Google Ads Management
Find where your Google Ads budget leaks, then close it
Search is demand capture. The person is already looking, so the work is making sure you pay for the ones who intend to buy, land them on a page that matches what they asked, and measure which of them turned into revenue.
Where the money goes
Five places a Google Ads budget leaks
Search accounts rarely fail dramatically. They lose money in small, quiet, structural ways that nobody notices because each one looks reasonable in isolation.
Demand capture is the easy half of advertising: the person is already looking for what you sell. That is exactly why the failures are subtle. You are not trying to create interest, you are trying to avoid paying for the wrong interest.
- Broad match is running and nobody reads the search terms report.
- Broad match will match your keyword to searches Google judges related, which is useful when the negative list is disciplined and expensive when it is not. Left alone for a quarter it buys traffic for adjacent products, job hunters, free alternatives and other countries. The setting is not the fault. The missing weekly routine is.
- Brand and non-brand sit inside the same campaign.
- Brand clicks are cheap and convert well because those people were already on their way to you. Averaged in with everything else they make an underperforming non-brand campaign look tolerable, and they make the only important question unanswerable: is the advertising creating demand you did not already have?
- Location settings are wider than the area you can serve.
- A radius drawn generously at launch, a country-level setting nobody revisited, or a targeting option that includes people merely interested in your area rather than present in it. Each is invisible in the campaign view and obvious in the geographic report, and each spends real money on people you cannot sell to.
- Every ad points at the homepage.
- Someone searched for one specific service and arrived on a page listing eleven of them, so the work of finding the right one has been handed back to them. The bounce is not mysterious. Google also assesses landing page experience as one of three Quality Score components, which means the mismatch costs you twice.
- Auto-applied recommendations are switched on.
- Google can apply certain recommendations to an account automatically unless they are turned off. Some are harmless housekeeping. Others add keywords, loosen match types or change bid strategies without a person deciding to. If nobody in your business knows whether this is enabled, part of your account is being managed by a default.
How people actually search
Not every search is worth the same click
Keyword lists hide the thing that matters. Two searches can contain the same words and mean completely different things about whether that person is going to buy from you this month.
These are illustrative examples of the three tiers we sort demand into before deciding match types, bids and negatives. Yours will look different, but the shape holds.
Worth paying properly for
A named service, a commercial verb, or an urgency signal. These justify tight match types, dedicated ad groups and a page that answers only that question.
- emergency roof repair near me
- commercial hvac maintenance contract quote
- book a family law consultation
- buy standing desk next day delivery
Worth paying less for
Comparison and cost research. Real buyers, several weeks earlier. Worth bidding on at a lower ceiling, and worth a genuinely useful page rather than a quote form.
- roof repair vs full roof replacement cost
- how much does a family lawyer charge
- best crm for a small services business
- standing desk reviews
Worth excluding entirely
Job seekers, DIY, free-tool hunters and students. In most accounts, excluding this group is the single cheapest performance improvement available and it costs nothing but attention.
- roofing jobs near me
- how to fix a leaking tap yourself
- free crm software download
- plumbing apprenticeship courses
These are examples of how customers in this market search, drawn from keyword research and from the questions that come up on sales calls. They are illustrative, not a volume claim — the actual demand in your area is something we size before recommending anything.
The uncomfortable part
Most wasted spend is a measurement problem
Automated bidding does what it is told with more consistency than any human. That is the whole point of it, and it is also why a weak conversion signal is so costly. Tell the system that every form view counts and it will find you form views at an impressively low price.
So before we touch a bid strategy we check what is being counted, whether it fires when it should, and whether it corresponds to anything your sales team would recognise. That usually means separating enquiry types, removing duplicate tags, and assigning different values to a booked appointment and a newsletter signup rather than treating them as equal.
Where the sales cycle is long enough that platform data becomes misleading, we import what actually happened from the CRM. Google supports bringing offline outcomes back into the account, which lets bidding optimise toward closed business rather than toward whatever happened on the website that afternoon.
Scope
What we manage, and how often
Frequency matters more than the list itself. A search terms review done weekly is a different service from the same review done once a quarter, and it is the difference most accounts are actually missing.
- Weekly search terms review, with negatives added at the right level rather than dumped at campaign level
- Match type strategy per ad group, with broad match contained rather than banned
- Brand, non-brand and competitor demand separated so each can be judged on its own numbers
- Geographic, schedule and device reporting checked against where you actually sell and staff the phones
- Ad copy written per ad group, with a stated hypothesis for every test rather than rotation for its own sake
- Sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets maintained as real assets, not filled in once at launch
- Landing page relevance reviewed for every destination, and flagged when the page is the ceiling
- Conversion tracking verified end to end, including form submissions, calls and CRM import where relevant
- Auto-applied recommendations reviewed and deliberately enabled or disabled, with the reason recorded
- Monthly reporting that reconciles to your CRM and names the next three decisions
Order of work
What happens in the first ninety days
The sequence exists because restructuring an account before you trust its data means measuring the change against a number that was already wrong.
Read the account before changing it
Search terms, geographic performance, device split, conversion actions, change history and what the previous manager was optimising toward. We do not restructure in week one; we find out what the account has been doing and why.
You get: Written audit with the leaks named and quantified
Fix the measurement
Verify every conversion action end to end, remove the ones that count intent as outcome, separate enquiry types and assign values. Where the sales cycle warrants it, connect the CRM so the platform learns from what actually closed.
You get: Verified conversion setup and agreed values
Stop the obvious waste
Negatives, geographic corrections, schedule adjustments and pausing whatever is spending on demand that cannot buy. This step usually pays for itself and it happens before any restructure, because it is reversible and fast.
You get: Immediate exclusions applied and logged
Restructure around how you sell
Brand separated from non-brand, campaigns built around service lines and margins rather than platform convention, budgets allocated to the demand you actually want more of.
You get: Rebuilt account structure with budget rationale
Test the page, then the offer
Once traffic is clean and measurement is honest, the remaining ceiling is nearly always after the click. We test destination, form length, proof and offer clarity in that order.
You get: Landing page test plan and documented results
Questions
What people ask about Google Ads
Should we be using broad match or exact match?
It depends far more on your operating discipline than on your industry. Broad match reaches searches Google judges related to your keyword, which is genuinely useful when someone reviews the search terms report every week and adds negatives. Without that routine it becomes an open budget.
In practice we usually run tighter match types for the terms that already convert and use broad match deliberately, in its own campaign, as a discovery mechanism with a hard budget cap. That way the exploration cannot quietly consume the money that is working.
Why are we getting clicks but almost no enquiries?
The three usual causes are a mismatch between the search and the page, a form that asks too much too early, and traffic that was never qualified in the first place. All three show up quickly if you read the search terms report next to the landing page rather than looking at either alone.
Google evaluates landing page experience as one of the three components of Quality Score, alongside expected clickthrough rate and ad relevance, so relevance after the click also affects what you pay to get there.
Is it worth bidding on our own brand name?
Often yes, but it should be measured separately and never blended into the account average. Brand clicks are cheap and convert well because those people already decided to find you, so mixing them in makes weak non-brand performance look acceptable.
The honest way to judge it is to look at brand and non-brand as two different businesses. If non-brand cannot stand up on its own numbers, the account has a problem that brand spending is concealing rather than solving.
Can you guarantee a cost per click or a cost per lead?
No. Both are set by an auction with competitors we do not control, in a market with seasonality we do not control, converting on an offer and a sales process that are partly yours.
What we will do is show you the current numbers honestly, tell you early if the economics look unworkable at your margins, and recommend reducing or stopping spend rather than defending a budget for its own sake.
How long before we know whether it is working?
Waste is usually visible in the first two weeks, because irrelevant search terms, broken tracking and geographic overspill do not need statistical significance to be obvious.
Judging whether the channel can work at your economics takes longer — typically a full sales cycle plus a few weeks, so that leads have had time to become opportunities and the CRM has something real to compare against.
Get an honest account of where your search budget goes
Give us read access to the account and a month of lead data. We will show you which searches you are paying for, which of them could never have bought, and whether the numbers in the platform match the ones in your CRM.
If we don't deliver the work we agreed to deliver for reasons within our control, you don't pay for the undelivered work. Read our guarantee
Related
Where to go next
- the wider paid media practiceSearch is one channel inside a bigger acquisition plan.
- Performance Max campaignsWhere automation takes over decisions search campaigns keep.
- conversion tracking and analyticsThe measurement that decides whether any of this is readable.
- landing pages built to convertRelevance after the click is a Quality Score input and a revenue input.
- how paid and organic compare
- bringing cost per lead down
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal