Google Ads judged on customers, not clicks
We start by making the result measurable. A campaign judged on the wrong number gets optimised in the wrong direction, faster.
Your account is spending. The click cost is fine, the click count is fine, and you still cannot say which campaign paid for itself last month.
One client, one year
What measuring first was worth.
A taxi company buying phone calls, with no way of knowing which calls became rides. We changed what counted as a call worth having before we changed a single advert.
- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
client
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
client
- average cost per click
$2.10
average cost per click
australia
What changes
What you can say afterwards.
What a customer costs from Search
Separately from YouTube, separately from Shopping, measured through to revenue rather than to a click.
Which search terms bring buyers
Not which bring traffic. The two lists overlap less than anybody expects, and the gap is usually where the budget is going.
Why the budget moved
It moves weekly, toward what earns. You get the reason each time, in a sentence, before it happens rather than after.
When to stop
Including when to stop advertising altogether. If the arithmetic says the channel cannot work at your margin, we would rather tell you in month one.
How it runs
The first four weeks.
Nobody rebuilds your campaigns in week one. A campaign rebuilt before the measurement is fixed just produces wrong answers sooner.
Agree the questions
What a customer is worth, what you can afford to pay for one, and which of your conversions are currently being counted twice.
Make the outcome measurable
Conversion actions, server side measurement, call length thresholds, and the offline import if your sales close by phone or by email.
Reconcile against the bank
The reported number set against what you actually took. Where they disagree we fix the measurement, not the report.
Then change the advertising
Structure, search terms, budgets and bidding, against a number that now means something. This is where most agencies start and it is why their first quarter is guesswork.
What is included
The monthly work.
- Account structure built around what you sell, not around what is easy to report
- Search, Shopping, Performance Max and YouTube, used where each earns its place
- Search term review every week, with the waste excluded and written down
- Conversion values fed back, so bidding chases money rather than count
- Landing page notes, because the advert is only half of a cost per customer
- A weekly note: spend, customers, cost per customer, what changed and why
- Your account, your ownership. We work in it as managers
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
No. Being paid more when you spend more is the wrong incentive for the people whose job includes telling you when to spend less. Scope and fee are agreed up front and do not move with the budget.
What is the minimum we should be spending?
About two thousand a month. Below that our fee is a bigger problem than your advertising is, and we will say so rather than take the work.
Can you fix Performance Max? We cannot see inside it.
Partly. You will never get the visibility Search gives you, that is the trade the format makes. What you can control is what it optimises toward, and feeding it real customer values rather than raw conversions is the change that usually matters.
We were burned by an agency before. What is different?
Probably that we will show you a number that looks worse before it looks better, and explain why. The previous reports were not necessarily dishonest. They were counting things that were easy to count.
How quickly will it work?
Four weeks to the first honest answer, and a quarter before the bidding has enough clean conversions to be doing real work. Anybody promising a transformation in three weeks is describing a spend increase.
Your turn
Bring one question you cannot currently answer.
30 minutes. We will tell you whether it is measurable, roughly what it would take, and whether we are the right people for it.