Practical Google Ads reading for business owners.
Written so you could do this yourself if you wanted to. Some people do, and that is a perfectly good outcome.
Get your free audit
No sales call, ever. Tell us about your business and we’ll reply in writing, usually within one business day.
The audit checklist
The seven things to check in your own account, in the order that usually matters most: tracking, search terms, structure, geography, ads, landing pages and the settings that quietly waste money.
Getting conversions right
Why half of small business accounts optimise toward something that is not a lead, the eight most common tracking mistakes, and what to set up instead.
Landing pages that convert paid traffic
Why page conversion rate moves results more than bidding does, the five failures we see most often, and what belongs on a page built for a specific search.
What to budget
How to work out a realistic monthly ad budget from what a customer is worth, why $1,500 is the usual floor, and which categories need considerably more.
What the first ninety days look like
Week by week: tracking, build, controlled launch, weekly optimisation, and what it is reasonable to expect at each stage.
Industry playbooks
Eighteen trades, each with its own campaign structure, negative keyword list, seasonality and conversion approach. The specifics, not the generalities.
Three things worth knowing before you spend anything
Your cost per lead is meaningless without your close rate
A $90 lead is expensive if you close one in ten and the job is worth $400. It is cheap if you close one in three and the job is worth $6,000. Before judging any campaign, work out what you can afford to pay for a customer, and divide by your close rate to get what you can afford per lead. Most business owners have never done that arithmetic, and it changes every decision that follows.
Thirty conversions is roughly when data becomes real
Below that, what you are looking at is mostly noise. This is why ninety days matters, why tiny budgets struggle, and why the first three weeks of any campaign should be judged on whether it was built properly rather than on its cost per acquisition.
The search terms report is the most useful screen in Google Ads
Not the dashboard, not the recommendations tab, not the optimisation score — which is a measure of how closely you follow Google’s suggestions, not of how well your account performs. The search terms report tells you what people actually typed before spending your money, and reading it every week is most of what good account management consists of.
More guides are being added over time. If there is something you want explained, message us — we will usually answer it directly and then write it up here.