Google Ads
What it is
Advertising against search: your offer shown at the moment someone types a need that matches it. It harvests demand that already exists, so it scales with the size of the search market and no further.
What it’s good at
Intent. The searcher states the need seconds before seeing the ad, which no other channel offers. Measurement direct enough to steer weekly, query by query. And immediacy: live within hours, with a first signal inside days.
What it costs to own
Query maintenance is continuous. Search terms drift, and without a weekly negative-keyword pass the budget leaks into almost-relevant searches. The second standing job is honesty about brand terms: clicks on your own name are the cheapest in the account and would largely have arrived anyway, so an account left alone drifts toward its own brand while the blended return flatters everything. Someone has to hold the branded and generic numbers apart.
When it’s a poor fit
Nobody searches for your category yet. The monthly searches for your generic terms in your market are the channel’s ceiling, and if that number is a few hundred, this is a supporting channel at best. Or most of the account’s conversions carry your own brand name: you are paying for demand you already own, and new growth comes from wherever new demand gets created.
What it sits beside
It runs beside Meta or LinkedIn in a capture-and-create pairing, and beside GA4 and Consent Mode for measurement, where the platform’s conversion count and the analytics count will disagree, so the steering number is usually chosen once. It replaces little, which is why it is usually the first paid channel opened and the last one cut.
My experience
I use Google Ads to capture the demand that already exists, keep the queries clean every week, and build new demand in other channels.