- Negative keywords: explicitly telling Google "don't show me on these searches". The most overlooked, and most direct, money-saving switch there is.
- Ad copy & assets: the ad the customer actually sees, plus the links, phone number and address attached beneath it.
This article focuses on the anti-waste safeguards across the first four layers. How to write the copy, and how to use assets, are for the ad-copy article. Which campaign type suits whom is covered in the comprehensive guide to campaign types. If you'd rather get the whole Google Ads picture first and then come back to Search, start with the Google Ads overview.
Safeguard one: one ad group, one theme
Plenty of accounts, set up in a hurry, throw every service term into a single ad group. "Dentist", "teeth cleaning", "fillings", "braces", "dental implants" all land in one pile, paired with one vague ad. The result: whichever term brought someone in, they see the same off-target ad, the click-through rate is poor and conversions suffer.
Google's own advice is blunt: for each ad group, pick a narrow theme, use keywords related to that theme, and write one ad aimed squarely at it. For our Burnaby practice, that means splitting "routine cleaning" and "orthodontics" into two ad groups. Someone searching "teeth cleaning Burnaby" sees a headline about exactly that: cleaning, price, booking. Someone searching "Invisalign Burnaby" sees a separate ad written purely about clear aligners. The tighter the fit between keyword, ad and landing page, the more relevant your ad is at auction time, and relevance is one of the things that tends to lower what you pay per click and lift your placement. Google bundles that relevance into a diagnostic called Quality Score, a 1-to-10 read on how your ad quality compares with other advertisers. It is a gauge, not a dial you set, but a healthy score is a good sign you are not overpaying for each click. What this step saves isn't your daily cap; it's the price of each individual click.
Safeguard two: buy keywords precisely, not plentifully
Keywords decide "who, searching what, triggers your ad", and they sit at the ad-group layer, not the campaign layer. Google offers three match types: broad, phrase and exact. There's a straightforward trade-off between them: exact match gives you the tightest control over who sees your ad, while broad match reaches the widest set of searches. Google's current default is broad match, which leans on its automated bidding to sort the wide net. For a small local budget, though, our advice runs the other way: start narrow with exact and phrase match so you can see exactly what you're paying for, then widen out only once certain terms have proven themselves.
For a local dentist, putting the budget behind precise, place-and-service terms like "Burnaby dentist", "teeth cleaning Burnaby" and "dental check-up Burnaby" is far smarter than bidding on a vague "health" or "teeth". The broad ones push your ad at a crowd of people doing research, homework or job-hunting, and the budget drains away. How the three match types actually behave, and how wide each one reaches, is unpacked in the article on keyword match types. Here, just hold one principle: better to start narrow and widen gradually than to cast a wide net on day one.
Safeguard three: use negative keywords to keep money out at the door
This is the most underrated, and most immediately effective, safeguard of the three. Negative keywords are how you tell Google plainly: "for searches containing these words, don't show my ad." Google offers a neat example of its own: an optometrist who sells eyeglasses may want to add "wine glasses" and "drinking glasses" as negatives, so an ad for spectacles isn't wasted on people hunting for glassware.
The same logic, applied to our dental practice: set "dentist jobs", "dental assistant jobs", "dentist school" and "teeth whitening DIY" as negative keywords, and job-seekers, students and DIYers won't trigger your ad. Every irrelevant click you block is real money saved. The beauty of this safeguard is that it doesn't shrink your ability to reach genuine customers. It simply shuts the "never-going-to-buy" searches out before they cost you. The point is this: an account like that needs someone watching the Search Terms Report regularly, seeing which searches actually brought clicks and adding the irrelevant ones to the negative list. That is ongoing work, not a set-and-forget.
What the customer actually sees
With those three safeguards in place, what does it mean for the neighbour doing the searching? They search "teeth cleaning Burnaby" on their phone, and right at the top is an ad whose headline is about cleaning, carrying the practice's address and a "Call now" button. One tap to phone, or jump straight to the booking page. Clean, on-point, exactly what they wanted. Meanwhile the person searching "dental assistant jobs" never sees that ad at all. For you, the first is a potential booking; the second is money you've quietly saved. The essence of a "money-saving" Search campaign is simply doing this well: the right people see it, the wrong people don't.
Where this fits in your business
Setting up Search ads belongs to marketing and lead generation, and to the part of it closest to a sale, because it catches people already actively looking for your kind of service, with the clearest intent there is. It works hand in hand with your website: the ad brings the right person to the door, and the landing page and site have to catch them and make them want to call or fill in a form. Let either end slip and the money on the other end is discounted.
When it's worth a proper review
A few common signals: you've just opened and urgently need a first wave of people coming to you; the account has run a while and the money's going out but enquiries trickle in; you open the Search Terms Report and find a pile of searches with nothing to do with your business eating the budget; or you've simply never set a single negative keyword. Any one of those is a reason to work through these safeguards carefully. Often it's not about adding budget, just spending the budget you have in the right place.
How 5U Website helps
A Search campaign is never a switch you flip and walk away from. What really decides the outcome is whether the safeguards above are set correctly and whether someone keeps watching and adjusting them. Over our years building websites and digital marketing for Vancouver businesses, we've taken over plenty of accounts that were burning money with little to show for it, and on opening them the problem is almost always the same: muddled ad-group themes, keywords bought far too broadly, not a single negative keyword in place. Here is where we come down on it: for most small local businesses, we recommend starting simple. A tightly built Search campaign on a handful of precise, local keywords, with negative keywords in place from day one, will usually do more than a sprawling account with five campaign types running at once. The fancier options, broad match left to run on autopilot, Performance Max, and the rest, tend to earn their keep only once you have steady conversions to learn from and someone watching the numbers. Until then, they mostly just spend faster.
What we do for clients is work out what your customers are actually searching for, split the terms by intent into clean ad groups, set negative keywords to hold irrelevant traffic at the door, then keep pruning against the Search Terms Report, so every dollar of budget lands, as far as possible, on people who'll come through your door. If you're about to run Search ads, or your current account just isn't delivering, take a look at our website design and digital marketing services, or send us an email describing your situation. We usually reply within one to two business days.
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