Google ads: does the intent exist, and in what quantity

Advertising on a search engine has almost nothing in common with advertising on a social network, and yet both are sold by the same people in the same meeting.

On a network you interrupt somebody who was not looking for anything and you have to stop their thumb. Here you answer a question somebody has just typed, in their own words, at a moment they chose. There is no creative to get right: there is a place to take.

That is what makes this platform formidably effective when it works, and completely useless when the question is not being asked. And that is precisely the part nobody checks before opening an account.

This article therefore starts there, with the prior question that decides everything else, and it quotes no search volumes for Algeria: we know of no dated, checkable series, and you can measure your own for free.

A search account has a default behaviour worth understanding before funding it: it broadens. You buy one phrase, and it bills you for neighbouring phrases it judges related.

That relatedness is sometimes useful and often absurd. The search terms report — the most important screen in the tool and the least consulted — shows you what was actually typed. It contains students’ homework, job hunting, competitors’ names, and questions meant for another trade.

The discipline that makes an account profitable is one weekly habit: open that report, read the real terms, and exclude. An account with no exclusion list is not an optimised account, it is an account nobody has opened since day one.

In this market the proportion of irrelevant terms is especially high, for a mechanical reason: the same words serve French, Arabic and transliterated dialect, and the overlaps are numerous. Cleaning is not a refinement, it is half the work.

One budget consequence often ignored: the first three weeks cost more per result than the ones after, and that is normal. A supplier promising a stable cost from day one is describing an account they have not yet opened.

In most documentation, the conversion of a search campaign is a completed form. Here it is usually a telephone ringing, and that changes several operating decisions.

The internet market observatory published by ARPCE counts, for the second quarter of 2025, some 59.10 million internet subscriptions in Algeria, of which 88.71% are mobile and 11.29% fixed.

The consequence is not only that the advertisement will be seen on a small screen: it is that the device displaying your advertisement is also a telephone. The distance between intent and a call is one gesture, and it is the most profitable gesture on the market.

Hence two concrete decisions. First: run the ads during the hours when somebody picks up. A campaign running at ten on a Friday night spends budget against a ringing telephone in an empty room, and that is measurable in the call reports.

Second: use a number distinct from the one on your sign, or record the origin at every call. Without that you will know how many clicks you paid for and never how many customers they produced — and that is the only question that matters.

There is a practical obstacle to this spend that does not exist on the others, and keeping quiet about it serves nobody: settling a foreign platform from Algeria is complicated, and the arrangements used create one specific risk.

The commonest arrangement is to go through somebody else’s card — an agency, a relative, an intermediary. It works for the billing, and it regularly produces a situation where the advertising account is not in your name.

The consequence is the one described in the article on Facebook advertising, only harder: that account holds the history that lowers your costs, the exclusion lists built week after week, and your conversion data. Losing it means losing the work rather than the tool.

The rule we apply: the account is created in the company’s name, with a company email address, whatever card settles it. The payment method is an administrative detail; the account holder is not.

So ask to see, before any payment, who owns the account and who is listed as an administrator. It is a ten-second question, and the awkwardness it sometimes causes is itself an answer.

What we will refuse: opening a search campaign when the monthly volume does not justify one. We check before the quotation, it has already made us walk away from comfortable budgets, and the honest alternative is often a corrected business listing and nothing else.

We will refuse to run ads to a home page. If the subject being bought has no page giving a price, a delivery time and a way to call, we build that page or we do not run the campaign — because otherwise we would be billing for clicks in order to throw them away.

We will refuse to mix every placement in the first month, to promise a cost per customer before three weeks of cleaning, and to run an account whose holder is not your company, whatever the payment method used.

What we do: the volume measured before any budget; three sets of phrases for three languages, transliterated dialect included; the terms report read every week with an exclusion list you can inspect; and the schedule set to the hours when somebody picks up the telephone.

And what you should do without us this week: open the planning tool, type the five ways somebody might search for your trade, and note the volumes. Then reread your last twenty incoming messages and pull out the words actually used. Two hours, no money, and you will know whether there is a campaign to run.