Google Ads Management

A lead is a phone call, not a click

We count a win when your phone rings and a real person wants your help. Clicks are a step on the way. A sixty-second phone call is a lead.

That sounds obvious. It is not how most accounts are set up, and the gap between the two is where the money goes.

Most accounts count the wrong thing as a win

Google spends your budget going after whatever you tell it to go after. So what you count as a win decides who ever sees your ads.

It is common to open an account where the win is set to something that isn't one. Somebody reached the contact page. Somebody tapped the phone number and hung up before it rang. Every spam form fill counted the same as a real customer.

Feed that back to Google and it goes looking for more people who do that. It gets very good at finding them. Meanwhile the campaign that actually books work looks worse on paper - and that is usually the one that gets cut.

We set it up to count calls that lasted long enough to be a real conversation, and form fills from people who answered the qualifying questions. Then the report and your calendar finally agree with each other.

You are paying for searches that were never going to call

Your ad does not only show for the words you picked. Google matches searches it thinks are close enough, and some of them are nowhere near.

Open a neglected account and you will find money spent on things like:

• People looking for a job with you, not a quote from you
• How-to searches from people planning to do it themselves
• Parts, prices and the word "free", from people who were never buying a service
• Towns you do not drive to
• A trade next door to yours that you do not actually do

Every one of those is a click you paid for. We read the search terms report - the actual words people typed - and block the ones that can't turn into work.

That list is never finished. New ones appear every week. Keeping it current is the work.

Where the click lands decides whether it pays

Half of a search campaign happens after the click, on a page most ad agencies cannot edit.

We build and host your site, so the page your ad points at is ours to fix. That means a page about the one thing the ad promised, the phone number where a thumb already is, and a form short enough that people finish it.

It also means we notice when the form stops sending. We wrote our own monitoring for the sites we host, and whether the contact form is still working is one of the things it watches.

That failure is the expensive one. A broken form looks exactly like a bad month, and it can eat a whole budget before anyone thinks to test it.

How fast should you answer a website lead? →

If you are a home-service trade, start somewhere else

For roofers, plumbers, HVAC, electricians and the rest, Google has a different product that sits above the search ads and charges per lead instead of per click.

It is usually the better first dollar. We will tell you that before we build you a search campaign, not after.

Search ads still earn their place. They cover the searches Local Services Ads don't, and every trade that doesn't qualify for them. Most of the time the answer is both, in that order.

See how Local Services Ads work →

What we will tell you on the first call

• What a click actually costs in your trade and your town. It varies more than people expect, and it decides whether the budget you have in mind is enough to bother with.
• Whether ads are the right move at all. If nobody can find you even when they do search, that is an SEO problem, and more ad spend will not fix it.
• Ad spend goes on your card, straight to Google. It doesn't pass through us and we don't mark it up.
• You are not locked in. Ads run month to month. Results are the reason to stay.

We've built this for

• Trades & Home Services
• Professional Services
• Construction