Google Ads in Washington

By treating Seattle and the Eastside as separate campaigns rather than one radius spanning both. The bridges are genuine bottlenecks and the travel time is significant enough that Eastside residents do not cross for routine services — so a Seattle-centred radius that reaches Bellevue, Kirkland and Redmond buys clicks from people who will not make the trip, and because the click volume looks healthy the waste is invisible without geographic segmentation. Running them separately lets you write ad copy naming the Eastside, point to a landing page that names it, and see the two markets' true cost per lead independently. Given how affluent and commercially dense the Eastside is, it frequently deserves the larger share of budget rather than being an afterthought inside a Seattle campaign.

Heavily weighted into the summer window for outdoor-adjacent categories, with a much lower baseline through the long off-season. The demand pattern here is genuinely extreme: months of suppressed activity followed by a few weeks of intense demand for landscaping, roofing, home improvement and recreation, with auction costs rising in step. A flat monthly budget under-spends during the only period that produces meaningful revenue and over-spends through months when the same dollar buys far less qualified traffic. Practically this means an uneven annual budget, which is usually a harder internal conversation than the media strategy itself, and it means the campaigns and landing pages must be built and tested through the winter — because entering the season still iterating means paying peak prices to learn.

Because they are priced by national advertisers rather than by the local market. A Seattle or Eastside software company bidding on category keywords is competing against companies anywhere, since their buyers are not geographically constrained, so the auction reflects national budgets rather than the size of the Puget Sound market. Businesses arriving with local-scale budget expectations find their clicks cost several times what a comparable local service category costs, and the campaign gets misdiagnosed as poorly managed when it was budgeted against the wrong benchmark. The realistic responses are narrowing to specific long-tail intents national advertisers are not bidding on, accepting a national-scale budget, or weighting toward organic and content where accumulated authority competes better than money — which for a technology-adjacent audience that adopted AI research early is frequently the better investment anyway.

Yes, if you serve it, and the economics are considerably more favourable. Spokane and Eastern Washington sit across the Cascades in what is effectively a separate economy, with far fewer advertisers competing and click costs well below the Puget Sound equivalent for the same intent — so the same budget buys substantially more qualified traffic, and testing is more affordable relative to the stakes. Residents there search their own city rather than the region, so a Seattle-oriented campaign reaches them poorly even where the targeting technically includes them. Running Spokane separately with its own ads and landing page is straightforward and frequently produces the best cost per qualified lead in a Washington account. Tacoma occupies a similar position on the west side, under-contested despite its proximity to Seattle.