You're Throwing Money at Clicks. Browsers Click. Buyers Convert.

Ads are the right answer when you need enquiries before organic work can plausibly deliver them, when demand is seasonal and short, when you are testing whether a service sells at all, or when the organic results for your term are held by national sites you will not displace soon.

They are the wrong answer when the site cannot convert the traffic. Paying for clicks to a page that loads slowly, does not work on a phone, or does not say what you charge is buying the same visitor twice and losing them both times. We would rather fix that first and take less money now.

The honest framing is that the two channels solve different problems on different timescales — organic traffic versus paid ads goes through when each makes sense, and local SEO is the slower, cheaper-per-lead half of the pair.

The single most common waste in a small account is match type. Broad match hands Google latitude to show your ad for things that are adjacent to your term rather than the same as it, and on a modest budget that latitude is expensive: a plumber pays for “plumbing courses” and “plumbing supplies” before the budget reaches anyone with a leak.

So: phrase and exact match for the terms that carry buying intent, broad only where there is enough budget to learn from it, and a negative keyword list that grows every week from the actual search terms report. That report is the most useful screen in the account and the one most rarely opened.

Intent matters more than volume. “Emergency plumber near me” at low volume outperforms “plumbing” at high volume, because one of them is a person with water on the floor. Google’s keyword matching options covers the mechanics.

Sending paid traffic to a homepage is the default and it is almost always wrong. A person who searched for one specific thing and clicked an ad promising that thing should land on a page about that thing — not on a general introduction to the business with the answer three clicks away.

A landing page that works matches the promise in the ad word for word, states the price or the range, shows the service area, and makes the action obvious above the fold on a phone. Removing navigation is sometimes right and sometimes patronising; what is always right is not making the visitor hunt.

Location-specific pages are a particular trap: twenty pages differing only by town name are a doorway scheme, they read as one to a search engine, and they convert badly because they say nothing. What to include and what to avoid on location pages is the longer version.

Every account needs a period where it is gathering data rather than performing, and a budget too thin to produce conversions never leaves that period. If the realistic cost per click in your market is eight dollars and you are spending ten a day, the account cannot learn, automated bidding has nothing to optimise toward, and the money goes anyway.

It is usually better to advertise one service properly in one area than five services thinly everywhere. Narrow the geography, narrow the hours to when someone answers the phone, and let the budget concentrate.

We will tell you if the budget you have in mind is below the level where paid search can work in your market, and what it would need to be. That conversation costs us the sale sometimes. It costs you more to find out three months in.

An account can look healthy on impressions, click-through rate and cost per click while producing nothing the business can bank. The numbers that matter are enquiries and what each one cost.

That requires conversion tracking that actually fires — form submissions and phone calls both, including calls from the ad extension rather than only from the website. It is worth checking rather than assuming: a surprising number of accounts have been reporting conversions from a tag that stopped working after a site change.

You keep the account and its history. It is created in your name, we are granted access to it, and if we part company you revoke that access and everything stays where it is. An agency that runs your ads inside its own account is holding your data hostage by default, whatever the intention. How to use Google Analytics covers reading the rest of it yourself.