Google Ads
for salons.

The word 'hairdresser' is typed by people who want a haircut, people who want to become hairdressers, and people who want to know what one earns. 'Lash lift' is typed by people booking one and people buying a kit to do it at home. Google Ads charges for the click either way.

So the first job isn't writing ads. It's deciding which searches you'd happily pay for. These are typical patterns in salon accounts, not figures from a study:

One campaign called 'Salon' with every keyword in it hands Google the choice of where your money goes. It'll usually pick whatever is cheapest to get a click on, which isn't always what you want to sell.

Split campaigns by the services you most want more of, each with its own budget. A colour campaign, a cut campaign and a brows campaign let you put more behind the service with spare chair time and the better margin. If Saturdays are full and Tuesdays aren't, the campaign for Tuesday's services gets the money.

Every ad should land on the page for that service, with its price range and the booking button above the fold. Sending a 'brow lamination Gosford' click to your home page makes the person hunt for it, and plenty won't.

The first is location. Google's advanced location options offer 'Presence or interest', which is the default and recommended setting, and 'Presence'. Presence reaches people who are likely to be located, or regularly located, in the locations you've targeted. The default adds people who have only shown interest in the area. For a business people must physically visit, someone in Perth reading about Terrigal isn't a booking. Switch to Presence.

The second is the clock. A new campaign runs all day, every day, unless you set an ad schedule. Ads that send people to an online booking page can run overnight, because people book from bed. Ads with a call button shouldn't, because a call at 9pm to a closed salon is a click you paid for and a client you disappointed.

For a mobile hair and makeup artist, target the suburbs you actually travel to, and leave out the ones where the travel time eats the margin.

Paste the search terms from the last 30 days, from Insights and reports in Google Ads, or a keyword list you're planning.

Google's healthcare and medicines policy restricts the use of prescription drug terms in ads, landing pages, and keywords. So 'lip filler near me' and 'anti-wrinkle injections Sydney' aren't keywords a clinic can use, and a landing page that names the product can get the whole ad disapproved. The TGA rule sits underneath it: ads can't refer to prescription-only injectables, including generic terms like 'anti-wrinkle injections'.

There's a second limit people miss. Google's personalised advertising policy lists invasive medical procedures, including cosmetic surgery, surgical procedures or injections as a sensitive health category. Ads in it can't use Customer Match, your data segments (remarketing lists), lookalike segments or audience expansion. Location targeting and Google's own predefined audiences are still allowed.

In plain terms: a clinic can't upload its client list to chase past injectable clients with ads, and can't follow website visitors around the internet. Search ads on non-prescription words, such as 'skin consultation Newcastle' or 'pigmentation treatment Chatswood', are where the budget belongs. For the wider rules, see the cosmetic and skin clinic page.

Google Ads budgets are averages. On a given day a campaign might spend up to twice its average daily budget, and over the month it won't spend more than 30.4 times the daily figure. So a $20 daily budget can cost $40 on a busy Saturday, and around $608 across a month.

That matters for a small salon watching cash. Set the daily figure from the monthly amount you're comfortable with, divided by 30.4, and stop checking it day by day. The salon budget page works out that monthly figure from your empty chair hours.

A click is someone looking. A booking is someone coming in. Most salon accounts I'd look at report the first and guess the second.

At minimum, track clicks on the booking button and calls from the ads. Better, tag the ad's final URL so the booking system or Google Analytics can see where the visitor came from: Google says always use utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign when you build tagged links. Then once a month, count the clients from ads who booked again. A campaign that brings bargain hunters who never return looks cheap and isn't.