Where your Google Ads budget actually goes

Two businesses in the same trade spend five hundred dollars on Google Ads in the same month. One books four jobs out of it. The other books nothing, decides ads do not work for their trade, and switches the account off.

They were not running different ads. They were paying for different searches.

That is the part that usually gets skipped. You are not buying customers on Google. You are buying the right to appear when somebody types something, and the price is the same whether that somebody was ready to hire you today or was never going to call anyone at all.

You are buying searches, not customers

When you set a budget, what you have actually agreed to is a fee every time someone taps your ad. It comes out whether the call happens or not, and it comes out at the same rate for a perfect customer and for a dead end.

Left alone, Google is generous about what counts as a match. It will show your ad against searches you never put in the account and would not have chosen. Some of those turn out to be good, and finding them is genuinely part of the value. The rest cost exactly as much.

The searches that were never going to call

It is the same few categories in almost every trade, and they are worth knowing by name, because each one has a fix.

• People looking for a job rather than a service. Your trade plus hiring, salary, apprenticeship or careers. In a lot of trades this is the single largest source of wasted clicks.
• People who intend to do it themselves. How to, DIY, and anything phrased as fixing their own. They are researching, not hiring, and the click costs the same as a booking.
• People after parts, materials or equipment, when what you sell is the labor to fit them.
• Students, researchers and other businesses. Definitions, how the work is done, wholesale pricing, and competitors checking what you charge.
• People outside the area you actually cover, which is the easiest one to fix and the most commonly left running.

Each of these is handled with negative keywords, which is simply a list of words that stop your ad appearing when they show up in a search. It is the least interesting part of an ad account, and it is where most of the savings live.

The least interesting part of the account is the part holding most of the money.

The radius is a spending decision

Ask an owner how far they will travel and the answer comes back immediately. Forty minutes, or the county line, or anywhere they can get home from the same day.

That answer is a budget setting, and in plenty of accounts nobody ever entered it. So Google shows the ad to someone ninety minutes out, charges for the click, and you spend the call explaining that you do not come that far. You paid for a conversation that was always going to end that way.

This one takes no guesswork at all. You already know the number, and it just has to be in the account.

The page you land them on charges you twice

Google prices clicks partly on how well the page matches what the person searched for. Point every ad at your homepage regardless of what was typed and two things happen together. You pay more per click than a competitor whose page does match, and more of the people who arrive leave without doing anything.

The fix is not a bigger website. It is that the ad about emergency callouts lands on the page about emergency callouts rather than a general list of services. Somebody who clicked an ad has already told you what they want. The page should pick up where the ad left off.

Clicks are not the number

An account can look busy and produce nothing. Clicks, impressions and click-through rate all rise as you spend more, which is why they are the numbers that end up in reports and the numbers that tell you least.

What matters is the cost of a booked job. Getting to it takes call tracking, so a call can be traced back to the ad and the search behind it. Without that you are looking at traffic and guessing which part of it turned into work.

Once it is in place the account starts answering questions worth asking.

• Which keywords produce calls, and which only produce clicks
• What a call costs, and separately what a call that turns into work costs
• Which towns earn their place in the radius and which have never booked anything
• Whether the hours the ads run match the hours somebody actually answers the phone

Most of the job is subtraction

Getting an account live takes about a day. What decides whether it makes money is the months after, and most of that work is switching things off.

A keyword that pulls twenty clicks and no calls comes out. A search term nobody predicted goes onto the negative list. A town that only produces enquiries you turn down leaves the radius. Every one of those moves money off something that does not work and onto something that does, so the cost per booked job falls over time instead of climbing.

Accounts nobody prunes drift the other way. That drift is usually the real story behind somebody saying they tried Google Ads once and it did not work.

When the honest answer is not to run them

Some businesses should not. If you already come up first for the searches that matter in your area and the phone rings enough, ads may only be charging you for clicks you were getting for free.

The other case is when the arithmetic does not close. If clicks in your market are expensive, and it takes a lot of them to produce one call, and that call is worth less than the pile of clicks cost, no amount of account management rescues it. Better to find that out before the first month than after the third.

What ads are genuinely good at is speed. They can be live within a day and the phone can ring that same week, which nothing else on this list can do. The trade is that the leads stop within a day or two of you stopping, which is the argument for building something slower underneath them rather than treating the ad account as the whole plan.