A Simple Guide to Google Ads for Wedding Photographers (2024)
As a wedding photographer, continuously finding new clients is a challenge. Word of mouth referrals can only get you so far and posting on social media is time-consuming and gives mixed results. What if I told you there was a channel to get reliable new clients in a cost-effective way?
Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is the best channel to get new clients quickly for wedding photographers. In this post I’ll explain what Google Ads are and how you can make the most of them for your photography business. Here’s exactly what I’ll cover:
What are Google Ads?
Often when you search Google for something, you’ll see “sponsored” results at the top of the search results page. Those are Google Ads. They don’t show up every time you search for something, only if there are advertisers who choose to spend money to appear there.
There are approximately 100,000 Google searches happening every second, and about 2 trillion searches a year, and almost all of those searches are eligible to show ads. That’s an unfathomably huge number and it represents a huge opportunity for you and your photography business - you can show up at the very top of the search engine results page (SERP) when someone is looking for a service you provide.
Google Ads aren’t free like just posting on social media is, but you can be successful with budgets as low as $10 a day. And they’re effective. Google estimates that for every $1 spent on Google Ads, businesses earn $8 in revenue in return.
I don’t recommend every business use Google Ads, but for wedding photographers it’s an ideal channel. Running ads can be expensive - paying $10 a day you might only get 2-3 clicks a day, so you might spend $100+ for each incoming lead. But as a wedding photographer, you probably charge enough that you’d still make a profit after factoring in the cost of ads.
Note: A lot of people, myself included in this post, say “Google Ads” to mean “Google Search Ads”. But Google Ads also encompasses ads running on Google’s display network (third party websites), Discovery ads, Video ads (i.e. YouTube), and more. I won’t be covering those in this post, they’re more used by businesses with larger budgets to generate awareness.
How to Use Google Ads as a Wedding Photographer
Setting up Google Ads is really easy. Honestly, too easy. Google wants to get you spending on ads as fast as possible, and ideally they want you to be successful so you keep spending, but their default setups leave a lot to be desired.
When you create a Google Ads account, to get you started quickly, Google will push you into creating Smart Campaigns. Do not use these. They’re technically easier to set up if you want to get started quickly, but they lack features compared to regular campaigns and you may well end up losing money by using them.
If you see these options, you’re in the right campaign builder. For getting new clients, you should use the Leads objective.
Next, you need to understand the basic structure of Google Ads. There are three basic “layers”:
Campaign level - campaigns contain ad groups, ads, keywords, and all the associated targeting. If your goal is to get new clients for your photography business, I’d recommending only setting up one campaign.
Ad group/keyword level - Within each campaign you can have multiple ad groups, based around keyword clusters. For example, depending on the services you offer and issues you can help with, maybe you’d have ad groups for: anxiety, depression, relationship issues, couples counseling, and career coaching.
Ads - each ad group can have many different ads. Using the default responsive search ads type, you’ll be able to enter 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Use all of these in every ad to let the Google Ads algorithm show what it thinks is the best message to the individual searcher. Having only one ad with 15 headlines + 4 descriptions is ok, but if you want to also test different messages in other ads that’s definitely worth doing.
Set Your Goals & Budget
Now, before you even start setting up any Google Ads, you need to figure out your goal and how much you want to spend. If set up right, the revenue you generate from clients will more than offset the cost, but you’ll need to pay for the ads first. So consider what you’re comfortable with.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Google generally offers a $500 (or local equivalent) ad credit when you spend your first $500 within 2 months. Make sure to claim this offer and make sure you use it before it expires. I’ve spoken to Google Ads reps who refuse to give it a second time even if you never spent a cent. You can use this offer to guide your minimum initial budget.
Keyword Targeting
To set up Google Ads for your photography business, you first need to consider your ideal client, and specifically, what are they actually searching for in Google? These will make up your target keywords.
Consider this example:
You’re a wedding photographer in Vancouver. You probably want to show up for the search “wedding photographer in Vancouver” as a search. And that should definitely be a search you target with ads.
But consider what else you might want to target, which might also be less competitive. For example, “affordable wedding photographer”, if your prices are competitive.
(And also consider what you don’t want to target, so you can exclude them from ads. For example, maybe you don’t want to target “bridal boudoir photography” if that’s not a service that you offer but Google thinks is related, otherwise you’re just wasting money targeting the wrong people. You may also want to exclude “affordable”, “cheap” etc. as terms if your service is more focused on a premium experience.
Once you have a list of keywords you’re brainstormed yourself, add them to the free tool Google Keyword Planner, which will show you estimated search volume and level of competition for each of your keywords, and recommend other related keywords.
In the screenshot you can see real numbers from Google Keyword Planner for Vancouver (so if you’re an interior designer in Vancouver, you’re welcome!).
The top keyword is what I started with (“wedding photographer near me”), with 10-100 monthly searches and low competition.
The remaining keywords here all have more average monthly searches and have a mix of competition levels, so you can start to get some ideas about what you want to target.
Google Keyword Planner has hundreds of related keywords, depending on what you’re looking for.
Ideally you’re looking for high-volume, low competition and cheap bid ranges for keywords that indicate a high intent to actually start working with you.
Creating Ads
Your ad copy is your shop window, enticing potential customers to step inside. Headlines are the first impression, so brevity is key. Use relevant keywords naturally, highlighting your unique selling proposition (USP) within a character limit. You can say things like “Book a free consultation”, “Affordable, professional service”, whatever makes sense for you.
Then you’ll add descriptions. You can go into a little more detail and add further call to actions. Again, for both headlines and descriptions, use all the allowance you’re given - for the default responsive search ads you’ll get 15 headlines + 4 descriptions.
Next, don’t overlook ad extensions/assets. I recommend adding as many as make sense for you, but the more the better, because these extensions literally make your ad bigger, and the bigger your ad, the more likely someone will click it on the search results page. Extensions/assets include:
Sitelinks
Callouts
Call extensions
Lead forms
Location extensions
Images
Promotions
Structured snippets
Not all of them will make sense for you — as an wedding photographer, perhaps you don’t want to focus on the promotions side, you’d rather focus on convincing people of your expertise and why you’re worth the price.
Writing copy for ads takes practice. You need to learn persuasive writing with very limited character counts. Google Ads recently added AI tools to help automatically generate high-performing headlines and descriptions, and don’t be afraid to ask other AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot for suggestions. Just make sure to review the suggestion and tweak it to make it relevant to your unique business.
Optimizing & Analyzing Performance
You’ve launched your ads, now what? How do you know if they’re working?
Choosing what and how to measure is super important to make sure you’re getting the best results out of your Google Ads for your wedding photography business.
Let’s assume your goal is to get people to book free consultation calls, so make sure you’ve set up conversion tracking properly — connect Google Ads to Google Analytics as a start, and also make sure you’re accurately tracking new appointments (how to do this will depend on the appointment booking tool you’re using, as well as the website builder). If you need support with this, book a free consultation call with me here.
Beyond just the number of calls being booked, you should also monitor a few basic things for your ads/ad groups:
Click through rate (CTR): this is the percent of people that are clicking through to your website after seeing your ad. A good CTR depends on your keywords, but if they’re all high-intent searches (e.g. “wedding photographer near me”), a good CTR is typically at least 3-5%. If it’s lower than this, likely your ads aren’t persuasive enough.
Conversion rate (CR or CVR): for you, this would be the percent of people that book appointments after visiting your website (i.e. # number of booked appointments divided by website page visits times 100). ~2% would be acceptable. A low CVR suggests your website isn’t optimized well enough, i.e. people are visiting but aren’t persuaded to book an appointment.
Review your search terms report: inside Google Ads you can see what people are actually searching for to see your ad. If you see anything irrelevant, add it to your list of negative keywords.
You can also visit the Recommendations tab in your Google Ads account, where Google will suggest some improvements to help your campaigns. Some of them might be straightforward, some might be confusing at first. But be mindful that these recommendations are not always beneficial for your exact setup and often can cause you to spend a lot of budget on irrelevant things.
How much should you spend on Google Ads?
You can be successful with as little as $10 USD/day but I’d recommend starting with a minimum of $15/day. This is a very ballpark figure and varies hugely depending on what city you’re targeting and what keywords you’re targeting. If you want to target people in Los Angeles, you have way more competition and $5/day won’t get you very far compared to targeting Montana.
And outside the US, you’ll probably be okay spending even less. But really, the more you can afford to spend, the better.
Like other advertising platforms, Google Ads uses an algorithm to optimize your ads, using past campaign data to figure out who to show your ads to in order to get you your desired objective (it’s way more complicated with a thousand factors that play into it, but I’ll keep it simple).
So the more data you have in your ads account, the better your future performance will be. If you’re starting from scratch, the only way to get that past data is just to start spending. (Although make sure you use this guide to set up ads properly even when you’re starting out!)
Most importantly, though, start with what you’re comfortable with. There’s no sure-fire guarantee of success running ads, so consider that you might not get even one client and all your budget will be wasted.
Should you run Google Ads yourself?
Google Ads aren’t particularly difficult to get started with, especially for wedding photographers who have relatively simple goals.
But the mistakes you might make by running Google Ads without any experience could be pretty huge. If you accidentally set your daily budget too high, Google will eat through your budget in no time. Or you could waste half your budget on irrelevant searches. Or you could have great ads and great targeting but your well-funded competitors are just outbidding you so you have to pay a lot for every click you get.
Related:
Google Ads Support from Watts Ahead Marketing
If you’re looking for someone to support you setting up Google Ads, my prices start as low as $500 USD to set up Google Ads from scratch using your existing website landing pages. My service includes:
Keyword research to identify the best opportunities to get you affordable, high-quality leads
Ad copywriting to launch with persuasive, engaging ads
Campaign setup using industry best practices to out-compete your competitors
Free landing page audit and list of recommendations to improve conversion rate
First month of campaign optimization for free
Get in touch with me for a free consultation call to see how I can help your business.
