How to Run Google Ads for Your Cybersecurity Company or MSSP

For cybersecurity companies and MSSPs, Google Ads is one of the best ways to generate leads reliably, fairly, and cost-effectively, without having to lean on referrals or whatever inbound happens to show up.

In this post, I want to show you why it works and exactly how to set it up—or if you’d rather have it done for you, that’s exactly what our Google Ads for MSPs service is built for.

Why Cybersecurity Companies Should Be Running Google Ads

About 90% of people looking for a service like this are heading straight to Google. For cybersecurity specifically, they’re typically searching one of two ways:

• “Cybersecurity near me”
• “Cybersecurity” plus their location

Take a search like “cybersecurity companies in Phoenix.” When someone runs that search, four sponsored ads show up at the top.

Here’s the good news: your competitors generally have no idea what they’re doing. Look closely at those ads and you’ll usually find that none of them mention cybersecurity as a category clearly, and none of them mention Phoenix. If you’re an MSSP or cybersecurity company in that market and you run ads properly, that’s already a massive opportunity sitting right in front of you.

Below the ads, you’ve got the Google Business Profile section, which is its own opportunity for smaller companies (though that’s a topic for another day). Below that, the organic results are usually just three directory listings. There’s barely any real competition down there.

So Google Ads gets you right to the top of the page. As long as everything is structured correctly, and your inbound process can actually handle what comes in, this becomes one of the most consistent lead sources you can build.

Here’s how to actually set it up.

Step 1: Start a New Campaign

Head into your Google Ads dashboard and click New Campaign.

• Objective: Leads
• Conversion goals: Phone calls (if you can take them) and form submissions

I know a lot of business owners in this space would rather just get form fills, but a lot of small and mid-sized companies looking for cybersecurity help find it a lot easier to just pick up the phone, ask a few quick questions, and get booked into a call. Track both. Nothing else really moves the needle for a cybersecurity business on Google Ads.

Campaign type: The vast majority of you will get the best results with a Search campaign. If your budget is north of $30k a month, you can start experimenting with Performance Max or Display. But for 99% of cybersecurity companies and MSSPs, Search is the right call.

Name your campaign whatever makes sense, something like “Cybersecurity Company: Phoenix,” and set your location. You don’t need to select any of the extra targeting options here.

Step 2: Choose a Bidding Strategy

Google gives you a handful of bidding options.

Maximize Conversions is one of their smart bidding algorithms, and I like leaving it there for about the first month.

One thing to watch for: every once in a while you might get hit with an unusually expensive click. If that happens two or three times, you can set a portfolio bid limit to keep it from happening again.

After that first month, once you’ve got a solid baseline of performance data, you can switch over to a Target CPA strategy. Max Conversions can still be a fine option beyond month one, but that’s the general path I’d follow.

A couple of quick housekeeping items on this screen:

• Skip “Customer Acquisition”
• Opt out of the two lower-quality networks (Search Partners and Display Network)

You don’t want your ads showing up in Gmail or on some random website. You want to be in the actual search results, right where someone is typing in “cybersecurity company” or “MSSP.”

Step 3: Set Your Location Targeting

Location targeting matters a lot here, so pay attention to this step.

Choose Presence, which limits your ads to people who are actually in or regularly in your target area. Then click “Enter another location” and use Advanced Search to set up radius targeting.

How wide you go depends on your city, but radius is usually the best bet, and for MSSPs and cybersecurity companies, you can often go a bit broader than you’d think.

Here’s the important part: you’ll eventually build separate ad groups for the surrounding cities too. If your main city is Phoenix, that also means Glendale, Scottsdale, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler. Smaller businesses in those areas search the same way, just with their own city attached, like “cybersecurity company Chandler.”

Volume won’t be huge for any single one of these, but if your ad actually says “Chandler” back to them, you’re going to get the click over a competitor running something vague like “third-party monitoring, real-time data breach protection.” That kind of language doesn’t mean anything to most people searching for this stuff.

Step 4: Set Your Ad Schedule

A lot of businesses just run their ads 24/7. Don’t do that.

You want ads running during hours when you can actually get back to leads fast. As soon as someone fills out a form, you want to call or email them almost immediately. Speed to lead is one of the biggest factors in whether a lead actually turns into a booked call or a closed deal.

For most of you, a simple schedule works well:

• Days: Monday through Friday
• Hours: Start a little before your day officially begins (around 8:15) to get things warmed up, and wind down a bit after your day ends (around 6:15–6:30 if you’re working nine to five)

Click next, and opt out of AI Max. It’s not in a good place right now. It might improve over time, but I wouldn’t run it currently. Skip the other Google AI feature on the next screen too.

Step 5: Keyword Research

This is where the account actually gets built: keywords and ads.

One mistake I see constantly when auditing accounts: businesses cramming 40 keywords into a single ad group. That’s about 38 too many. Keep it to one or two keywords per ad group, grouped by search theme, not by throwing everything into one bucket.

The easiest way to do this research is right inside Google Ads:

1. Go to Tools > Planning > Keyword Planner
2. Click the keyword idea tool
3. Add your location
4. Search your core service (in this case, “cybersecurity company”)

Also add “cybersecurity company near me.” The volume is lower, but it’s still meaningful, and it’s honestly the term I’d start with.

A quick note on budget: if you’re running a small cybersecurity firm, say under 10 people, and you don’t have a real ad budget behind you, Google Ads probably isn’t your best move right now. You’d get more value focusing on SEO and optimizing your Google Business Profile instead.

Here’s why: the “average” cost per click Google shows you is misleading. That figure often gets skewed by Google trying to serve ads to job seekers, people whose last ten searches were employment-related, and occasionally you’ll get hit with a $120 click from someone like that.

Realistically, expect something closer to $60–$70 per click for a term like “cybersecurity firms.” Ideally you’re getting five to ten clicks a day, and once you can sustain a couple hundred dollars a day in spend, that’s when Google Ads really starts to make sense.

For this example, “cybersecurity company near me” pulling 10 to 100 searches a month is plenty of volume for a service like this. Add it as a keyword, along with a close variation like “cybersecurity firm,” just to cover your bases without going overboard.

Step 6: Build the Ad (and Use a Landing Page, Not Your Website)

Before we get into headlines, let’s talk about the final URL, because this is the single biggest mistake companies make in this space.

Hover over most competitor ads and you’ll see they’re sending traffic to their homepage, a generic services or industries page, or in some cases something completely irrelevant to the search at all. That’s a wasted click.

A landing page is built specifically to turn that paid traffic into leads. Someone sees an ad that says “Cybersecurity Company Phoenix” or “Number One Cybersecurity Company in Phoenix,” they click it, and the page needs to immediately confirm that: “Phoenix’s Number One Cybersecurity Company.” From there it should:

• Speak directly to their pain points
• Walk through your features and benefits
• Back it up with testimonials and proof

At $60+ per click, every visitor needs to land somewhere built to actually convert them, not just inform them.

For the display path, consider adding dynamic location insertion so the URL reflects wherever the searcher actually is (Mesa, Scottsdale, wherever), rather than always showing Phoenix. It’s a small detail that adds relevance.

Only add a phone number if you’re genuinely willing to take calls. If you are, you can optimize for calls, form submissions, and even booked appointments, though booked appointments is the hardest of the three to actually hit.

Headlines

Your first headline should be something like “Cybersecurity Firm Phoenix” or “Phoenix Cybersecurity Company,” pinned in the first position.

Worth noting: word order actually matters here. “Phoenix Cybersecurity Company” and “Cybersecurity Company Phoenix” will perform differently in terms of click-through rate. If I were running this account, I’d be split testing both.

Pinning in position one means every single ad variation always leads with your service and your location, which speaks directly to what the searcher just typed.

From there, round out your headlines with things like:

• A free security risk assessment offer, if you have one
• “Trusted IT Security”
• Five-star review callouts, if you’ve got the reviews to back it up (and if you don’t, that’s worth fixing first)

Every combination of these headlines should read as clearly relevant to someone searching for exactly this service in exactly this location.

Descriptions

Two or three descriptions is enough. Don’t go to four unless you’re working with a large budget. Something like:

• “Phoenix’s #1 Rated Cybersecurity Firm. Free Risk Assessments.”
• “Detect Security Threats Fast. Local Support, Fast Response Times.”
• “Trusted by Businesses Across Phoenix. See Our Reviews.”

The more your ad reads as a genuine local business, the easier it is to earn that click and get someone to actually convert.

Make sure your business is verified so your business name and logo show up on the ad. Don’t add sitelinks or callouts at the ad level, we’ll cover where those actually go. Unless you’re running a promotion or offering upfront pricing (unlikely in this space), that’s really all you need for your first ad.

Step 7: Set Your Budget

For average daily budget, $100 a day is going to be tough, and honestly I wouldn’t even recommend starting there in a city the size of Phoenix.

It’s always worth testing, but realistically:

• Minimum: around $150/day
• Realistic starting range: $3,000–$5,000/month for cybersecurity leads

Here’s the math: if clicks are running $30–$50 and you only have $100 a day to spend, you’re getting two or three clicks max, maybe converting one in ten. That gets you a couple of leads in your first month, and that’s exactly the scenario where people conclude “Google Ads doesn’t work.”

It’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s that it never had enough budget or enough time to actually work. Budget and reasonable expectations solve that.

Set your budget to something minimal like $0.01 while the campaign goes through review so you don’t get charged accidentally, and make sure your Google Tag is set up so conversions actually get tracked properly.

Step 8: Build Out Additional Ad Groups

Once your campaign is live, head into your campaign and rename your first ad group to something clear, like “Near Me,” since that’s the keyword theme it’s built around.

To build out your surrounding city ad groups (Tempe, Scottsdale, Chandler, wherever else applies), don’t recreate everything from scratch. Just copy the ad group, paste it into the campaign, and then go in and swap out the copy, the landing page, and the keywords for that specific city. It’s a lot faster than building each one manually.

Step 9: Add Sitelinks and Callouts

Head into Assets to add these, always at the campaign level, never the ad group level (adding them at the ad group level makes duplicating ad groups later a mess).

Sitelinks:

• “Our Services”
• “Free Risk Assessment” (link this directly to that section of your landing page, not your website)
• “Our Team” (people want to see who they’d actually be working with, trust matters a lot right now)
• “Pricing” (even a “starting from” price goes a long way so people aren’t walking into a sales call completely blind)
• “Testimonials” or “Reviews”

Callouts:

• “Serving All of Phoenix”
• “24/7 Threat Monitoring”
• A few more short phrases like this that add a bit of extra text and relevance to the bottom of your ad

Putting It All Together

At this point, you’re ready to launch. To recap:

• Structure campaigns by service and location
• Keep ad groups tight (one or two keywords each)
• Send traffic to landing pages, never your website
• Budget enough to actually gather data
• Track the conversions that matter (calls and forms, not just one or the other)

I’m Alex, I run MSP Sprout, and we help MSPs, MSSPs, and cybersecurity firms get leads reliably and consistently, without the feast-or-famine cycle that comes from relying purely on referrals. Google Ads is just one piece of that, our marketing built for cybersecurity companies and MSSPs covers SEO, lead generation, and web design too.

If you want help setting any of this up, or you’d just rather focus on the cybersecurity side of your business while someone else handles the marketing, feel free to book a call. Happy to answer any questions you’ve got.