Podcast Episode 306: Introduction to Google Ads for Your Brick & Mortar

Are Google Ads worth it for your studio or practice? If you’ve ever wondered why ads don’t seem to work for you—or why you’re spending thousands each month without seeing results—this episode is for you.

I’m walking you through the anatomy of a Google Ad and breaking down how to set up campaigns the right way so you can start generating consistent, high-quality leads.

Inside the episode, you’ll learn:

• The three types of Google Ad campaigns every brick-and-mortar business should run: non-brand, brand, and competitor.
• Why keywords and search intent matter more than anything else—and how to choose the right ones.
• How to structure campaigns, ad groups, and ads so your Pilates, yoga, or physical therapy clients land on the right page every time.
• The math behind cost per lead (CPL), conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS)—and why even a $60/day budget can create thousands in revenue.
• The key difference between running ads on Google vs. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and how to use them together for better results.

Google Ads aren’t about throwing money at the wall—they’re about strategy, structure, and tracking. When done right, they can be one of the fastest ways to get new clients in your door and grow your boutique fitness or wellness business.

✨ Want help learning and applying these strategies?

• Join the Inner Circle waitlist: christagurka.com/mentorship
  
  
• Or schedule a 1:1 coaching call with me to walk through your setup step-by-step.

Transcript

Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies: 0:51

Hey there everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Female Empowered Podcast. I'm your host, Christa Gurka, and today's episode is going to be super, super visual. Which is not great for a podcast, I understand. You're listening. So how can you understand what's going on visually? But I'm gonna su really encourage you to watch this on my YouTube channel. So go to YouTube. if you're on my email, there is a link that comes with the email that says, listen to the podcast or watch on YouTube. And I'm gonna suggest that you go to YouTube to watch this video because. I am gonna be doing a visualization where I talk about the anatomy of a Google ad. And it was very easy for me to understand the difference when I wrote this out and I drew it on a piece of paper. So I get a lot of questions, and this is something that we're actually doing. I'm doing a full month of training on this for my inner Circle members, so they are getting it this exact month of September. Just like it's coming out on the podcast, and we've been spending the whole month literally helping these businesses build out their Google ad strategy. This is something that I've been recently learning and optimizing for myself, and then I'm turning around and teaching it to the women in my membership and my mentorship group. It is something that I think is super valuable for businesses looking to grow, and get more leads in the door, and it does work if you set it up properly. So a lot of times the reason people say it doesn't work for them is because they haven't set it up properly. This was my case. This was lots of business owners when I look at the backend of how their ads were set up and it's just not set up the right way. it happened to me when I had an agency that was doing my ads. I recognized after really abdicating that responsibility because I didn't know what I was looking at. I recognized I was paying$3,500 a month, not including ad spend, so I was probably paying about five grand a month and they had the campaign set up the wrong way. And so I was just not getting the right data and not getting in front of the right people. But they do work if you set them up the right way. I'm gonna do this little training today to hopefully give you an understanding of how you can optimize Google ads. One of the reasons I think Google Ads are good for. Brick and mortar local service businesses is because what Google basically is, is like people searching in a phone book. these are people that are raising their hand that are saying, I want pelvic health services. they are looking online, typing in pelvic health services near me. Pilate Studio near me. Best Pilates studio in Miami. They are actually literally saying, I'm looking for this information, and so that is where you wanna be. Versus in meta, Facebook, Instagram, social, those people are not necessarily looking for something. The analogy for them, it's kind of like. Driving on the highway and you see a billboard of like, oh, that caught my attention. That's like an ad. They didn't know they were looking for that, but maybe it brings it to the front of their awareness I like to do what we call prospecting. So prospecting is like looking for gold, right? Looking for new people on Google, and then maybe retarget on meta if you are a local service business. Alright. If you're an online business, I do think Meta is a really good place to do it. I've had a lot of really great success with my meta ads recently in starting to grow my email list and my podcast listeners. But today we're gonna talk about Google. The I Other important thing when you talk about Google is keywords. the way that you set up your Google ads are you input different keywords of like what you think people are gonna search for. The most important thing in terms of ads is the intent of the searcher. We as business owners, if we're putting money. Behind an ad, right? So that's paid advertising. We wanna make sure that the intent of these people is to work with us and pay us for our service. it's really important to use the right key words. so for example, someone who's typing in prenatal exercise, maybe they're looking for. A online video, or maybe they're looking, is it safe to exercise when I'm pregnant? We, as the providers want to be looking, want to be using keywords where they're looking, so like prenatal Pilates classes near me. Best physical therapist near me. So we wanna make sure that we're using words that are the intent of the searcher, not just people looking for information. So I get a lot of people that will ask well, what if people are looking for, is Pilates safe during pregnancy? And they're just looking for that information. But then we convince them to come to our studio now. Those are great, but I still do think what's important is we do that with like organic research or organic search, like SEO blogs, but let's not pay for that because the choice the, those are people that are problem unaware, right? They don't know that they want your services and to pay to try to convince. Them is just a little bit harder. So what I would say is you can do like a blog and they can get access to your website, which is always good for SEO, and then you can maybe retarget them with an ad later or on your blog. The call to action is like interested in seeing if this is right for you. Schedule a session with us today, but I just wouldn't put paid money behind it. let me get to what I'm gonna teach you on my handy dandy whiteboard. I'm so excited. You can tell how old I am. I've been using this incessantly and I love the fact that I got a whiteboard and it's kind of crazy and sad that I'm super excited about a whiteboard purchase nowadays. this is where you should really go to YouTube and watch this, In Google, the highest point. The, the start of the pyramid is what we call the campaign level. So you are gonna decide what you want that campaign to be. And now under the campaign, you have different. Ad groups. In meta, they call them ad sets. In Google, they call them ad groups. so ad groups is the next level down, and then within each ad group. You have your ads, Same in meta. So in meta you have campaign, you have ad sets, and then you have ads in Google, you have campaign ad groups, and then ad, so the ad groups are where we can separate our keywords for very specific things. All right? At the campaign level is we're gonna decide like the top tier of the campaign. There's three different campaign types that I am recommending to business owners currently, and this is something that I recently learned, which I'm super excited about. so the three types of campaigns that you can build are standby. you can have your non-brand. So non-brand are key words like pelvic health, near me, best reform or studio near me. Private concierge, physical therapist near me. so that's your non-brand campaign. Then you have your brand campaign, Your brand campaign. So your brand campaign is where you are protecting your brand. Now, some people might be well. Why do I have to pay for my brand? You wanna protect your brand so that other people, your competitors can't pay to show up for your brand name. So for example, and you can do this, if you go to Google and you type in Airbnb, the top. Result will be Airbnb, and usually the very next one will be VRBO. Why? Because VRBO has bid on the keyword Airbnb so they can show up next to it, all right? And if Airbnb is not protecting their brand name, what happens is VRBO would show up above them in the search query. So if I didn't protect, and this happened to us, if I didn't protect Pilates in the Grove as a brand name and run an ad so that if anyone typed in Pilates in the Grove, I would show up first. My competitors were doing that, and they were showing up first. So this was happening to us. So what was happening was. Even it said in the ad title, Pilates in the Grove, and so sometimes people were booking there, right? And they were going to another location thinking they were still coming to Pilates and Grove, but it was another location. So we want to, protect our brand. Then the next campaign type is a competitor campaign. Okay. Your competitor campaign, this is where you are going to bid on your competitor's names. Okay? So like for Pilates in the Grove, we could run a campaign for Club Pilates. So if people typed in Club Pilates, we would show up. Now,, if Club Pilates was running a brand campaign, we wouldn't show up above them. But if they're not running a brand campaign, which they do, we would show up above them.'cause you know how the sponsored ads come at the top and then organic search? so we have, generally a good strategy is to run all three different campaigns. Okay. And I'm gonna show you how you can set that up now. if we go back to this campaign structure. All right. And I'm gonna do an example of a, excuse me, a boutique fitness studio that offers a variety of services. Okay. And we are gonna do, first we are gonna be non-brand search. Okay? That's gonna be our campaign level. Then I'm gonna have three different ad groups, One ad group is gonna be Pilates. Okay? Another ad group is gonna be yoga, and another ad group is gonna be personal training. Okay? So in this ad group. Pilates, I'm gonna decide, I'm gonna have all of the keywords be related to Pilates reformer classes near me, and I'm gonna use phrase match, okay? Which goes in the little quotation marks. I'm gonna use small group. Reformer classes. Okay. I might use one-on-one Pilates. Okay. Now, in my yoga, my key words might be the same, but just with yoga. Yoga near me. maybe, if I have, if that's my specialty. Yoga in Miami. Okay. Maybe I'll have best yoga classes, Miami. Okay. And then for personal training, I'll have a bunch of keywords in here. But so what happens then is I can pay for these words and then this ad will send them specifically to a page that's all about Pilates. So it'll be way more specific. And Google will show it to more people that are searching these terms. And then same with yoga. I could have the yoga ad. Group go specifically to a yoga page, and I could have the personal training ad group go specifically to a personal training page so we can customize the experience for each person, right? So. Because if you send them to a generalized homepage, which is what a lot of people do, you might lose them. Because if they're searching Pilates and they go to a generalized homepage, they might be like, well, I don't, I just want Pilates. so you want to customize this experience for them. Customize this experience for the person searching so you can really optimize why you're the best person for this. Making sure that on this last page or wherever you're sending them, they can take an action, right? So ideally we're, we are using, in this campaign, we're going for leads. And we're measuring. A conversion, you can have different conversion, what's the word I'm looking for? Actions. A conversion could be, they submitted a lead form that could be a conversion. And then Google will tell you, this person clicked on your ad. This person scheduled a, a lead a submitted a lead form. It can be a phone call to your studio. It can be a. They actually schedule. Now, if they schedule, then use a third party scheduler. There's a bit of a workaround you have to do, but you wanna know are they taking the action that you want them to take? So are they not just landing on your website, but are they taking an actual action? Whether it's book a call, submit a lead form. Add to cart, like all this different kinds of stuff. So this would be your non-brand search campaign, and you can have all these different buckets if you want. Now the next thing we can do is create a brand campaign. so we can call this brand search campaign. And again, we'll set up for leads and we'll decide what conversion we want to take. Now the ad group here would be. Your business name. So it would be like Pilates in the Grove. Okay. And I'm protecting this, so I'm paying, so if people search Pilates in the Grove, I make sure that I come up very first, not one of my competitors. Okay. And then lastly. We would have your competitor campaign. Okay, so competitor search. Okay, I want leads. All right. And then we can measure whatever conversion we want. Okay. Now I would have maybe different ad groups for this, or I could have one ad group. But I would have different, keywords. So I would have like club Pilates. Okay. I would have, Pilates one. Okay. I could have, you know, Pandora. Pilates. So basically what I'm telling Google is I'm willing to pay that if somebody click, is searching one of these, that they see my ad, okay. And then I get the lead or the conversion from there. And especially this works if these people are not protecting their brand name and I'm getting some of the traffic by people looking for this. Okay. So. To review. In a perfect world, when you're having everything optimized and you are doing Google search campaigns, okay, which is what we recommend for local search ads, you would have three different types, right? Are non-brand, brand. Search your brand. Search and your competitor search. Alright, these are the three different ones, and then each one, you know, you have your campaign budget, so maybe you're like, I wanna spend$20 a day on this one.$20 a day on this one, and$20 a day on this one. So that's$60 a day. Okay, let's actually do the math on this. Let's actually do the math, okay?'cause the numbers don't lie. So if you've got all of those running, okay, and you're spending$60 a day, okay, which is$1,800 per month.$60 a day is$1,800 per month. Now if you are getting with all three of those, if you're actually getting, and, and this is where it could take a while to get these metrics, like maybe a month or two months, but once you get them, they're really good. Let's say your cost per lead, So the cost per someone submitting a form or the cost per someone making a phone call, let's say. You get that down to like$5. You get it down to$5. CPL is cost per lead. Cost per lead. And you have a conversion rate of, let's even say on the low end, 30%. 30% is. Costs. 30% conversion rate. So if you get, so you're spending$60 a day, And it's, you're getting a$5 cost per lead. that's, let me see if I do my math right. So I think it's 12, but let's see, 60 divided by five equals 12. Yeah. So you're getting 12 leads per day. so now you say, well, that's 12 leads per day, but not all of those people schedule. But you get a 30% conversion rate, so that means three of, so like let's say, so that's four. so four. So of these 12 leads, four become clients. So you have four. You spent.$60 a day and you got four clients, right? So if each of these four clients signs up for a private physical therapy session, that costs$200, Four times two, that's$800, even if they only come one time. So you spent$60 to get$800. That's what we call our ROAS roas Return on ad spend. I would do that all day long. Would you give me$60 if I gave you$800 back? Yeah. Even if you only had a 1%, let's just say you had 1%, so you got 12 people to come in and only one person became a client. That's still.$200. You spend$60 and you got 200. That's awesome. That's good. where you get your, this is where you, this is where the magic happens. When you learn these numbers here, I don't know, drawings a little bit messed up now. So this is where it becomes a math problem. So if you're like, oh, I actually want to get, I wanna get. 10 new paying customers each week. It just becomes math. How much do you have to spend to get there? So now if you are, if you're charging$200 a visit, you might be willing to spend$20 CPL. Now, just recognize if you're getting a$20 cost per lead and you're only spending$20 a day on that ad, you're only probably gonna get one lead a day. Maybe that's okay for you. Maybe you don't have the capacity to service that many clients. But this again, is how you can leverage the power of ads to get in front of the right people for your business. And at each and every phase, each and every touchpoint, each and every next step, we can optimize to be better. So we can see. Are people not clicking on the ad. That means there's something wrong with the ad. Are people clicking on the ad but not taking the following action? So there's no converting? Then there's some disconnect with the ad and the call to action on the conversion page, right? So like let's say, maybe again, let's say you're talking about the person that searching was searching for something for menopause, but you sent them to a prenatal page. Well, they'll be like, well. I typed in menopause. Now I'm on a prenatal page. This is totally not different. They're not gonna take the right action. So you need to optimize the landing page. Has to meet the ad, And then if they're not actually coming in, right, they're not actually showing up. What does that funnel look like, right? Or if they do come in, but they don't reschedule, you have to look at your operations and your service delivery. Maybe you have a sales problem. But you, we can look at each and every touchpoint and figure out where the kink in the chain is. Now, if your brain is losing outta your ears, because ads is a lot and it's a big, it's a big undertaking and it feels like a very, very heavy lift for us as business owners. I will tell you, this is totally something we can learn how to do. We can totally learn how to do this ourselves, and this is something that possibly in the inner circle, I will be adding this as a resource for the inner circle starting in January of 2026. So if this is something you're interested in being like, I don't wanna do this by myself, I want someone to hold my hand as I do it. Get yourself possibly on the wait list for. The inner circle. So you can go to Christa Gurka.com/mentorship. There should be a wait list already open. we open up enrollment again end of December, January. So if this is something you're interested in learning or maybe schedule a one-on-one call with me, you know, I'm happy to walk you through step-by-step how I do it, and show you screen shares and all this kind of stuff and walk you through this process to give you a little bit of guidance. I hope this was helpful. I'm sure it wasn't super helpful if you're just listening to it, but if you do get the chance to go on YouTube and watch the video, I think it will be a little bit more clear. ladies, I hope this was good. Until next time, bye for now.