Start with what one booked job is worth
Before you touch a setting, work out the number that decides everything: what a booked job is worth to you after your costs. A clinic, a roofer and a farm supplier will each land on a very different figure, so each can afford a very different price for a lead. Without that number, a cost per click is just a figure that looks big or small.
Then walk one enquiry backwards. Suppose ten people click, two phone or send a form, and one of those becomes a job. The leak could sit at any of those three gaps, and the fix is different at each. Write your own three numbers on paper first. Everything else in this article is a way of finding which gap is widest.
Make sure the leads are being counted
A surprising number of low-return campaigns are fine and badly measured. If the account only counts form submissions, every phone call from a mobile search vanishes and the cost per lead looks terrible. If it counts the thank-you page twice, the results look wonderful and mean nothing. Test your own tracking: send yourself a form, ring from your cell and watch what appears in Google Ads.
Set a minimum call length so a wrong number or a hang-up is not recorded as a lead. Then decide what a conversion means for you: a booking request, a quote form, a call that lasts over a minute. Tell Google the real outcome and its automated bidding learns from a useful signal instead of chasing cheap, pointless clicks.
Find the leak: wrong searches, wrong places, wrong page
Open the search terms report, which shows the actual phrases people typed before they clicked. Read the last month of it like a customer file. You will usually find searches that were never yours: jobs, courses, free, do-it-yourself, a different service, a different city. That is the wrong-searches leak, and negative keywords close it.
Next, check the location setting. Choose people in your area rather than people interested in it, or you pay for a visitor planning a trip to Abbotsford. Finally, open your landing page on your own phone with the wifi off, standing in a parking lot on South Fraser Way if you must. If you cannot find the phone number in three seconds, nobody else will either.
- Many clicks, few calls, and search terms that are not yours: the keywords are too loose.
- Sensible search terms but few calls from phones: the page or the call button is the problem.
- Clicks from towns you do not serve: the location setting is too wide.
- Calls arrive but few become jobs: the leak is price, speed of reply or fit, not the ad.
- Good weeks followed by nothing: look at the schedule, the daily budget cap and seasonal demand.
When the ads work and the phone does not
This one is uncomfortable, and it is common in the trades and in clinics. The ad did its job, a person called, and nobody picked up because the crew was on a roof or the front desk was at lunch. Compare your call log with the hours your ads run. Missed calls during those hours are paid-for leads thrown away.
The fixes cost far less than a keyword overhaul: a call-forwarding rule, an automatic text-back, a form that promises a reply the same business day, and one named person who owns the reply. Speed matters because the customer has usually opened three other tabs. Whoever answers first, politely, often wins the quote.
Change one thing, then wait long enough to learn
Once you have found the leak, resist fixing everything in one afternoon. Google’s bidding needs time to settle after a big change, and if you alter keywords, budget and the landing page together you will never know which move helped. Change one area, note the date and give it a couple of weeks of ordinary traffic before judging.
Keep a one-page log: date, change, reason, result. After a quarter it becomes one of the most useful documents in your marketing, because it records what your own market responds to. It also keeps any conversation with an agency honest, since you can both read the same record. If the log says the account is sound, the problem is probably the offer.
What to measure once the leaks are closed
When the obvious leaks are shut, the useful question shifts from why the ads are failing to how much more they can carry. Watch cost per booked job rather than cost per click, and read it against the seasons you already know: furnace calls before the first frost, roofing before the autumn rains, farm suppliers around harvest. Let those patterns shape your budget month by month instead of one flat amount all year.
- 01Cost per booked job, reviewed monthly instead of cost per click
- 02Call answer rate during the hours your ads run
- 03Share of enquiries that come from towns you actually serve
Questions & answers
Long enough to collect a fair sample: a few weeks of normal traffic, with enough enquiries that one odd week cannot skew the picture. Judge by booked jobs, not clicks. A service with a long decision, such as a renovation, needs a longer window than a same-day plumbing call.
No. Keywords are only one place money leaks. Tracking that misses phone calls, a page that loads slowly on a phone, a location setting that is too wide and unanswered calls all produce the same symptom. That is why the diagnosis starts with the whole path from click to job.
Usually not entirely. If the campaign is losing money quickly, lower the daily budget or tighten the schedule while you work, but keep enough traffic running to learn from. A full pause removes the data you need to test your fixes against.
Yes. The free marketing audit includes a review of your ads, and you receive the findings before any proposal. You will see where the money is leaking and which fixes are worth making yourself. One account lead stays with you from the first call to the final report.
