What are the main PPC campaign types?

Each campaign type does a distinct job, and choosing the right ones for your goals is the first decision. Mixing them without purpose wastes budget.

For most Pretoria and Johannesburg service businesses, Search does the heavy lifting because it catches demand at the exact moment someone types "plumber near me" or "aircon installation quote". Display and Performance Max earn their place once you have visitors to re-engage and enough conversion history for Google's automation to bid sensibly. Shopping is non-negotiable for retail, and social carries the load where your buyers scroll rather than search, which in South Africa means Facebook and Instagram for consumer brands and LinkedIn for B2B.

We have run campaigns across all of these since 2015, and the accounts that waste the least are the ones that pick two or three types on purpose rather than switching everything on at launch.

For a deeper platform comparison, see our guide to PPC platforms and channels.

How should a PPC campaign be structured?

Good structure is what separates a profitable account from a wasteful one. The hierarchy runs from campaigns (by goal or product line), to ad groups (tightly themed clusters of keywords), to the ads and keywords themselves.

The principle is tight relevance: each ad group should target a small, closely related set of keywords, with ad copy and a landing page that match them exactly. Loose, sprawling ad groups dilute relevance, lower Quality Score, and raise your cost per click. Disciplined structure is the cheapest performance gain available.

In practice, that means one ad group for "wooden flooring installation" and a separate one for "vinyl flooring installation" rather than a single "flooring" group trying to serve both. Give each ad group its own responsive search ad that repeats the keyword in the headline, and point the click at a landing page about that exact service, not your generic homepage.

Add negative keywords from day one to stop your budget bleeding on searches like "free", "DIY", or "salary", and use the search terms report every week to promote profitable queries and block the wasteful ones. This is the routine housekeeping that keeps cost per lead trending down instead of up.

How do you write PPC ads that convert?

Ads convert when the message matches the search and the offer is specific enough to act on. A South African looking for "emergency electrician Pretoria east" should see the suburb, the response time, and a reason to choose you, not a vague slogan.

Lead with the exact service and location in the headline, because relevance is what earns the click and lifts Quality Score. Use the second and third headlines for proof and differentiators: years in business, a Google rating, area coverage, or a clear next step like "Free quote in 4 working hours". Put concrete detail in the description, such as guarantees, payment options, or the fact that you are locally based, and avoid empty phrases like "best service" that every competitor also claims. Populate ad assets, previously called extensions, with sitelinks to your key pages, callouts, a call button, and your location, since these take up more space on the results page and give people more ways to convert.

Then keep testing: run at least two or three ad variations per ad group and let the winners earn the impressions. In line with our no-estimate approach, we never bake a price into an ad we cannot stand behind. We invite the enquiry and follow up with a proper human proposal.

Which campaign type should you start with?

Most South African businesses should start with Search. It targets people who are actively looking for what you offer, which makes it the most direct route to leads and the easiest to measure.

Once Search is profitable and you understand your cost per lead, expand deliberately: remarketing to re-engage visitors, Shopping if you sell products, social for broader reach. Adding campaign types before Search works simply spreads a limited budget thinner across less-targeted traffic.

A practical sequence we use with new clients looks like this: launch a tight Search campaign on your highest-intent keywords, give it two to four weeks to gather conversion data, then layer remarketing to bring back the people who visited but did not enquire. Only after those two are pulling their weight do we test Performance Max or social, because automated campaign types need conversion history to perform, and feeding them a starved, unproven account is how budgets disappear.

Because we work with no long-term contracts, there is no pressure to bolt on channels for the sake of a bigger retainer. We add a campaign type when the numbers say it will pay.

Why does conversion tracking matter so much?

Without conversion tracking, you cannot tell which campaigns, ad groups, or keywords actually produce leads. You are left optimising on clicks, which tells you nothing about revenue, and the platforms cannot optimise towards outcomes they cannot see.

Proper tracking of calls, form submissions, and sales is the foundation of every profitable PPC account. It lets you cut what does not work, scale what does, and feed the platforms' automated bidding the data it needs. Any campaign run without it is guesswork.

Setting it up properly means more than dropping a tag on the thank-you page. Track form submissions, but also track phone calls, because many South African buyers would rather ring than fill in a form, and a call from an ad is often your highest-intent lead. Use Google Analytics 4 alongside Google Ads conversion tracking, mark only genuine business outcomes as conversions rather than soft actions like a page scroll, and where you can, feed offline results back in so the platform learns which leads actually became paying customers.

This closed loop is exactly how we hold accounts to an average 4.8x return on ad spend across our client base: the algorithm bids towards revenue because we show it what revenue looks like.

What do PPC campaigns cost to run?

Running PPC campaigns has two costs: ad spend to the platforms and management to build and optimise the campaigns. Spend depends on your sector's cost per click and goals; management starts from about R6,000 a month.

Ad spend is money that goes straight to Google or Meta and is set by how competitive your keywords are and how many leads you want. Management is what buys the structure, ad writing, tracking, and weekly optimisation that stops that spend leaking. A common mistake is pouring everything into ad spend and skipping management, which usually means a self-run account quietly wasting a third of its budget on the wrong searches.

We deliberately keep quotes request-only: tell us your goals and sector and we come back with a proper proposal within 4 working hours, rather than an off-the-shelf number that ignores your margins. As a founder-led Pretoria team with a 4.9-star Google rating from more than 214 reviews, our job is to make sure every rand of that spend is working towards leads you can actually close.

For full pricing and how the two costs split, see our Google Ads pricing page and PPC guide.

Frequently asked questions