Search Intent For People Who Pay Per Click

There’s a version of Google Ads failure that confuses people more than any other.

The ads work. The clicks arrive. The traffic graph goes up and to the right.

And the phone doesn’t ring.

Almost every time we investigate that, the answer is the same. The account is buying the wrong intent.

Now, plenty has been written about search intent. Nearly all of it is written for SEO, and that matters more than it sounds, because in SEO a wrong-intent visitor is free.

In Google Ads, that visitor costs you £4.

This post is about search intent for people paying by the click. What the four types are, which ones actually produce revenue, how to read intent in five seconds, and how to stop funding the rest.

The Four Types, Fast

You’ll see these in every guide. Here they are with the advertiser’s version attached.

Informational. Somebody wants to learn something. “How does underfloor heating work?” They are not buying today, and quite possibly not this year.

Navigational. Somebody wants a specific website. “British Gas login.” Unless it’s your own brand, this traffic isn’t for you.

Commercial. Somebody has decided to buy and is comparing options. “Best boiler for a three bedroom house.” “Worcester vs Vaillant.” Real money, slightly early.

Transactional. Somebody is ready to act. “Boiler installation quote Luton.” “Book emergency plumber.” This is where your budget belongs.

Four categories, and only two of them reliably pay for themselves.

Everything else in this post follows from that.

The 70 Per Cent Problem

Here’s the number that should reframe how you think about your account.

Roughly **70 per cent of all search queries are informational**.

Read that again with your budget in mind. The default state of search traffic is people who are not ready to buy anything.

That’s not a flaw in Google. It’s what a search engine is mostly for. People look things up far more often than they buy things.

But it means something important for you. Left alone, your account drifts towards the majority. Broad keywords, loose match types and no negatives will all pull you towards that 70 per cent, because that’s where the volume is.

Cheaper clicks, more of them, almost no customers.

So the work of running a profitable search account is largely the work of staying out of the majority.

Every practical lever in this post exists to do that one job.

Why SEO Intent Advice Does Not Transfer

Worth being explicit about this, because a lot of good SEO advice becomes bad advice when you’re paying per click.

In SEO, informational content is the foundation. You write the guide, it ranks, it builds authority, it costs you nothing per visitor. Somebody who arrives, reads, and leaves has cost you nothing. Some fraction come back later and buy.

That maths works because the marginal visitor is free.

In Google Ads, the marginal visitor is £4. Or £9. Or £22 in some sectors.

So the same visitor who was a small win in SEO is a small loss in paid search. Identical person, opposite outcome, because of who’s paying for the click.

This is why “create content for every stage of the funnel” is right for SEO and dangerous as a paid search strategy on a small budget.

It doesn’t make informational traffic worthless in Google Ads. It means informational traffic has to be bought deliberately, with a plan for what happens next, and never with the money that pays your wages.

How To Read Intent In Five Seconds

You don’t need a tool. Intent leaves fingerprints in the wording.

Four families of words tell you almost everything.

Urgency words. Emergency, urgent, today, now, near me, open now, 24-hour, same day. Highest intent in the language. Somebody with a burst pipe is not comparison shopping.

Commercial words. Cost, price, quote, hire, book, buy, installer, near me, company. They’ve moved from wondering to arranging.

Decision words. Compare, versus, review, top, alternative, and the word best. Commercial intent. They’re buying; they just haven’t picked.

Learning words. How, what, why, guide, tutorial, DIY, yourself, meaning, definition. Usually informational. Usually not your customer today.

Apply it to real searches, and it resolves instantly.

“How to bleed a radiator” is a learning word. That person is holding a radiator key.

“Radiator not heating up who to call” contains a decision. That person is holding a phone.

Same topic, same day, completely different value to you.

There is one important exception, and it’s where a lot of cheap opportunity hides. Some questions are informational in wording and commercial in reality.

“How much does a new boiler cost?” starts with a learning word. It is somebody budgeting for a purchase.

“How long does probate take?” is somebody who has already started.

The test that catches this: does the question contain cost, urgency, or a decision already made? If yes, treat it as commercial regardless of how it starts.

The Benchmarks, So You Can Score Yourself

Numbers help, because “my conversion rate feels low” isn’t diagnosable.

Published 2026 benchmarks put the average conversion rate for Google Search ads at roughly **3.75 to 4.4 per cent**, depending on whose dataset you use. Display sits far lower, around **0.77 per cent**.

By sector, professional services average around **4.6 per cent**, while heavy equipment and leisure sit closer to **1.9 per cent**.

Take those as rough shapes rather than targets. Conversion rate depends on what you count as a conversion, and accounts count wildly different things.

Here’s how to use them properly.

If you’re sitting well below the figure for your sector, the cause is usually one of two things. Either you’re buying the wrong intent, or your landing page answers a different question from the one people typed.

Both are intent problems. Neither is fixed by changing your bid strategy, which is what most people try first.

The Biggest Leak: Intent Mismatch On The Page

This is the failure we see most, and it’s expensive because you’ve already paid for the click before it happens.

The keyword is right. The ad is right. The person genuinely wants what you sell.

Then they land on a page that answers a different question, and they leave.

Three common versions.

Transactional search, informational page. Somebody searches “emergency plumber Luton” and lands on a page explaining the causes of burst pipes. They wanted a phone number.

Commercial search, transactional page. Somebody searches “best boiler for a small house” and lands on a booking form. They haven’t chosen yet. You’ve asked for a commitment three steps early.

Specific search, generic page. Somebody searches “boiler making a banging noise” and lands on your general services page. They asked a precise question and got a brochure.

The rule is simple to state and takes real discipline to apply. The page must answer the search, in the same words, above the fold.

If the search is transactional, the page leads with the action. Phone number, form, price, availability.

If the search is commercial, the page leads with the comparison. Options, differences, what suits whom, then the action.

If the search is a specific problem, the page names that problem in the heading. Nothing builds trust faster than seeing your own words at the top of the page.

Test your own account this week. Take your five highest-spending keywords, search them, click your own ad, and ask whether the page answers what you typed.

Most people find at least one that doesn’t.

A Worked Example Of The Mismatch

Let me show you what this costs, because “improve your landing page” is easy to nod at and ignore.

Take a business spending £600 a month, average cost per click £4, so 150 clicks.

The keywords are good. Mostly transactional, decent match types, sensible negatives. Someone has done real work here.

Every ad points at the homepage.

The homepage does what homepages do. It says who the company is, lists six services, carries a nice photograph and puts the phone number in the header.

Now picture the searcher. They typed “boiler making a banging noise”. They have a specific, slightly worrying problem, and they want to know whether this is serious and who fixes it.

They land on a page that says “Quality Plumbing Services In Bedfordshire”.

Nothing on the screen mentions a banging boiler. So they go back to Google and click the next result, and you’ve paid £4 for that.

Now run the same account with intent-matched pages. Four short pages, one per common problem, each headed with the problem in the customer’s own words, each explaining what usually causes it, what it costs to fix, and a phone number.

Same keywords. Same ads. Same £600. Same 150 clicks.

The difference is that the searcher sees their own words at the top of the page and thinks, right, these people know what I’m talking about.

Move the conversion rate from 2 per cent to 4 per cent, and you’ve gone from three enquiries a month to six. Nothing in the ad account changed at all.

That’s why we always look at pages before we look at bid strategies. The account is often fine. The arrival is the problem.

The Four Levers That Control Intent

Intent isn’t something you set. It’s the outcome of four settings, and each one has its own post in this series.

Match types decide how far your intent can drift. Broad match lets Google widen your circle until it includes informational searches you never chose. Tight match types are how you stay near the intent you picked.

Negative keywords block the intent you don’t want. Free, DIY, how to, jobs, salary, course. Every one of those is an intent filter written as a word. Building that list is the single cheapest intent control available.

Ad group structure decides whether your ads can speak to an intent at all. One ad group holding four intents produces one vague ad that speaks to none of them. Split by intent, and each ad can match the person who searched.

Keyword discovery is where new intent comes from. Your customers describe their problems in words you’d never choose. Reading their phrasing gives you high-intent keywords no competitor is bidding on.

That’s the whole system, and this is why intent is the concept underneath all four.

Get intent right, and the other four decisions mostly make themselves.

The Intent Ladder, And Where To Spend First

Once you can label intent, the budgeting question answers itself. Think of it as a ladder, and climb it from the top.

Rung one: transactional, in your area. Emergency plumber Luton. Boiler installation quote. Book a roofer. These people are choosing somebody today. Fund this completely before anything else.

Here’s the test that settles most budget arguments. Check your impression share on your transactional keywords. If you’re losing impressions to budget on those, you have no business spending money anywhere else. You’re turning away people ready to buy while paying for people who aren’t.

Rung two: transactional, wider area or softer wording. Same intent, less urgency, or slightly outside your core patch. Fund next.

Rung three: commercial comparison. Best boiler for a three-bedroom house. Worcester versus Vaillant. Real buyers, a few weeks early. Worth having if rungs one and two are fully funded, and worth pointing at a genuine comparison page rather than a booking form.

Rung four: commercial-in-disguise questions. How much does a new boiler cost? How long does probate take? Cheap, because the phrasing looks informational, and they convert far better than their price suggests. This rung is where most of the bargains in search live.

Rung five: everything else. Pure informational, DIY, research. Only with a capture plan, only from a capped budget, and only when the four rungs above are full.

Most struggling accounts we see are spending on rung five while losing impression share on rung one. Nothing else in the account matters until that’s the other way round.

Intent Changes With Season And Time Of Day

One nuance the standard four-type model misses, and it costs money in trades.

The same words can carry different intent depending on when they’re typed.

“Plumber near me” at eleven on a Tuesday morning is somebody arranging work. The same search at eleven at night is usually an emergency, and that person will call the first number they see.

“Roof repair” in July is a planned job. The same search the morning after a storm is urgent, and the competition for it triples within hours.

Two practical consequences.

First, check your conversion rate by hour and by day before you set an ad schedule. Most accounts have a pattern nobody has looked at, and it rarely matches the assumption.

A word of caution here, and it links back to bidding. If you’re on Smart Bidding, percentage bid adjustments by time of day are ignored. Your lever is scheduling the hours off entirely, not bidding them down.

Second, build your seasonal campaigns before the season, paused, ready to switch on. Demand jumps the day the weather turns, and competitors take about a fortnight to react. That fortnight is the cheapest high-intent traffic you’ll buy all year.

Nobody has to be clever to get this. They just have to be early.

Diagnose Your Own Intent Mix

Half an hour, no tools, and you’ll know exactly what you’re buying.

Open your search terms report and set it to the last 90 days. Sort by cost.

Take the top 50 rows and label each one with a letter. I for informational, N for navigational, C for commercial, T for transactional.

Don’t overthink it. Use the word families above. Five seconds per row.

Now total the spend by letter.

Here’s how to read the result.

T and C are above 70 per cent of spend. Healthy. Your intent controls are working.

I is above 25 per cent of spend. You’re funding the 70 per cent problem. Negatives and match types are the fix, in that order.

N above 10 per cent, on brands that aren’t yours. You’re paying to be compared. Sometimes deliberate, usually not.

A lot of T spend but few enquiries. The intent is right, and the page is wrong. Go and look at your landing pages.

That last case is the one worth flagging, because it’s the only one where the fix isn’t in the account at all. No amount of keyword work repairs a page that answers the wrong question.

When Informational Traffic Is Worth Buying

To be fair to it, there are three cases where paying for informational searches makes sense.

When the question is commercial in disguise. Anything containing cost, price, how long, or a decision already made. These are cheap because the phrasing looks informational, and they convert far better than their price suggests.

When you can capture rather than sell. If you have something worth downloading- a guide, a checklist, a calculator- you can turn a reader into a contact and follow up later. This only works if you actually follow up.

When you’re building a remarketing pool deliberately, cheap informational clicks today, retargeted with commercial messaging later.

Three rules apply to all three cases.

Never fund it from the budget that pays your bills. Give it its own campaign with its own cap.

Never judge it on a 30-day window. It doesn’t work that way.

And never do it at all until your transactional keywords are fully funded. If you’re losing impression share on “emergency plumber” because your budget ran out, buying informational traffic is indefensible.

First, buy every customer who’s ready today. Then think about next year.

Write The Ad For The Intent, Not The Service

One more place intent shows up, and it’s the cheapest thing on this whole list to fix.

Most ads describe the business. The good ones answer the intent.

Watch the difference on the same service.

For a transactional search, the ad leads with the action and removes friction. “Emergency Plumber, 60 Minute Response. Call Now, No Call-Out Fee.” Speed, availability, price certainty. Nothing else matters to somebody standing in water.

For a commercial search, the ad leads with the comparison. “Compare 4 Boiler Brands. Free Home Survey, Fixed Quotes.” They haven’t chosen, so asking them to book is a step too early. Help them decide, and you’re in the shortlist.

For a commercial-in-disguise question, the ad answers the question in the headline. “New Boiler From £1,850 Fitted. See Full Price List.” Somebody who searched how much a boiler costs has just had their question answered before clicking, and they’ll click precisely because of that.

Notice that all three could be the same company selling the same thing. The service didn’t change. The person did.

Here’s the test to run on your own ads. Read your headline, then read the search term next to it, and ask whether the headline answers the search.

If your headline works equally well for all your keywords, it’s answering none of them. That’s the same problem as the ad group that holds too many intents, showing up in the copy instead of the structure.

And the same discipline runs all the way through. Search, ad, page. All three saying the same thing, in the customer’s words.

Break the chain anywhere, and you pay for the click without getting the enquiry.

The Mistakes We See Most

Assuming more traffic is the answer to fewer sales. Usually it’s the cause.
Applying SEO intent advice to a paid budget, where the wrong visitor costs money rather than nothing.
Judging keywords on cost per click instead of on the intent behind them.
Sending every intent to the same landing page.
Bidding on informational terms before transactional terms are fully funded.
Treating “near me” as a location signal only. It’s one of the strongest intent signals in the language.
Labelling intent by topic rather than by wording. “Boiler” isn’t an intent. “Boiler quote” and “boiler how it works” are two very different ones.
Fixing intent in the account and never checking the page.

Your Thirty Minute Job This Week

One sitting.

Minutes one to fifteen. Search terms report, 90 days, sorted by cost. Label the top 50 rows I, N, C or T. Total the spend by letter.

Minutes sixteen to twenty. Write down every informational search you’re paying for. Find the word they share. Add it as a negative phrase.

Minutes twenty-one to thirty. Take your five biggest keywords. Search each one, click your own ad, and read the page as though you were the searcher. Ask whether it answers what you typed, above the fold, in the same words.

Whatever you find in those last ten minutes is usually the most valuable thing on the list.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the four types of search intent?

Informational, where someone wants to learn. Navigational, where they want a specific website. Commercial, where they’re comparing options before buying. Transactional, where they’re ready to act. For an advertiser, transactional and commercial are where the money is, and the other two need a very good reason.

Why am I getting clicks but no enquiries?

Usually an intent mismatch, and it comes in two forms. Either you’re paying for informational searches from people who were never going to buy, or your landing page answers a different question from the one they typed. Check the search terms report first, then click your own ads.

What percentage of searches are informational?

Around 70 per cent of all search queries. That’s the most important number for an advertiser to know, because it means the default state of search traffic is people who aren’t ready to buy. Left unmanaged, every loose setting in your account pulls you towards that majority.

What is a good conversion rate for Google Ads?

Published 2026 benchmarks put Google Search ads at roughly 3.75 to 4.4 per cent on average, with display far lower at around 0.77 per cent. Professional services average around 4.6 per cent, heavy equipment and leisure closer to 1.9 per cent. Treat these as rough shapes, since accounts count very different things as conversions.

How do I tell if a keyword has buying intent?

Look at the words. Urgency words like emergency, today and near me. Commercial words like cost, quote, hire and book. Decision words like compare, versus and top. Learning words like how, what, guide and DIY usually mean the opposite. One exception: questions containing cost or urgency are commercial regardless of phrasing.

Should I ever bid on informational keywords?

Sometimes, with three conditions. Only when the question is commercial in disguise, or you have a genuine way to capture and follow up. Only from a separate capped budget. And never before your transactional keywords are fully funded.

Does search intent matter for Performance Max?

It matters, but you control it differently. There are no keywords and no match types in Performance Max, so your levers are account-level negative keywords, search theme exclusions, and above all the quality of your conversion data. Feed it poor conversions, and it will find you more of the wrong intent, faster.

Is “near me” an intent signal or a location signal?

Both, and the intent half is the more valuable one. Someone typing “near me” is usually ready to act now, which makes it one of the strongest transactional markers in ordinary language. Treat it as a buying signal that happens to carry geography.

Traffic Was Never The Problem

If your ads are getting clicks and your phone isn’t ringing, more traffic will not fix it. More traffic is usually what caused it.

The question isn’t how many people arrived. It’s who they were, and what they wanted when they typed.

Roughly seven in ten searches are people who want to learn something. Your job as an advertiser is mostly the job of staying out of that seventy per cent, and buying the three in ten who want to act.

Everything else in this series exists to serve that one idea. Match types decide how far you drift from it. Negatives block what you don’t want. Ad group structure decides whether your ad can speak to it. Keyword discovery is where new intent comes from.

Start with the half-hour job above. Label fifty search terms, total the spend, then click your own ads and read your own pages honestly.

You’ll usually find the answer in the last ten minutes, on a page you wrote and never looked at again.

And if you want the whole of this series in one line, here it is.

Search, ad, page. Three things, saying the same thing, in the customer’s own words. Everything else is just machinery for keeping those three aligned.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on any of that, it’s what we do at SF Digital.

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