Paid search that earns its spend.

Google Ads suits businesses that need enquiries now, can answer them quickly, and know roughly what a new customer is worth. For a plumber, a clinic or a professional firm, that usually means a few tightly targeted Search campaigns, not every campaign type Google offers.

When ads won’t pay

Ads struggle when the landing page doesn’t convert, when nobody tracks which clicks became enquiries, or when few people search for the service. In a small niche, raising broad-match bids tends to buy clicks on general searches that were never about your service. Then we recommend fixing the page or tracking first, or putting the budget into SEO.

A written report. Each finding names the setting, what it costs you and the fix.

• Conversion actions. Which are Primary, what fires each one, and who created it.
• Tracking. Auto-tagging, the Analytics link, and one real test enquiry followed through to the Ads conversion column.
• Keywords. Whether each ad group can match the searches it exists for. Keywords that all include a place name miss everyone who leaves it out.
• Negatives. Negatives don’t match plurals or close variants, so lists leak. Some also block searches you want.
• Settings. Search partners, display expansion, broad match, automatically created assets and auto-applied recommendations, which can undo a careful build unnoticed.
• Ads and policy. Whether ads promise anything the landing page doesn’t say, and any restricted category or certification Google requires.

The most common way an account overstates its leads is a conversion set on a page view instead of a submitted form. Every visit to the contact page then counts as a lead. We have seen this in accounts we have taken over. The rule lives in the Google Ads interface, not the website code, so it is easy to miss. Once bidding is based on conversions, Google starts buying visits instead of enquiries, and the cost per lead looks better than it is.

We don’t delete the action. Contact-page views help show where people drop off, so it moves to Secondary, which keeps it for reporting and out of bidding. The submitted enquiry becomes the only Primary conversion. On every account we:

1. List every conversion action and what fires it.
2. Make only real outcomes Primary: a submitted form, a booking, a call.
3. Send one real test enquiry and watch it arrive in Analytics, then in Google Ads.

Two reading rules. Ads reports conversions against the click date, so we widen the date range before reading them; a one-day view can show “0” for leads that happened. And we don’t diagnose Analytics data under 48 hours old.

One ad group per service, built around how people phrase it, with a negative keyword list built at the same time. Every claim in an ad has to appear on the landing page, and we check that before launch. The campaign stays paused until tracking, negatives, location and settings are confirmed. In the first week we read the search terms daily and check spend against budget.

We target the suburbs or radius you can reach, so a business in Hoppers Crossing isn’t paying for clicks from across the city.

• Presence, not interest. Google’s default includes people outside the area who show interest in it. We usually target people in the area, and talk through the trade-off.
• Place names in negatives. If you serve Sunshine, “sunshine coast” is a safe negative and “sunshine” alone blocks your own suburb.
• Call ads only when someone answers the number during ad hours.

With Ads linked to Analytics, cost and enquiries land in one plain-English Google Sheet. Qualified enquiries and cost per qualified enquiry come first; clicks and cost per click explain why they moved. We agree up front what counts as qualified. You get a written check-in each week and a review each month: what happened, what we recommend, and what we need from you.

15% of ad spend · $1,500/mo minimum management fee. Ad spend goes to Google directly from your account. Up to $10,000 a month in spend, the minimum applies.

Shisir, the founder, runs the account. Google Ads and conversion tracking are his specialism.