What Google Ads does for a consultancy that a feed cannot
Someone who types “msc nursing uk consultants thrissur” has already picked a course, a country and a town to look in. Google Ads puts your consultancy in front of that person at that moment, with an ad that answers the exact question they asked.
The searches are close to home. The Kerala Migration Survey 2023, as reported, found Ernakulam district sends the most student emigrants, 43,990, followed by Thrissur and Kottayam, and that the UK draws roughly one Kerala student in four and Canada about one in five.
Intent has a price. You pay per click, the auction is crowded wherever consultancies cluster, and Google’s policy on government documents shapes what a consultancy may say in an ad. The rest of this guide is about working inside those limits. For the discovery side, where students first meet a country on Facebook and Instagram, see our Meta ads guide for study abroad consultants.
The visa-ad policy, and what changed on 5 October 2026
Google’s Government documents and official services policy does not allow ads that offer help obtaining documents a government provides directly, and it names visas and Electronic Travel Authorizations among them. It does not restrict immigration lawyers or consultants “where the focus is on consultation”, but that exemption stops short of “mere assistance acquiring particular travel documents”.
On 5 October 2026 Google tightened the rule. Ads that promote directly obtaining government documents and services may now run only from authorised providers: advertisers whose domain is linked from an official government website and named there as authorised for that specific document. Commercial contracts, business licences, registry entries and blog posts on government sites do not count as authorisation.
For a private consultancy the practical reading is plain. Write ads around counselling, course choice, university choice and admission, and expect visa-help wording to be restricted. Nobody outside Google can tell you exactly how a given ad will be classified, and we do not pretend to. What we can do is keep visa wording out of headlines, descriptions, sitelinks, display paths and page titles, and read the policy status column after every edit.
Ad text: what to write and what to leave out
The difference between an ad that runs and one that gets limited is often a single phrase. These pairs show the direction.
| Write this | Not this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Free counselling for UK, Ireland and Canada | UK student visa processing in Kochi | Counselling is the service you sell; processing a visa is the restricted part |
| MSc Nursing in the UK: course and university guidance | Nursing visa assistance, apply today | Course and university choice are your expertise; visa help is policy-sensitive |
| Book a session with a counsellor in Kottayam | Visa guaranteed or your money back | Nobody but a government can decide a visa, so the promise misleads |
| Shortlist courses and apply for the next intake | Guaranteed admission to any university | Universities decide admissions; a guarantee invites disapproval and complaints |
| Office in Kochi, online sessions for Gulf parents | Official partner of a named university | Partnership claims need a written agreement you can produce on request |
Apply the same discipline to every asset, not only the headlines. Sitelinks titled “Visa services”, callouts promising “100% success”, a display path ending in /visa, or an image showing a passport with a stamp can each pull an otherwise clean ad into review. Rename the page behind a sitelink rather than only its label, since the destination is checked too. And keep success stories factual: a named former student, with written consent, describing the course they took and where it led.
Landing pages: one per country, built around counselling
Send each country campaign to its own page. A single “Study Abroad” page makes a nursing graduate who searched for Ireland scroll past Canada, Australia and Germany just to learn whether you handle Ireland at all.
A country page that converts, and that reads cleanly to a reviewer, usually has:
- a title and H1 about studying in that country from Kerala, not about visas;
- the courses you counsel for there, with entry requirements linked to the universities’ own pages;
- costs and conditions taken from official sources, each with the date you checked it, linked rather than paraphrased into promises;
- who your counsellors are, where your office is, and how a session runs, in person in Kerala or online for families in the Gulf;
- a short form asking country, course, qualification and year, intended intake and phone number, with a WhatsApp button beside it;
- a plain line saying you are a private counselling firm, that universities decide admissions and governments decide visas.
Where a page mentions visas at all, keep it factual and secondary: what the student will need to apply for, with a link to the official page, rather than an offer to obtain it for them. Build a Malayalam version of each country page if you run Malayalam ad groups, so the click lands in the language of the search. Pages should open quickly on mobile data, since Gulf parents read them on their phones.
Keyword families by country, course and city
Group keywords by what the searcher has already decided. Each family gets its own ad group, ad text and page.
| Family | Example searches | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Country and town | study in uk consultants kochi; canada study consultants kottayam | One ad group per country, sent to the country page |
| Course and country | msc nursing uk from kerala; masters in data science germany | Course ad groups inside the country campaign |
| Stage of decision | study abroad after plus two; abroad studies after bsc nursing | A starting-out campaign with an explainer page and a session form |
| Malayalam and Manglish | വിദേശ പഠനം കൺസൾട്ടൻസി കോട്ടയം; uk il padikkan enthokke venam | A Malayalam ad group sent to a Malayalam page |
| Your own name | your consultancy’s name and its misspellings | A separate brand campaign with low bids |
These are illustrative searches, not measured volumes; your search terms report replaces them within a few weeks. Use phrase and exact match for country and town keywords, and keep broad match for later, once offline conversions are flowing. The town list should mirror your catchment: Kochi, Kottayam, Thrissur, Kothamangalam, Muvattupuzha, Pala, Thodupuzha.
Students do type “study visa” into searches. We leave visa phrasing out of the keyword list at the start, let phrase-match country keywords pick up those searches, and watch the policy column. If you choose to bid on them directly, the ad and page that answer still have to be about counselling and admission.
Negative keywords, and a policy on competitor names
A consultancy account without negatives pays for job hunters, tourists and people checking an application status. Start with shared lists and apply them to every campaign.
- Jobs: job, jobs, vacancy, salary, work permit, recruitment, hiring. Unless you hold a Recruiting Agent licence under the Emigration Act 1983, these clicks are wasted and the topic is risky.
- Visa-only: visa status, visa stamping, biometrics, visitor visa, tourist visa, PR, dependant visa. These people want a document, not a course.
- “Free”, carefully: the word shows up in genuine study searches as well as junk ones, so add phrases such as “free visa” and “free ticket” rather than the single word.
- Exams you do not teach: IELTS result, exam date, OET registration, if you do not run coaching yourself.
- Pure information: embassy address, pdf, syllabus, wikipedia.
Other consultancies’ names
Google’s trademark policy does not restrict trademarks used as keywords, but it can restrict a direct competitor using them in ad text once the owner complains. Our policy is stricter than the rule: we do not bid on other consultancies’ names, and we add them as negatives so broad match and Performance Max cannot buy them for you. Their searchers want them; the clicks are expensive; and it starts a bidding war nobody wins. University names are different. A search for a master’s at a named university is a fair keyword, provided your ad does not imply a partnership you do not have.
Location settings for Kerala students and Gulf parents
Run two campaigns, not one with every country ticked.
Kerala. Target the districts you serve, or the whole state if you counsel online, and set the location option to Presence: people in, or regularly in, your chosen locations. Google’s default, Presence or interest, also shows ads to people elsewhere who have shown interest in those places. For a consultancy that mostly means students in other states who will never visit your office, which is worth paying for only if you counsel them too.
The Gulf. A separate campaign for the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, with its own budget, English and Malayalam as languages, a schedule on Gulf time, and ads that say sessions run online in Gulf evenings. Two kinds of searcher arrive there: parents planning for a child back in Kerala, and students finishing school in the Gulf themselves. If your search terms show both, give them separate ad groups, because they ask different questions.
Keeping the two apart matters for budget too. In a shared campaign, Google spends wherever conversions look cheapest that week, and one region quietly starves the other.
Performance Max: where it helps and where it hurts
Performance Max puts one budget across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Discover and Maps, and lets Google decide where it goes. For a consultancy that has two specific risks on top of the usual ones.
- It can write and route for you. Text customisation can generate headlines from your site, and final URL expansion can send clicks to any page on it, including one that talks about visas. Switch those off, or limit URLs to your country pages, and review every asset Google creates.
- It reaches people far from deciding. Display and video placements bring cheap form fills from people browsing, not choosing. Without outcomes from your CRM, the campaign learns to find more of them.
- It bids on your own name. Add brand exclusions and keep brand searches in their own Search campaign so the report shows what Performance Max found that you would not have got anyway.
- Negatives now apply. Since 2025 Google has allowed campaign-level negative keywords and shared lists on Performance Max, so attach your job and visa-only lists.
Our advice is to start with Search alone. Add Performance Max once offline conversions report sessions attended, run it beside Search rather than instead of it, and compare cost per session between the two every month.
Calls, CRM stages and offline conversion import
Parents often phone rather than fill in a form. Google forwarding numbers are available in India, so call reporting can record every call from your ads: which campaign, how long, at what time. Set a minimum call length that counts as a conversion, and ask counsellors to log the outcome of each call against the lead. A three-minute call about fees and a three-minute wrong number look identical to Google until your team says otherwise.
Forms and WhatsApp need the same treatment. Capture the Google click ID on every form and on the link behind every WhatsApp button, store it with the lead in your CRM, and upload the stages that matter:
- qualified, meaning the course, country and qualification fit what you handle;
- counselling session attended;
- application filed with a university;
- enrolment, meaning deposit paid or place accepted.
Google accepts click-ID uploads up to 90 days after the click. Admissions often take longer than that, so make session attended the primary conversion that bidding learns from, and upload the later stages as secondary ones when they happen inside the window. Without this, Google treats a student who enrolled and a form filled in by a job seeker as the same success.
Budget logic without a price list
We publish no prices, and we will not invent a benchmark cost per click for you either. Your own numbers set the budget better. Three questions do most of the work: how many counselling sessions can your team hold in a week, how many sessions does it take in your records to produce one enrolment, and what is an enrolment worth to you after costs. Together they tell you what you can afford to pay for a session attended.
- Fund first the countries with the strongest session-to-enrolment rate, not the ones with the most searches.
- Give the Gulf campaign a budget of its own, so Kerala spend does not swallow it.
- Keep money in reserve for results days and application deadlines; when those fall is in our study abroad marketing calendar.
- Review monthly on cost per session attended, and quarterly on cost per enrolment once those figures arrive.
Google bills the spend to your own card and we add no margin. If you want a second opinion on an existing account, our study abroad consultant marketing page explains the free audit, which ends with a written scope and one figure.
