Google Ads questions from UAE businesses

Google Ads is Google's advertising platform: you bid to show ads on Google Search, YouTube, Maps and partner sites, and on search ads you pay when someone clicks. You pick a goal and a budget, and an auction decides whether your ad appears and what each click costs. Google's Performance Max campaign type can reach all of that inventory, including Discover and Gmail, from one campaign.

You pay twice: the ad budget, which goes to Google directly, and a management fee if you hire help. Google's auction sets the price per click, so any quoted average belongs to someone else's account. Magnetic Keys' management starts from AED 12,000 a month, excluding VAT, with the ad budget paid straight to the platforms. Decide what a lead is worth to you first, and the most you can pay per lead follows.

Enough to produce about 30 conversions a month, because Google recommends judging Smart Bidding over a period with at least that many, such as a month or longer, and 50 for Target ROAS. Say a lead costs you AED 150, as an assumption: 30 leads is AED 4,500 a month. Divide the leads you need by your cost per lead; if the total is out of reach, narrow the campaign rather than thinning the budget.

A good cost per lead is one your margin can carry, and no average will tell you that. Multiply a customer's gross profit by the share of leads that close, then by the share of that profit you're willing to spend winning the customer. Say a customer is worth AED 4,000, one lead in ten closes and you'll spend half the profit: your ceiling is AED 200 per lead.

Once a campaign is live, clicks can come within days, and our published expectation is leads in the first two weeks. A fair read of cost per qualified lead takes longer: Google suggests judging Smart Bidding over at least 30 conversions, such as a month or longer. Don't rebuild the campaign every few days, because constant changes make it impossible to tell what produced the result.

Not as your first campaign, and only once your tracking is trustworthy and you have enough conversions to judge it. Google describes Performance Max as a goal-based campaign type with access to all its inventory, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps, and says it may replace your final URL with a more relevant landing page. For clinics and property, where pages and claims need approval, that loss of control is a reason to wait.

Junk leads have traceable causes: search terms that don't match what you sell, an offer that attracts freebie hunters, a form that asks nothing, or a campaign told to maximise form fills instead of qualified leads. Read the search terms report, add negative keywords for anything no buyer would type, add one qualifying question to the form, and feed back which leads became customers.

Track every way a buyer reaches you: form submissions, calls and WhatsApp taps, then the outcome in your CRM. Smart Bidding needs conversion tracking switched on and learns from whatever you mark as a conversion, so counting page views or soft clicks trains it to find the wrong people. WhatsApp matters here: GWI's Q2 2026 survey found 84.1 per cent of UAE internet users aged 16 and over used it in the past month.

Run Arabic as its own campaign if Arabic searches show up in your search terms report or your enquiries arrive in Arabic. Write the ads in Arabic instead of translating them, and give each language its own budget and report, so a strong English campaign can't hide a weak Arabic one. If you see no Arabic searches, don't build one yet.

Run it yourself while the budget is small and you can check the account every week. Pay for management when a bad month of wasted clicks would cost more than the fee, when you can't tell which leads became customers, or when Arabic and English both need running. Whoever manages it, the account stays in your name and you pay Google directly.

A PPC agency should review search terms and add negative keywords weekly, check tracking, test new ads and landing pages, move budget toward what produces qualified leads, and report leads and cost per lead, not clicks. Ours covers account setup or rebuild, server-side tracking, new ad creative every week and a weekly report. Check any agency by opening the account's change history and reading who changed what.

Ask for last quarter's report with the client details removed, ask what they would change in your account in week one, and ask how they'd count WhatsApp enquiries. Avoid a fee that rises automatically with your ad spend, because that rewards spending more instead of earning more, and avoid any promise of a fixed cost per lead before they've seen your account.

You should. Set the account up under your own business with you as administrator and the agency added as a user, and put the billing on your own card or invoice so you pay Google directly. Then your campaigns, keywords and conversion history stay with you if you change agency. An account the agency owns is a rented one, and you can't see how it was run.

Start where your buyer is when they decide. If they type the need into Google, as with an emergency repair or a visa service, begin with Google Ads. If they'd never think to search for it, as with a new product or an event, begin with Meta. Then move budget toward whichever channel gives the lower cost per qualified lead, not the lower cost per click.

PPC means paying per click on search or social ads. Performance marketing is the wider practice of buying measurable results and being judged on them: ads, but also landing pages, tracking and follow-up, with reporting on cost per lead and pipeline instead of clicks. If a PPC agency can't tell you what happens to a lead after the click, you're buying only half of it.