Google Ads that can prove what they earned
I've audited a lot of Google Ads accounts. The pattern is depressingly consistent: thousands of pounds spent, a conversion figure that looks healthy, and on inspection the "conversions" are page views. One account I looked at had spent £14,000 with a conversion ID that had never been installed and no enquiry form on the website at all.
So I start with tracking. Until you can see which clicks turned into real enquiries and real sales, everything else is guesswork with your money.
What I do
- Conversion tracking first — calls, form submissions and ecommerce sales, tested end to end and verified as firing
- Account structure — campaigns and ad groups built around how people search, not around your service list
- Keywords and match types — tight targeting, with a negative keyword list that stops you paying for the wrong searches
- Ad copy and extensions — written to pre-qualify, so you pay for clicks from people who can actually buy
- Landing pages — sending traffic to the right page, and building one if the right page doesn't exist
- Bidding strategy — started manually, moved to automated bidding only once there's enough real conversion data to feed it
- Ongoing management — search term reviews, negatives, budget shifts and honest reporting
Watch out for auto-applied recommendations
Google will happily "improve" your account for you — broadening your keywords, raising your budgets, switching your bidding. I've traced sharp drops in lead volume directly to auto-applied recommendations that nobody approved. Turning those off is often the single highest-value change in an account.
Performance Max
PMax has its place, but on small budgets it frequently spends most of its money buying clicks on your own brand name — traffic you'd have got for nothing — and reports them as conversions. I'll tell you when it's working and when it's flattering itself.
Ads and SEO together
Ads buy traffic today and stop the day you stop paying. Search engine optimisation builds traffic that keeps arriving, but takes months to compound. Most clients run both, with Ads covering the gap. Either way the clicks have to land somewhere that converts, which is usually a website design job rather than an ads one.
Google Ads accounts I manage
Live accounts across trades, retail, automotive and appointment-led businesses — several of them inherited from somebody else and rebuilt.
SkyLofts
Loft conversions — Farnborough, Hampshire, Surrey & Berkshire
Four search campaigns and £14,000 of spend across nearly two years with not one recorded enquiry. The audit found why: the conversion ID on the site pointed at a different Ads account entirely, so every conversion was silently discarded — and there was no enquiry form anywhere on the website to convert on.
On Point Appliances
Appliance retail & repair — Southampton
An account reporting hundreds of conversions at about £5 each, none of which were sales. Performance Max was largely buying the company's own brand name and counting it. Rebuilt around real ecommerce and call tracking, alongside the website rebuild shown with the other ecommerce website examples.
Solent Locksmiths
24/7 emergency locksmiths — Southampton & Eastleigh
Conversion actions had existed since 2023 but were dead — the rebuilt site never carried the tag — so automated bidding was chasing 43p clicks for key cutting instead of emergency call-outs. Tracking wired into the site, PMax paused, budget moved to the campaigns that bring calls.
Romsey Bridal Boutique
Wedding dresses, by appointment — Romsey
An appointment-only boutique that cannot win a price fight with national online discounters, so it doesn't try. The account is built around the five designers they actually stock, local intent and booking an appointment — with the wasteful broad searches negated out.
Langs Automotive
Prestige & performance garage — Wimborne, Dorset
A garage lives on phone calls, so calls are what gets measured. Ads run alongside the garage website and the Google Business Profile, with the service areas, categories and marque pages all pulling the same way.
And the rest of it
Ads sit alongside the local SEO and the site itself on most of these accounts, which is the point — a click is only worth buying if it lands somewhere that converts.
You can see the builds behind them in the website portfolio.
Ads account audit
If you're already spending on Google Ads, I'll go through the account and tell you what's working, what's wasting money and what isn't being tracked. No cost, no obligation, and you keep the findings either way.
Frequently asked
