Campaigns built for a six-square-mile city that sells into a much wider corridor.
Summit is roughly six square miles. Almost no business here sells only inside those lines, and almost no default Google Ads setup handles that well. A radius wide enough to include Berkeley Heights and Chatham also pulls in Newark, Elizabeth and Plainfield, where the jobs and the intent look nothing alike. Geography is the first thing we fix in a Summit account.
Paid search does work here. Union County demand for home services, medical and dental procedures and professional services is steady, and household incomes support the kind of job values that justify a real click cost. It is a poor fit for a business with no capacity to take on more work, and we will say so.
Management is a flat monthly fee separate from spend, run in your own Google Ads account, with monthly reporting you can actually read.
Competition comes from every direction and from close range. Union County has twenty-one municipalities, and Essex and Morris County towns sit right on the border, so a roofer in Springfield, a dentist in Millburn and a med spa in Chatham all bid against you from under ten minutes away. Cost per click runs high enough that a wide radius wastes money fast.
Search timing follows the Midtown Direct schedule. Traffic from Summit households clusters before seven in the morning and again after seven at night, when people are on the platform at Union Place or home from Penn Station. Standard business-hours ad scheduling misses a real share of that, and so does a phone line nobody answers after five.
Category economics vary sharply. Overlook Medical Center supports specialty practices where one new patient justifies a high cost per lead. Boutique retail on Springfield Avenue usually cannot make search ads pay at all and does better with organic and social. We look at the value of a single customer before recommending any budget.
Most local categories need fifteen hundred to three thousand a month in spend before the data means anything. Specialty medical and high-value renovation terms need more. If your budget sits under that, we usually recommend fixing reviews and the site first.
We target by municipality rather than by radius, exclude locations that never convert, and review the geographic report every month. Summit sits close enough to Newark, Elizabeth and Plainfield that default settings leak budget almost immediately.
For eligible trades and some professional categories, yes. They charge per lead instead of per click and appear above the map, and the verification badge carries weight with Summit homeowners. We usually test them alongside search rather than replacing it.
Usually not. For boutique retail and restaurants on Springfield Avenue, search ads rarely cover the margin. Reviews, photos, local organic search and social generally do more. We would rather tell you that than run a campaign that quietly loses money.
You do. Billing, history and conversion data stay in your name, and our fee does not scale with your spend, so there is no reason for us to inflate budgets.
New Providence, Berkeley Heights, Chatham, Springfield, Millburn, Madison
