Beyond Search: Winning Local Customers on Display & Demand Gen

By David Green - Tuesday October 13, 2026 Share (Twitter) WhatsApp Summarize ChatGPT Perplexity Grok Google AI In 2024, I went to Hero Conf in San Diego and one of my biggest takeaways was from a channel I did not honestly expect to ever work. Display ads. Up to that point – I could not get Display ads to work for our local clients.

Search was doing all of the heavy lifting, costs per click kept climbing, and every Display test we ran produced plenty of impressions and very little attributable revenue. Looking back, a big part of the problem was us. Search trains paid search advertisers to be literal.

Someone types “water heater repair,” so you bid on “water heater repair” and write an ad about water heater repair, always trying to ensure ad relevance and CTRs are strong. That habit follows you into Display, YouTube, and Demand Gen, where nobody is typing anything, and it produces ads that are very easy to scroll past.

Today, non-search campaigns are the largest growth channel across our local accounts. What changed was not a new feature. It was a four-step process that I shared on stage in San Diego this month, and that I’ll walk through here.

Start with more questions After that session 2 years ago, I went back and re-read one of my favorite marketing books of all-time: This I Know: Marketing Lessons From Under the Influence by Terry O’Reilly. In the book, he asks a question that every marketer should be able to answer: what business are you (or your client) really in?

Michelin sells safety, not tires. Nike sells motivation, not shoes (based on their recent stock price challenges, they really need to be selling a lot more motivation). Step 1: Find the pain points We went back to our clients and asked two things: What themes do you hear on calls, over and over?

And what moments make someone pick up the phone or submit a form? We got a lot of great responses but a local HVAC + plumbing client said something I never forgot. “Nobody calls for a water heater. They call because they have a cold shower.” That single sentence reframed how I approached display ads.

We had been focused on the product, and the customer was focused on a miserable morning. The place to start looking for pain points and high-value moments like these for your customers are: Sales and intake calls Notes in the CRM Customer reviews Customer surveys AI now is also helpful in generating pain-point ideas we might have missed.

Step 2: Craft the audience Google gives us five main audience types for these campaigns: custom, combined, in-market, lookalike, and affinity. Here is how each one has played out for us. Custom segments are where the pain points go to work.

Instead of service keywords, we built segments from the searches people make while the problem is happening, such as “why is my shower cold,” “no hot water in shower,” and “hot water runs out fast.” We also found that our older custom segments had become bloated.

One segment mixed furnace, heat pump, and general HVAC queries together, which made it impossible to match an ad to the person seeing it. We split it into themed segments so that each one could be paired with its own creative. Combined segments are the most tactical option available.

They let you intersect the people who fit your target and subtract the people who do not, such as existing customers. They pair perfectly with custom segments. In-market segments deserve a second look in most accounts.

It is worth asking which ones you are missing, which ones you dismissed too early, and whether you ever tested them with demographic filters applied. Lookalike segments are the one advertisers forget. They are built into Demand Gen and YouTube, and they are a natural fit if you have a healthy customer list. Affinity segments are the exception.

We have tested them repeatedly and have not found effective results for local lead generation. Step 3: Match the creative Once the audience is built around a pain point, the ad has to speak to the same pain point. This is where most local Display campaigns fall apart, because the default is service-first copy.

Service-first Pain-point first “Local Water Heater Pros” “Tired of Cold Showers?” “Trusted HVAC Pros” “AC Blowing Warm Air?” “Licensed and insured with 2,400+ five-star reviews. Call today for a free estimate.” “No hot water this morning? Warm showers back by tonight.” Service-first copy is not wrong, but we found better results focusing on pain-points.

In a feed or on a news site, though, the person seeing the ad is not shopping. The pain-point version earns attention because they recognize their own morning in it. Step 4: Land the message We audited the client’s landing pages and rebuilt them so that the pa