Search campaigns for agricultural dealers: the keyword structure that stops wasted clicks

Written by Michael Nadalin, CEO and Founder · 30 Sept 2026 · 7 min read

Where does a dealer's Google Ads budget actually go?

I've audited a lot of Google Ads accounts for agricultural machinery dealers. The pattern is nearly always the same. There's one campaign, maybe two, with a handful of broad keywords like "tractors", "hay equipment" and a couple of brand names. Everything is lumped together.

Then I open the search terms report. That's where you see what the money was really spent on. Someone looking for a workshop manual. A bloke in Dubbo searching for tractor driving jobs. A grandparent after a ride-on toy tractor for Christmas. Every one of those clicks cost somewhere between $1.50 and $6, and not one of them was ever going to buy a $180,000 header.

In my experience, 30 to 50 percent of spend in an unstructured dealer account goes on searches with no chance of turning into a sale. It isn't really a bidding problem. The keyword structure is what's broken, and fixing it is the cheapest win in agriculture marketing.

The structure I use: split campaigns by what the buyer is ready to do

Don't organise campaigns around your product catalogue. Organise them around intent. Someone typing a specific model and "for sale" is weeks from buying. Someone typing "best tractor for small farm" is months away. They deserve different budgets, different ads and different landing pages.

I build dealer accounts in five campaign types, and I fund them in this order. The top two get fed first and never get starved to pay for the bottom ones. If budget is tight, the competitor campaign is the first one I switch off.

Each campaign gets tight ad groups of 5 to 15 keywords sharing one theme. "Used tractors 100 to 150hp" is an ad group. "Tractors" is not.

Match types and negatives: the fence around the paddock

Google has spent years pushing everyone toward broad match. For a dealer with a modest budget, I think that's mostly bad advice. I run phrase and exact match on the hot campaigns and only test broad once there's conversion data for Smart Bidding to learn from, and that data needs to be actual sales, not form fills.

Negative keywords matter just as much. I load every new dealer account with a shared negative list before a single dollar is spent, then I go through the search terms report every week for the first two months. After that it drops to fortnightly. It's tedious. It's also where the savings are.

One call you need to make deliberately: keep parts and service out of your machinery campaigns. If you want parts leads, give them their own campaign with its own budget. Otherwise a $4 click from someone after a fan belt is eating the budget meant for someone after a seeder.

Should your keywords change with the season?

Yes. A structure that suits May is wrong for November. Rural buyers follow the season, and the good dealers I work with shift budget between ad groups ahead of each window instead of leaving the same split running all year.

The main rule is to be early. Nobody researches a new boomspray the week spraying starts. They do it six to ten weeks before, usually while they're talking to their agronomist and their accountant. If your hay and harvest ad groups only switch on in October, you've already missed the farmers who decided in August.

Track it to the sale, or you're optimising for the wrong thing

Here's where most agencies stop short. They report cost per lead and call it a win. A lead for a $400 service booking and a lead for a $350,000 header look exactly the same in Google Ads unless you tell it otherwise.

In my experience, category campaigns might turn out leads at $40 to $90 each while model campaigns sit at $100 to $250. On a dashboard the category campaign looks like the hero. Once you match those leads to invoices in the CRM, the model campaign regularly comes out ahead on revenue because far more of its leads become sales-qualified leads.

So we set up call tracking, pass every enquiry into the dealer's CRM, and send the sold deals back into Google Ads as offline conversions with their value. It takes a few weeks to set up and 60 to 90 days of data before it tells you much. After that the bidding chases farm equipment leads that buy, not ones that just fill out forms. The same sales data also makes your Meta Ads retargeting sharper.

Written by

Michael Nadalin

Founder, Market Lead & Harvest Lead

Michael is the founder of both Market Lead and Harvest Lead, building lead and sales systems for agriculture and machinery businesses across Australia and the USA.