432 Local Conversions for a New Delivery Brand in Dnipro

Client & Context

A new local brand producing and delivering sweet and savory pies and quiches in Dnipro. At the start: a brand-new ad account, no historical campaign data to lean on, low brand awareness, and no accumulated reviews or local-demand history to reference. Core geography was strictly Dnipro, and the defined goal was local action — not generic site traffic, but calls and driving directions that signal a real intent to visit or order.

The ad account was created 11 May 2026; the Search campaign launched 13 May, and Performance Max followed on 14 May.

The Challenge

For a brand-new local account, there is no valid "before/after" baseline — there simply isn't a prior period to compare against. The real first task wasn't optimization in the usual sense; it was building a reliable dataset from scratch and identifying which channel actually drives local demand, while measuring what genuinely matters for a local business (calls and route requests) rather than raw clicks.

Plan of Work

• Launch advertising for a new local brand with zero history.
• Test demand across the core product categories — delivery, savory pies, sweet pies and quiches.
• Set up proper measurement of local actions specifically.
• Connect Business Profile and use Google's local signals.
• Target users physically located in Dnipro.
• Continuously clean traffic from irrelevant queries and placements.
• Determine which campaign type delivers the most value for a local business.

The key KPI throughout was routes and calls — actions that directly signal intent to interact with the business, rather than a passive click.

Preparation: Structure and Measurement

I. Building the ad structure

For Search, four thematic ad groups were created: pie delivery, savory pies, sweet pies, and quiches — deliberately not blending every category into one campaign, so demand for each product line could be assessed separately and the most promising directions identified over time. Performance Max ran separately with a dedicated "Pie Delivery" asset group.

II. Measuring genuine local demand

For a local business, a plain click isn't always a meaningful success signal — a user might visit the site and never place an order. A route request or a phone call, by contrast, demonstrates a materially higher level of intent. So within Performance Max, the primary local conversions tracked were route-building plus calls — specifically letting the team judge the campaign not just by impressions and clicks, but by concrete local actions.

Local Strategy

Reaching a Dnipro-only audience was critical for this brand. Business Profile was connected and Performance Max was focused on users in the target location. According to the Location report, all recorded ad traffic was concentrated in Dnipro. A particularly telling signal: of 2,508 total clicks, 2,472 led users directly to the Business Profile — meaning the campaign worked not just as a source of clicks, but as a tool actively building the brand's local presence on Google.

Traffic Quality Work

Performance Max delivered significant reach, but that reach came with a real need to control ad-inventory quality. Placement analysis revealed a heavy skew toward mobile apps: of 18,671 recorded impressions in the placement report, 15,007 landed in mobile applications. In response, the team systematically cleaned traffic, adding 362 negative keywords and 307 placement exclusions over the course of the campaign.

Continuous Optimization

The account was never run on a "set and walk away" basis. The team regularly analyzed Search performance, worked negative keywords, reviewed placements, assessed ad quality, monitored local results, optimized campaigns and prepared reporting throughout. For a brand-new account, this constant iteration mattered doubly — early data wasn't just used to judge results, it was actively used to build the advertising strategy itself.

What Was Tested

Excess impressions in mobile apps

A significant share of Performance Max impressions landed in mobile apps — 15,007 of 18,671 in the relevant report. For a campaign whose core goal was local routes and calls, this inventory needed active control; the team ran a placement cleanup and logged 307 exclusions.

Search didn't become the main driver of local actions

Search delivered 169 clicks at a strong 17.28% CTR on 6,197.57 UAH of spend. Yet in the available data window, Search was not the source of the bulk of routes and calls. This was itself a useful finding: a high CTR alone doesn't mean a channel delivers the action the business actually needs. Focus progressively shifted to Performance Max, which better served the local-acquisition goal.

Display never became a standalone driver

Display was originally planned to build awareness, and prep/testing tasks for it were logged in the team's task tracker but no standalone Display campaign appears in the final ad report. Rather than artificially scaling every originally planned channel, the team focused on the channel that was actually generating the actions the business needed.

Quality of part of the Search ad copy

Ads in the "Sweet Pies" and "Savory Pies" ad groups received a Poor quality score and didn't produce local actions in the available data window a clear signal flagged for further work on message relevance for those specific product categories.

Results

Key Insight

For a brand-new local business, there's no valid classic "before → after" comparison — there simply was no prior advertising period to measure against. So the first-phase goal became building a solid data foundation and understanding which channel genuinely drives local demand. In this case, that channel was Performance Max paired with Business Profile. A user who builds a route to a business, or calls it directly, is worth far more to a local brand than an ordinary click — which is exactly why the campaign was judged by real local intent, not just CTR or click volume.