In the spring of 2025, we developed a Google Ads management strategy for a Minneapolis-based managed services provider (MSP). The plan targeted accounting firms across the US and was paired with an MSP search engine optimization (SEO) strategy targeting nine other industries. To date, the Google Ads strategy together with well-defined SEO have contributed to over $500K in the pipeline for this MSP.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the step-by-step process we used to build and execute our MSP Google Ads strategy. By following the steps outlined, you’ll have a proven framework your own MSP can apply to drive similar results.
The average MSP survives on easy-to-close leads from repeat referrals and sporadic advertising. If you’re ready to truly scale your business, it’s time to look at Google Ads.
A pay-per-click (PPC) campaign allows IT service providers to cut to the front of search results and attract in-market buyers. These inbound leads typically close at a 20% rate or higher. This is far above the conversion rates of leads generated through cold calling, thereby justifying the investment. For MSPs that are serious about generating leads, MSP Google Ads services are one of the first digital marketing channels we recommend businesses use (second only to SEO).
On average, for every million people that live in your city, there are roughly 500 to 1,000 people actively searching for managed IT services every month. Some of these prospects are window-shopping for an upcoming request for proposal (government agencies, nonprofits, etc.), while others have a red-hot need for IT help.
No matter where they are in the buyer's journey, these searchers present a strong opportunity for your company to help them identify, evaluate, and resolve their technology needs.
Managed IT service providers often struggle to differentiate their offerings from those of their competitors. As a result, they are forced to compete primarily on price. To avoid a race to the bottom of the cost ladder, you need to clearly define who in your market has a need that you can uniquely solve.
In the Minneapolis agency mentioned above, part of the onboarding process was to review sales calls and any first-party data that was available about their target audience. This research, though laborious, can uncover hidden gems that show why customers have selected your services. These clues are foundational for identifying your product-market fit.
After conducting a thorough analysis of their customer base we found that approximately 20% of their clients were accounting firms. We now knew that accounting firms found our client’s services particularly valuable for the needs of their firms. We weren’t sure why, however, so we did some digging on Reddit. After combing through hundreds of conversations, we found that accounting and CPA firms have two primary IT pain points: reducing cyber liability and improving workplace productivity during their busy season. After reviewing this research with our client, we learned that these problems were particularly acute for hybrid teams using a VPN to access a shared remote desktop. Our client had a proprietary solution containing a suite of cybersecurity tools and an Azure virtual desktop that helped accounting firms secure sensitive data and support hybrid work without VPN complexity.
For the best results, your MSP Adwords strategy should have some guardrails. The first and arguably most important constraint is your geographic area of focus. As an MSP, it might be tempting to say, "Well, I can service businesses anywhere in the world with remote support. A lot of businesses are work-from-home these days anyway".
That might be true. But not all high intent MSP leads have the same long term value. For example, if a company in New York issues a request for proposal and receives competitive bids from five firms in New York and one in Ohio, who do you think is most likely to win? They’ll almost certainly choose to work with a firm in their own state.
Therefore, when setting your geographic focus, it's important to consider the area you can most competently serve and the area that will also contribute the highest close rate. We've heard of an MSP losing a bid because they were five miles away from the customer's city! That’s an extreme example, but for some clients location is very important when choosing contractors.
It’s important to understand your audience and how important locality is for them, but as a general rule of thumb, focus your ad campaign on your state’s main city or the nearest major city nearby. If you live in a low-population state, you can expand this to cover the state as a whole.
Our favorite method for reaching a target audience, regardless of the platform, is industry-based targeting. By focusing your marketing efforts on a specific industry, you can tailor your messaging to a degree that would otherwise not be possible. When your audience hears you talk about their specific pain points and how you can help solve them, their ears perk up.
Businesses prefer to work with other businesses that specialize in their niche. Once we discovered that our Minneapolis client was already successfully addressing pain points for CPAs and accounting firms, we focused their Google Ads campaign on accounting firms across the entire US.
The fact that approximately 2,900 people in the US search each month for an MSP that specializes in servicing accounting firms further supports this decision.
Think of Google Adwords as the fishing pole and your offer as the worm on the hook. If you have a fat, juicy, live worm you will undoubtedly catch more fish than if you’re using a dirty, half-torn, plastic worm. The same is true for your MSP advertising strategy. The better the offer the higher the conversion rate.
When possible, it's great to have at least two offers—a middle-of-funnel offer (low friction) and a bottom-of-funnel offer (high friction). This way, you can convert inbound traffic regardless of where they are in their buying journey and improve your overall conversion rates.
For our client’s low-friction offer, we created an “Ultimate Guide to Cybersecurity for Accounting Firms.” This lead magnet was a professionally designed, high-quality, 12-page booklet covering everything a CPA or accounting firm needs to know about cybersecurity fundamentals and the FTC Safeguards Rule.
In addition, we also created a high-friction offer for a free cybersecurity assessment. Potential clients who accepted this offer had to interact with the MSP personally and share some of their company information, a significantly greater investment than simply requesting the guidebook. To make the offer more compelling, we later expanded this assessment to include a Level-1 penetration test, which we offered at no additional cost to qualified prospects.
Some of us had the opportunity to sit in on a few sales calls from prospects that converted from our campaign. It was very interesting to observe that most of the accounting firms our client spoke with already had a managed services provider, but they didn't feel their current MSP was doing enough on the cybersecurity side.
We also listened in on a call in which a Director of Operations said she had accidentally clicked on a phishing email the day before. Her relationship with her existing MSP was so poor that she was consulting our client on what to do to ensure her device wasn't infected with malware.
After you’ve done your research to narrow down what sorts of customers you should target and in what geographical area, you can prepare to launch your Google Ads campaign. In order to achieve the best possible return on investment, it’s important to lay some groundwork before launching. We’ve laid out a list of best-practice steps for you to follow.
To set your campaign up for success, start with the end in mind. Before you spend a dollar, answer three questions:
• What is a new customer worth to your business?
• How much are you willing to spend to acquire one?
• How many new customers do you need, and by when?
These answers define the economics of your campaign and set a realistic budget for this marketing channel.
Your exact numbers will vary, but the following is an example of how to determine your Google Ads budget.
If your average client pays $2,000 per month and stays for three years, the lifetime value of a customer is $72,000.
For most IT service providers, a healthy customer acquisition cost is around 25% of first-year revenue. In this case, that means you should be comfortable spending roughly $6,000 in advertising to acquire a new client.
Now work backward.
If your business closes 20% of qualified leads, you can afford to spend $1,200 per qualified lead and still hit your target.
Most MSP Google Ads campaigns see an average cost per click (CPC) of about $20. At that rate, your campaign needs to generate a qualified lead in fewer than 60 clicks, which translates to a 1.5% conversion rate (clicks to new contact).
Defining these numbers up front gives you clear benchmarks. As the campaign runs, you can quickly see what’s working, what isn’t, and where adjustments are needed to stay profitable. If your goal is to close $20K in net new monthly recurring revenue from Google Ads in 12 months, you need to spend $60K on your advertising campaign. This translates to $5,000 per month, or a daily budget of about $167.
Now that your budget is clearly defined, you’re ready to create your first campaign.
Google Ads offers several types of campaign objectives, such as Sales, Website traffic, and so forth. When creating your campaign, we recommend choosing the Leads objective. For most MSP clients, this objective consistently produces solid results and aligns closely with how IT services are actually sold.
The Website traffic objective can work in some cases, but based on our experience with managed service providers, starting with Leads is a more reliable approach.
Google Ads also offers several campaign types, but not all of them are a good fit for managed IT services.
Here’s a quick overview of the main options:
Search
Text ads that appear when someone searches for specific keywords.
Performance Max
AI-driven campaigns that run across all Google channels to maximize conversions.
Demand Gen
Image and video ads designed to generate and capture demand across YouTube, Google Discover, and Google Display.
Video
Video ads that run on YouTube to drive awareness, consideration, or conversions.
Display
Visual ads shown across millions of websites and apps, typically used for awareness or retargeting.
Shopping
Product ads pulled from Google Merchant Center that appear in Google Shopping and Search results.
For MSP clients just getting started with Google Ads, we strongly recommend Search campaigns. They offer the most control over targeting, keywords, and bidding, and they capture prospects who are actively looking for IT services. This makes Search the most predictable and manageable option for most MSPs, especially in the early stages.
Below are the additional campaign settings we recommend for MSP Google Ads campaigns:
Bidding focus
Set your focus to Clicks. This gives you control early on while Google collects data. Enable a maximum CPC bid limit and set it to $20. This helps prevent overspending while the campaign stabilizes.
Networks
Turn off Google Search Partners Network.
Turn off Google Display Network.
These networks often drive low-quality traffic for MSP campaigns and are better excluded at the start.
Location targeting
Set your location using the geographic constraints you determined earlier. In our case study, our client was targeting the entire United States. For most MSP clients, however, we recommend limiting targeting to the primary city or metro area the MSP actually serves. Tighter geography almost always leads to higher-quality leads.
Final URL
Add your destination URL. For now, use your main website. In Step 6, you’ll create a dedicated landing page designed specifically for your campaign.
Next, we recommend conducting keyword research and organizing related keywords into ad groups. Think of ad groups as categories that group keywords with the same or very similar search intent.
For example, keywords that include “managed IT” or “managed IT services” belong in one ad group. Keywords such as “cybersecurity consultants” or “managed cybersecurity” should be placed in a separate ad group. While these services are often sold together by MSPs, Google treats them very differently. Each group reflects a distinct search intent, and mixing them typically leads to weaker ad relevance and higher costs.
Keeping ad groups tightly focused allows you to write more relevant ads, improve your Google Ads Quality Score, and control costs more effectively.
For example, when our Minneapolis client decided to target accounting firms, we used keywords such as:
Once you’ve built your keyword list, export it to a Google Sheet for easy organization and review. Then return to your campaign and create an ad group using the keywords you identified. Repeat this process for each keyword category, creating as many ad groups as needed to keep keywords tightly grouped by intent.
Well-structured ad groups make it easier to write relevant ads, improve performance, and control costs as the campaign scales.
When it comes to bidding, you generally have two options: automated bidding or manual bidding. Based on our experience with MSP Adwords management, manual bidding is the most cost-effective approach in the majority of cases. Manual bidding gives you direct control over CPC, allowing you to increase bids on keywords that convert better or consistently drive higher monthly recurring revenue.
For example, companies searching for co-managed IT services are typically larger organizations with an existing internal IT team. That usually translates to higher seat counts and larger contract values. With manual bidding, you can prioritize these higher-value keywords and ensure your MSP appears in top positions for co-managed IT searches, rather than letting Google automatically distribute spend across lower-value traffic.
Creating an effective Google Search ad requires relevance and clarity at every level. Each element of the ad, along with the landing page it points to, should align closely with the searcher’s intent.
For our client’s campaign, “IT support for accountants” had the highest search volume, making it the primary keyword. We placed “IT Support for Accountants” in Headline 1 to clearly signal to both the searcher and Google that the ad directly matched what they were looking for. Headline 2 included a clear call to action to encourage clicks through to the landing page.
The ad copy focused on pain points that resonate strongly with accounting firms, such as non-billable hours and lost productivity caused by poorly managed IT. These challenges are well understood within the accounting industry, so we reinforced them consistently across both the ad copy and the landing page to maintain message alignment and relevance.
Navigate within your Google Ads account to Tools and select Keyword Planner. Use this tool to research keywords, review estimated search volume, and understand the expected CPC for each query.
If you specialize in a specific industry, we recommend combining industry-specific terms with your core service keywords. This often attracts higher-intent prospects and reduces wasted spend.
In general, the most effective way to maximize lead generation from an MSP Google Ads campaign is to send traffic to a dedicated landing page. This can be a modified version of your homepage or a page tailored specifically to the offer and audience you’re targeting.
As a best practice, we recommend using a simple, distraction-free header on the landing page. This keeps visitors focused on the message and the primary call to action.
Your primary keyword should also be included in the page title, H1, meta description, and within the first 100 words of copy. This alignment helps improve landing page relevance and contributes to a stronger landing page performance within Google Ads.
After you launch your campaign, let it run for 48 hours. At that point, it's important to adjust CPC bids manually until bidding higher begins to give you a diminishing return on clicks and impressions. Bid management is an ongoing, iterative process that requires close coordination between marketing and sales to understand both the quality and volume of leads the campaign is producing.
In some cases, it makes sense to bid higher than what appears statistically optimal if such a strategy results in more monthly recurring revenue. At the end of the day, revenue is what matters most.
Once your campaign is live, it’s essential to actively monitor performance and have clear processes in place for handling new leads. Effective ongoing MSP adwords management depends on two core routines: continuous optimization and thoughtful lead nurturing.
If you don't have Microsoft Clarity installed on your website, add it now. It's a free tool that provides invaluable insight as to what your site's traffic is doing: where they click, how much time they spend on different parts of your site, and so on.
Our Minneapolis client found that their campaign’s landing page experience (Google's definition of how satisfied the traffic is with your landing page) was fine and didn't require significant modifications.
A prospect needs to get to know you, like you, and trust you before they are ready to buy. Every lead, regardless of the offer they converted on, was enrolled in two different workflows in HubSpot by our Minneapolis MSP.
The first workflow included seven marketing emails focused on cybersecurity best practices for accounting firms. Each email contained a hot tip from the “Ultimate Guide” lead magnet and included a cybersecurity offer at the bottom.
The second workflow was to follow up with the lead using a direct one-to-one email sequence from an account executive. For leads who downloaded the gated asset, this workflow focused on asking about cybersecurity initiatives and further investigating whether they had any questions about the content in the free guide.
Leads who requested to book a meeting were enrolled in a similar follow-up sequence, but these meetings were scheduled with a sales representative. We advised the sales reps to call every inbound lead who requested a meeting within an hour of converting (some guidelines suggest within 5 minutes!). We later adjusted this process by adding a self-scheduling link to the bottom-of-funnel form. This gave the sales reps some leeway and helped prevent leads from falling through the cracks.
Later in the campaign, we added a third workflow that sent a social media connection request and a message to the lead via LinkedIn automation. This provided an additional point of contact.
After three months, the campaign generated 25 leads and $32,000 in the pipeline. Across Google and LinkedIn, our client spent $4,000 in advertising, which means that for every $1 of ad spend, $8 of pipeline was generated.
The trade-off of running an industry-focused campaign is that performance will naturally follow the seasonal rhythms of that industry. For example, accounting and CPA firms are notoriously difficult to reach at year-end and throughout the spring tax season, when attention is almost entirely on client work.
As a general rule, it's usually better not to shut a campaign off entirely during these slower periods. Instead, reduce bids and scale back spending so you remain visible without forcing performance that doesn't align with current industry activity.
MSP Google Ads management and well-thought-out SEO should be the marketing foundation for your MSP. High-quality inbound leads are the easiest to convert and require the least investment from an overall sales and marketing perspective.