Google Ads strategy and diagnostics

Google Premier Partners in South Africa are the top 3% of Google partners and advertising partners in the whole of South Africa. That means the top 3% of hundreds and hundreds of different companies out there.

I'm glad to say that my company, Top Click Media has been a proud Google Premier Partner for the last 9 years. In order to be a Premier Partner, you have to pass a stringent set of requirements.

Google does audits on our accounts. You have to spend a certain amount, you have to do regular exams and there's a whole lot of strict requirements.

I'm proud to be a Google Premier Partner and I suggest you, if you're looking to get the best out of Google Ads, look for a Google Premier Partner like Top Click Media. If you need help with your Google Ads, drop me a mail at info at topclick dot c o dot z a or drop me a DM.

How do you fix your location settings in Google Ads to get better results for your campaigns? Many of the Google ad audits that I do have the same issue with the locations.

By default, Google have put on a setting that they'll show people in your targeted location that are No. 1 in your location.

That's perfect. But also again, by default, they show your ads to people that have shown an interest in your location.

Now this is very broad as it sounds. People may have been in your target location at some stage or they might have even been googling your location.

Now you have to turn this off to get better results. This is how you do that in your Google Ads.

Click on that button over there for settings, then scroll down, you gonna see other settings and then you eventually are gonna come down to locations. Now if you see over there, there's a toggle.

By default, you gonna see that that toggle is turned on for people that have an interest and people that are in your location. You have to change that.

Click on that second button over there...

if you're running Google Ads and you have a service based business and if your ads are not performing well here are two things that you can look for straight away that if you see them I guarantee you now in 99% of the cases your ads are not gonna be performing well the first thing that you have to do is click on campaigns then the first image that you're looking for looks like this you can see it's almost like a graph in a small square that means a P Max campaign now P Max is great but it's meant for e commerce 99% of the service based businesses that we look at that run P Max campaigns don't perform well your ads are showing on the display network on YouTube and a whole variety of things it should be just running on the search network like I said if you have a PMAX campaign and you see that image in a service based business be very careful and I'm sure it's not performing well the next thing that you're looking for is this image over here that means search campaign with display select now Google push this on a lot of the advertisers but professionals know that this is not the...

did you know that inside of Google Ads you can see who your competitors are and you can actually see how you are doing relative to them in the Google Auction it's very easy to do inside of Google Ads click on insights and reports then on the left hand side slightly below you're gonna see something that says auction reports now once you're in it as I said you gonna see all the people that are competing against you and you gonna see a wealth of information you can see how you're doing relative to them in terms of getting on top of the auction or obviously on below you can see if you need to increase your budget and a whole lot more most people don't know the wealth of information that it is actually inside of Google Ads it's actually an amazing system and you have to spend time to get to know it a little bit more...

Greg Sterling and Mike Bloomenthal did a whole panel discussion on Local Services ads. The topic was how should agencies build a business around Google Local Services ads?

How do you do it? Eric Levine used to work at Google.

He was one of the founding people that built the Local Services ads system. He worked at Google for years and now he's running his own agency and he's sharing all the secrets.

So you wanna listen to this guy. And so he says that the photo should represent what a person's journey would be like if they hired your company and you think that's the best thing you should do.

I also liked his thoughts on the future of search. He was a future of LSA's in particular.

He's like imagining a world where you're like, oh, I need to get my chick kitchen remodeled and my chicken, I need to get my chicken remodeled. So it's like this whole interactive journey.

And then at the end of that, Google says like, all right, I found you, these seven practitioners who you. So the ads will be very tailored.

And so I think that's a very interesting thing...

I just got an email from Google and they told me that once again in 2026, my agency, Top Click Media has been recognised as a Google Premier Partner. Now although this is the eighth year that I've got it, I really just get excited every single time that Google give me this badge.

Google only recognise the top 3% of agencies worldwide as a Google Premier Partner. Now there are thousands and thousands of agencies out there.

So if Google recognise me as the top 3%, I must be doing something right. I'm very proud of my staff and my team because we really work hard and we work at the highest levels in order to get this level.

Other things that we have to do, just by the way, to get this premier status, we have to spend a certain amount of money and most importantly, we also have to write exams every single year and Google do audit accounts. So yes, once again, I'm extremely proud of reaching this Google Premiere status and I do like to boast about it just a little bit.