Google Ads for MSPs: a geo-targeted playbook

Most MSP Google Ads accounts we audit are running national campaigns with a vague hope that the budget will land in the right places. It rarely does. The same £4,000 a month spread thinly across the UK produces a fraction of the leads it would generate if it were concentrated in the two or three cities where the MSP can actually deliver, win and retain accounts.

Geography is the single biggest lever in MSP paid search, and most MSPs underuse it. Below is the structure we typically use when rebuilding an MSP account from the auction up, with the regional logic that tends to work in the UK market.

Start with where you actually win

Before any keyword research, before any campaign build, we ask the same question: where do you currently win, and where do you currently retain? Not where the website lives, not where the founder is from. Where do the deals close and stay closed. The answer is usually a smaller list than the marketing team thinks.

For most MSPs we work with, that list is two to four metro areas in the UK, plus a handful of out-of-area accounts that came through referrals. The Google Ads programme should mirror that reality, not the aspirational map on the homepage.

This connects to the broader question of what your service area actually is. Our local SEO for IT support companies piece covers the same logic for organic, and the two should align. If paid is targeting Bristol and organic is targeting Manchester, something in the strategy is wrong.

Campaign structure: geography first, service second

The default MSP account structure groups by service: managed IT, cybersecurity, cloud migration, Microsoft 365 support. We invert this. For most regional MSPs, the top-level segmentation should be geography, with service ad groups nested below.

The reasons are practical. Bid adjustments differ by region. Ad copy needs to mention the city or region by name to hit the SERP local intent signals. Landing pages benefit from geographic specificity. Match types and negatives behave differently in dense urban areas (where intent is high and competition is fierce) than in surrounding regions (where volume is lower but conversion rates often higher).

A typical structure for a London-and-South-East MSP looks like this:

• Campaign: London Core (Westminster, City, inner boroughs)
• Campaign: London Wider (outer boroughs, key commuter belt)
• Campaign: Thames Valley (Reading, Slough, Bracknell)
• Campaign: South Coast (where applicable)

Each campaign has its own budget, its own Quality Score expectations and its own ad copy. The Maximise Clicks setting that worked in London Core will starve the South Coast campaign, and vice versa.

Location targeting: presence, not interest

A specific Google Ads setting trips up almost every MSP account we audit. The default location target is “Presence or interest”, which means your ad shows to anyone Google thinks might be interested in London IT support, including people physically in Mumbai or Manila browsing UK content for unrelated reasons.

We change this to “Presence” only on every MSP account. The cost-per-click drops, the search-term report cleans up dramatically and the lead quality improves overnight. This is one of the few “single setting change, large impact” moments in Google Ads management.

Keyword strategy by region

Volume is wildly uneven across UK regions. London has roughly five times the search volume for managed IT services as any other UK city, with proportionally fiercer competition. The keyword strategy that works in London (“managed IT services London”, “IT support London city”) would barely register in a Reading or Norwich campaign, where the long tail produces most of the volume.

We typically run two-tier keyword sets per region:

• Tier 1: city-and-service exact matches (“managed IT services Reading”, “cyber security support Slough”)
• Tier 2: long-tail phrase matches that have local intent through landing page geography rather than keyword text (“Microsoft 365 migration support”, “outsourced IT department”)

Negatives are critical and region-specific. London campaigns benefit from heavy job-seeker negatives (“careers”, “jobs”, “salaries”). Regional campaigns benefit from competitor city negatives so that “IT support Reading” does not eat budget on Slough searches and the campaigns do not cannibalise each other. Our negative keyword strategy for tech covers this in more detail.

Landing pages: real geography, not boilerplate

The single biggest landing-page improvement we make for MSP paid traffic is replacing generic “managed IT services” pages with sector-and-region pages. Reading prospects landing on a page that names Reading, mentions Thames Valley clients (where genuine), shows a real address or service area map and lists relevant accreditations convert at meaningfully higher rates than the same prospects landing on a homepage hero.

We do not advocate generating dozens of thin location pages. That is a separate problem we cover in programmatic SEO for tech: when it works and when it doesn’t. For paid search specifically, two to four genuine regional landing pages backed by real service area, real client logos and real local proof are usually enough.

Budget split by region

The instinct is to fund each region equally. The maths almost never supports it. We typically run a split that looks something like:

Brand campaigns sit on top of this, run separately, with their own bidding strategy and minimal budget cap. Whether to run brand at all when SEO already ranks is a separate audit question, covered in branded paid search when SEO ranks.

Bidding: what works and what starves

Smart bidding can work for MSP campaigns, but only above a volume floor. A regional campaign producing six leads a month will not give Target CPA enough signal to outperform thoughtful manual bidding. We covered the underlying logic in bidding strategies for low-volume B2B keywords, and the same constraints apply here.

Our usual sequence is manual CPC for the first 60 to 90 days, enhanced CPC once we have offline conversion imports flowing from HubSpot or Salesforce, then per-campaign or portfolio Target CPA once volume is reliable.

Microsoft Ads as the second front

A point worth making for MSPs specifically: Microsoft Ads (Bing) is genuinely useful in this vertical. The audience skews older, more corporate and more often using a Windows desktop in an office, which describes the MSP buyer reasonably well. CPCs are typically 30 to 60 per cent below Google for the same keywords, and the search-term report is cleaner because there is less broad-match contamination.

For MSP accounts spending more than £3,000 a month on Google, we usually recommend running 15 to 25 per cent of that budget in parallel on Microsoft. The detail sits in Microsoft Ads for enterprise software, which applies almost identically to managed services.

What we measure

For MSP paid search, the metrics we report on:

• Qualified opportunities by region, not raw leads
• Cost per opportunity, blended across Google and Microsoft
• Service area inquiry rate (proportion of leads in the targeted region)
• Win rate by region (sales tells you which campaigns to fund)

Click-through rate and average position are creative diagnostics, not performance metrics, and we treat them accordingly.

If your MSP account is running national, on smart bidding, with a generic services landing page and a creeping cost-per-lead, the rebuild usually starts with the geography. We work through this regularly on our paid media service, often alongside the SEO equivalent for the same regional set. If you’re rebuilding a paid programme that’s drifted off-strategy, we’re happy to take a look.