Google Ads for farm equipment and machinery dealers

Search is where machinery demand is most obvious and most expensive to get wrong. Somebody typing "portable sheep loading ramp" is a buyer. Somebody typing "sheep ramp" might be a buyer, a student, or a bloke pricing a weld job.

The search terms are the whole game

On a machinery account the difference between a profitable month and a wasted one is usually a dozen search terms. The queries that carry purchase intent are specific: a machine type, a size, a capacity, sometimes a price. The queries that drain budget are generic versions of the same words.

Here is a real cut from an Australian trailer and equipment account we manage, taken from a 30 day search-term pull. The pattern is the point, not the individual numbers:

Reference: Google Ads Help: About the search terms report, Google Ads Help: About negative keywords

Read the top and bottom rows together. "Portable sheep loading ramp" and "sheep ramp" are the same product. One converted, one did not, and the difference is that the first query names a form factor the buyer has already decided on. That is what a buyer sounds like.

No keyword tool tells you this. It only shows up in the search-term report of a real machinery account, reviewed every week, with the browsing queries negatived out one at a time.

How we structure a machinery account

• Brand protected and measured separately. On most machinery accounts brand terms carry the majority of tracked conversions. Leaving them mixed in with everything else makes the whole account look healthier than it is and hides the non-brand problem.
• One ad group per machine type, not per theme. The specs in the ad have to match the specs in the query, or the click is wasted before it lands.
• Exact and phrase carry the money. Broad match is used deliberately and monitored weekly, not switched on and left.
• Performance Max fenced in. PMax will happily spend a machinery budget on cheap traffic. It needs a clean feed, explicit exclusions and its own search-term review through campaign_search_term_view.
• Negatives as a standing discipline. Second hand, hire, parts, repairs, jobs, DIY plans, and every generic version of your product name unless you have proven it converts.

Bidding on low volume, high value

Most machinery accounts do not have the conversion volume for Target ROAS to work properly. Smart bidding needs data, and 30 conversions a month spread across eight machine types is not data, it is noise.

We generally start manual or maximise clicks with tight budgets to gather clean signal, move to Target CPA once the conversion action is trustworthy, and only consider value-based bidding when offline conversion values are flowing back reliably. Switching on Target ROAS over a form-fill conversion is how accounts end up optimising toward brochure downloads.

Tracking to the sale, not the form fill

This is the step most machinery accounts skip, and it is the one that changes the outcome. We wire your CRM back to Google Ads with offline conversion imports, so when a quote becomes an invoice the platform learns which click produced it.

Without it, Google optimises toward whoever fills in forms most readily. With it, Google optimises toward whoever buys. On a product with a five-figure or six-figure order value, those are completely different people.

Reference: Google Ads Help: About offline conversion imports