What this lesson covers
How do Google and Meta find the right person, and what do they need from me?
- Search intent vs. social interest: capturing demand vs. creating it
- Google Local Services Ads: pay per lead, the Google Guaranteed and Google Screened badges
- Call-focused ads and call tracking (a paid call is only worth it if someone answers: see speed to lead in 4.1)
- Shopping, Performance Max and catalog ads built on the product feed from 4.3, including local inventory
- Audiences: core, custom, lookalike and broad
- LinkedIn ads for B2B
- Retargeting and the pixel
- Restricted and special ad categories: health, housing, employment and credit
- First-party data and consent signals
- Why segmentation still decides who sees the ad
Why this matters now
Placeholder for the lesson's opening story: a vivid, real moment where a marketer or small-business owner meets this exact problem.
You can now
Match the campaign type and audience to the buyer's intent: capture demand that exists or create demand that doesn't.
For your own business or employer: Choose the first campaign that fits how the business's customers actually buy.
Industry case studies
Industry Case
Bajada Plumbing & Drain
Local home service · Demand capture
Case update 6.1
Module 6 of 8 in this case
The badge at the top of the page
When Dana searches “emergency plumber near me,” the first thing she sees isn't the map. It's a row of plumbers with a green check and the words Google Guaranteed. Copper Canyon is in that row. Bajada isn't.
Those are Local Services Ads, and they work differently from almost every other ad. Bajada doesn't pay for a click. It pays for a lead: a real phone call from someone in its service area asking for a job it does. To get the badge, Ray has to pass a background check and have his license and insurance verified. For a homeowner deciding in under two minutes, that badge answers the question “can I trust a stranger in my house at 2 a.m.?”
Carmen sets the service area to the six zip codes, the job types to emergencies, water heaters and drains, and the hours to 24/7. Then she adds call-focused search ads for the planned jobs, “water heater replacement” and “water softener installation,” where the ad's main button is a phone call, not a website visit.
Two rules make the money worth spending. Every channel gets its own tracking phone number, so Carmen will know which one made each phone ring. And the call-answering rules from 4.1 still apply. A paid call that goes to voicemail is money poured down the drain.
Notice what's missing: Bajada isn't targeting interests, ages or lookalike audiences. It doesn't need to. Dana tells Google exactly what she needs, and where, the moment she types. That's demand capture.
Artifact added
Ad set: Local Services Ads, call-focused search ads and a tracking number for each channel
Industry Case
Ocotillo & Ash
DTC fashion · Demand creation
Case update 6.1
Module 6 of 8 in this case
Let the creative find her
Lena's old ads targeted “women 25–45 interested in linen.” Flaxline targets the same box, and so does everyone else.
Her new setup works the other way around. Catalog and Shopping ads run on the product feed she built in 4.3. Audiences go broad, limited to hot-climate metros. Her consented list of heat-dressers seeds the system as a signal of who to look for. And the creative does the targeting: a video that opens with “It's 4 p.m., it's 109 degrees” will mostly find the people who live in that sentence.
That's why segmentation still matters here. Andrea is the brief for every ad, even when the platform decides who sees it.
Artifact added
Ad set: catalog and Shopping ads on the feed, broad audiences in hot-climate metros
Industry Case
Tepary Kitchen
Local restaurant · Local and offline
Case update 6.1
Module 6 of 8 in this case
Three miles, Tuesday afternoon
Tepary's ads only need to reach people who can be at a table by 7 p.m. Miguel draws a three-mile radius around the restaurant and schedules the ads to run Monday through Wednesday, from noon to 6 p.m., when people are deciding about dinner.
A second ad set retargets anyone who visited the menu page in the last 30 days: they were curious once, so they get a reason to come back on a Tuesday. The site's cookie banner lets visitors say no to that tracking, and Miguel accepts the smaller audience.
Nobody sees a Tepary ad on a Saturday. Saturday doesn't need help.
Artifact added
Ad set: radius ads for the slow nights and retargeting of menu visitors
Listen
Podcast · Move at the Speed of Culture
Underpriced Attention Zones You’re Missing
Listen for places where attention costs less because competitors aren't advertising there yet.
More from Move at the Speed of Culture →
Listen online: moveatthespeedofculture.com/underpriced-attention-zones-youre-missing
Key terms
- Broad targeting: Setting very few targeting limits and letting the platform's algorithm find the people most likely to respond.
- Call ad: An ad designed to get people to phone the business, with a tap-to-call button.
- Call tracking: Using unique phone numbers for each ad or channel so a business can see which marketing produced each call.
- Catalog ads: Meta ads (formerly called dynamic ads) built automatically from a product catalog, often showing people the items they viewed.
- Consent signals: Information passed to ad and analytics tools about whether a user has agreed to tracking and data use, as required by privacy laws (for example, Google's Consent Mode).
- Core audience: On Meta, an audience defined by location, demographics, interests and behaviors.
- Custom audience: An audience built from a business's own data, such as website visitors, app users or a customer list.
- First-party data: Information a business collects directly from its own customers and visitors, such as email lists, purchases and website behavior.
- Google Guaranteed: A badge shown on Local Services Ads for home-service businesses that pass Google's screening, backed by a Google guarantee for eligible jobs.
- Google Local Services Ads (LSAs): Google ads for local service businesses that appear at the top of search results. Businesses pay per lead instead of per click and must pass Google's screening.
- Google Screened: A badge shown on Local Services Ads for professional-service businesses, such as lawyers and financial planners, that pass Google's screening.
- LinkedIn ads: Paid ads on LinkedIn, targeted by job title, industry, company and seniority, used mainly for B2B (business-to-business) marketing.
- Local inventory ads: Ads that show shoppers which products are in stock at a nearby store.
- Lookalike audience: An audience of new people whose characteristics resemble those of an existing custom audience, such as current customers.
- Pay per lead: A pricing model in which the advertiser pays for each inquiry, such as a call or message, rather than for clicks or views.
- Performance Max: A Google Ads campaign type that uses automation to run ads across Google's channels, including Search, Shopping, YouTube, Maps and Gmail, from one campaign.
- Pixel: A small piece of tracking code, such as the Meta Pixel or the Google tag, placed on a website to report visitor actions back to an ad platform.
- Restricted ad category: A type of product or service, such as health care, alcohol, gambling or financial services, that ad platforms allow only with extra limits, certification or review.
- Retargeting: Showing ads to people who have already visited a website, used an app or engaged with a brand. Also called remarketing.
- Search ads: Text ads that appear when someone searches for specific keywords on a search engine such as Google. They capture existing demand.
- Shopping ads: Google ads that show a product image, price and store name, created from the Merchant Center product feed.
- Social ads: Paid ads shown in social media feeds, such as on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, targeted by interests, behavior and demographics. They often create demand.
- Special ad categories: Meta's label for ads about housing, employment, credit, and social issues, elections or politics. Targeting options are limited for these ads to prevent discrimination.