Two things make the Gold Coast different to run paid search in, and most accounts we inherit have been caught by both. The city ends at a state border that Google is happy to advertise straight across, and it carries a visitor population large enough that a default location setting will spend your budget on people who fly home on Sunday. As a Google Ads agency here (the platform plenty of people still call AdWords), we build around those 2 facts first, then run Search, Shopping and Performance Max on a flat $750+GST per month. Enquiries means a call, a form submission or a phone-link click, and that is the only number we report on. We also run paid search across Brisbane and on the Sunshine Coast.
Campaigns are built suburb by suburb, from Coomera and Helensvale down through Southport, Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach to Burleigh, Palm Beach and Coolangatta, with the NSW side excluded by name rather than trusted to a radius. Narrow themed ad groups beat one broad bucket on local terms, and a tight campaign paired with a real Google Business Profile regularly outranks bigger sites that are bidding wider.
If you sell products rather than book jobs, Shopping and Performance Max put your range in front of people already at the buying stage, and the visitor traffic that hurts a trades account can help a retail one. To be straight about the proof: the ecommerce account we can point to is an interstate retailer, not a Gold Coast business, and it returned 3.01x ROAS across a 30-day window.
Every ad group gets a page that answers the exact search behind it, instead of dropping traffic on a homepage and hoping. Tracking is wired so a call, a form and a phone tap each register as their own conversion action, which is what makes a cost per enquiry mean anything. On a South Australian roofing account we manage, that figure sits between $55.31 and $75.79.
The Tweed. Coolangatta and Tweed Heads are one town with a state line through the middle of it. Any radius wide enough to cover the southern Gold Coast is also buying clicks in NSW, and for a Queensland-licensed trade those are enquiries you have to decline after you have already paid for them.
The default location setting. Google targets people in your area plus anyone showing interest in it unless you tell it otherwise. For a resident-facing business on the Gold Coast, that setting is an expensive way to reach holidaymakers. We switch it to presence only, unless visitors genuinely are your market.
Treating the north like the beachfront. Coomera, Pimpama and Ormeau are a fast-growing residential corridor with a different customer, a different set of competitors and different click costs to Broadbeach or Main Beach. One campaign covering both averages the 2 and wins neither.
Event weeks nobody planned for. Schoolies in late November and event weekends like the Gold Coast 600 move both search volume and competition. We look at what your own account did last time before deciding whether to lean in or pull back, rather than applying a rule of thumb.
Sizing up the northern end of the region as well? The Sunshine Coast page covers how that market differs.
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