Ads

Attract NDIS participants with Google Ads.

Google Ads puts you in front of people who are already looking for a provider. Here is how the platform actually works, and where the budget goes if the account is set up badly.

18 March 2025 Chris Lapa 6 min read

Around thirty NDIS providers seated at round tables watching a presenter work through a slide at a CL Growth Academy summit.

01 · The mechanics

How Google Ads actually works

Google Ads runs on pay per click. Your ad can show to anyone searching a term you have bid on, and you pay only when somebody clicks it. That one fact is what separates it from every other channel on this site. You are not buying attention. You are buying the last few seconds before a decision.

Keywords are the whole foundation

The terms that matter to a provider are the ones a family types when they have run out of patience. NDIS support services. Disability support Parramatta. NDIS therapy services. Longer phrases work harder than short ones: NDIS support for autism in Blacktown brings fewer people and a much higher proportion of the right ones.

The auction, and why your bid is not the whole story

When somebody searches, Google runs an auction. Where your ad lands depends on what you bid and on Quality Score, which is Google's read on how relevant your ad and your landing page are to what was actually typed. A high Quality Score buys a better position for less money. A low one means paying more to sit lower, which is the expensive way to find out that your landing page does not match your ad.

You set what you are willing to pay per click. What it costs to hold the top spot is set by the market, so the more providers bidding on a term, the more that term costs.

Formats

Text ads reach people who are searching right now, and for a provider that is where the enquiries are. Display ads build recognition. Video can show the team and the room. I start with text, because it is the only one of the three that catches somebody mid decision.

A results page, top to bottom. The paid row sits above the organic ones, and attention runs out on the way down. Position is not a vanity metric here. It is most of the clicks.

02 · Setup

Setting the account up

An account that is hard to read is an account nobody optimises. The structure is worth getting right on day one, because everything you do afterwards depends on being able to see which part is working.

Structure

One campaign per service or per audience. Ad groups inside each one, built around a single keyword theme. It sounds fussy. It is the difference between knowing that support coordination is bringing enquiries at $40 each, and knowing only that the ads cost you $2,000 last month.

Keyword research, and the half people skip

Google Keyword Planner gives you search volume and suggestions, and that part is straightforward. The half that gets skipped is negative keywords, the terms you refuse to show for. Without them you pay for people searching NDIS jobs, people looking up the price guide, and every student researching an assignment. The negative list is what stops a budget leaking.

The ad, and where the click lands

Write the ad to the search rather than to the brand. Say what you do, where you do it, and what happens next. Then send the click to a page that answers the same question the ad was written for. A click that lands on a homepage and has to go looking is a click you paid for and lost. It will be on a phone, so that page has to work there first.

A provider asking a question from the floor at a CL Growth Academy session. — Questions from the room at a CL Growth Academy session. The ones about Google Ads are almost always about money going out with nothing coming back.

The account is rarely the thing that is broken. The page the click lands on usually is.
Chris Lapa

03 · Measurement

Knowing whether it worked

Conversion tracking goes in before a single dollar goes out. Form submissions, phone calls, and the enquiries that arrive by neither. Without it you are reading clicks, and a click is not an enquiry.

Then test one thing at a time. Two headlines against each other, or two landing pages, or two audiences. Change three things at once and you learn nothing reliable about any of them.

Watch it weekly at the start and monthly once it settles. Google's automated bidding is genuinely good, and it is good only once the account has enough conversions to learn from, which is a few weeks in rather than on day one.

Chart of cost per enquiry falling, then flattening onto a floor — Cost per enquiry as an account gathers data. It falls, then it flattens onto a floor set by how many other providers are bidding on the same terms. A bigger budget does not move that floor.

The short version

Buying the last ten seconds before a decision.

If you take three things from this piece, take these.

Text ads first. They are the only format that catches somebody mid decision.
A negative keyword list from day one. It is what stops the budget leaking.
Conversion tracking before spend, so you are reading enquiries and not clicks.

See how I run this →

04 · Why it works

What it gives you that the other channels do not

Every channel on this site does something the others cannot. This is what this one is for.

Reach aimed at intent. You appear for people already looking for a provider, rather than for people who might want one some day.
Numbers you can act on. Spend, clicks, enquiries and cost per enquiry, campaign by campaign.
A tap you can turn. Beds full, pause it. New service area, point it there this afternoon.
Speed. SEO takes months to move. This starts working the day it is switched on.

05 · Pitfalls

Where the money actually goes

When I audit a provider's account, the waste is almost never exotic. It is one of these four.

Guessed keywords. The wrong terms bring the wrong people, and you are paying per head.
A budget too thin to learn from. Spread across ten keywords, an account never gathers enough data to improve.
No negative keyword list. This is the leak I find most often, and the cheapest one to close.
Nobody reading the numbers. An account left alone does not hold steady. It drifts.

06 · Doing it yourself

Running it yourself, and when to bring someone in

You can run this yourself. Google's own tutorials are good, the interface is not hard, and a small single service account is a reasonable place to learn what the numbers mean.

Bring somebody in when the account is more than you have hours for, or when it has been running for months without getting better. What you are paying for is the reading of it: ad copy that earns its Quality Score, a targeting strategy rather than a keyword list, split tests that answer one question at a time, and somebody who will tell you when a campaign should be switched off.

If the enquiries are arriving and then going nowhere, the account is not your problem. That is the enquiry process, and it is a different fix.

07 · Questions

Questions I get asked

Is Google Ads expensive?

You pay only when somebody clicks, and you set the budget, so that figure is the ceiling on what you can spend. What you pay per click is the part you do not fully control: you name the maximum, and the market decides what the top position actually costs. The more providers bidding on a term, the more that term costs to win.

How long before I see results?

It varies with your service and how many others are bidding. With the tracking in place and the account tidied, a few weeks is a fair expectation before the numbers mean anything. Anyone promising you enquiries in week one is guessing.

Can I run Google Ads myself?

Yes. Google publishes plenty of tutorials and the interface is designed to be used by people who are not specialists. Where it gets hard is a multi service account, or one that needs to improve rather than simply run.

Are there alternatives?

Social media ads reach families before they start searching, which is a different job and a useful one. SEO catches the same searches Google Ads does, without the click cost, and it takes months rather than days. The three work best together, and the order depends on whether you need enquiries this month or a year from now.

How do I get started?

Open an account at ads.google.com and work through Google's setup. Before you switch anything on, get conversion tracking working and write your first negative keyword list. Those two steps are worth more than a bigger budget.

Google Ads is one channel of seven. If you would rather have the whole pipeline run as one plan, that is Managed Growth.

Want your ad account looked at before you spend another month on it?

The audit is free.

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