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Google Ads, With the Tracking Verified Before the Spend Starts

Most underperforming accounts are not a bidding problem. They are a measurement problem feeding a landing page that was never built to convert. We check both before touching a budget, because optimising towards a broken signal makes things worse quickly.

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The account is optimising towards the wrong thing

Smart bidding is only as good as the conversion it is told to maximise. When the conversion tag fires on a page load rather than a real submission, or never fires at all, the algorithm confidently spends your budget learning the wrong lesson. It looks like a bidding problem and it is not.

Always
Conversion signal verified before any spend change
Yours
Account and data ownership
< 24h
Written reply to a brief

The order we work in

Verify the conversion actually fires

End to end, with a real submission, confirming the event reaches the platform. This sounds trivial. It is the most common broken thing we find.

Read the search terms, not the keywords

What people actually typed, which is where the wasted spend lives. Negative keyword lists built from evidence rather than a template.

Fix the landing page

We build the page as well as run the account. Sending paid traffic to a page nobody will fix is the fastest way to burn a budget.

Structure that matches intent

Campaigns split by what the searcher wants, not by what is convenient to report. Brand separated from generic so the numbers mean something.

Offline conversion where the sale is not online

If the money arrives by email or invoice, feed that back so bidding optimises towards revenue rather than form fills.

Reporting you can audit

Written, plain, and reconcilable against the platform. Including the months where the answer is that it did not work.

How a Google Ads engagement runs

< 24h
Reply to your brief
100%
Scope agreed in writing before we start
4.9/5
Client rating
100%
Projects delivered remotely

Google Ads engagements

Account audit

On quote
  • Conversion tracking verified end to end
  • Search term and waste analysis
  • Structure and match type review
  • Landing page assessment
  • Written findings, yours to keep
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Build and run

On quote
  • Account built or rebuilt
  • Landing pages designed and developed
  • Conversion and offline tracking
  • Ongoing optimisation
  • Monthly written reporting
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Landing pages only

Custom
  • Pages built for an existing account
  • Conversion tracking wired and verified
  • Variant testing where volume allows
  • Handover to your existing agency
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Where paid budgets actually leak

Before changing a bid strategy it is worth knowing where the money goes in accounts that underperform. These five account for the large majority of what we find, and the first two are almost always present together.

A conversion that never fires, or fires on everything

This is the most consequential and the least noticed, because a broken conversion tag produces a plausible-looking dashboard rather than an error. Two failure modes dominate: the tag never fires, so bidding has no signal and the account looks like it has no demand, or the tag fires on every page load, so the algorithm learns that all traffic converts and optimises towards volume. Verify by submitting the form yourself and confirming the event arrives. We have found production sites where no conversion had ever been recorded because the tracking function was never actually attached to the page.

Broad match without the negative list to contain it

Broad match is not inherently wrong, and modern accounts often need it to find volume. What makes it expensive is running it without reading the search terms report weekly at the start. The queries that get matched are frequently adjacent rather than relevant, and the fix is a negative list built from what actually appeared, not a generic list downloaded from a blog post.

Brand and generic in the same campaign

Brand searches convert at a rate generic searches never will, because those people already decided. Mixing them produces an average that flatters the generic campaigns and hides that they are unprofitable. Separate them, and be prepared for the uncomfortable moment where the real cost per acquisition on non-brand traffic becomes visible for the first time.

Paying to be told what the sale was worth much later

If the actual revenue arrives weeks after the click, through an invoice or a signed contract, then optimising towards form submissions means optimising towards the wrong outcome. The accounts that improve most are the ones that feed the eventual outcome back, so bidding learns which leads become customers rather than which ones fill in a form. It requires connecting your own records back to the click, which is work, and it is usually the single highest-return change available.

A landing page nobody is allowed to change

A surprising number of paid engagements are constrained by a landing page that belongs to another team, another agency, or a CMS nobody wants to touch. The account gets optimised repeatedly against a fixed ceiling. If the page cannot change, that should be stated as a constraint at the start and factored into whether the channel makes sense at all, rather than discovered after six months of incremental bid adjustments.

We quote the engagement per project, on request, rather than as a percentage of spend. The reason is straightforward: a percentage model rewards the agency for spending more, which is misaligned with the months where the right advice is to spend less or pause a campaign that is not working. Ask any agency how they are paid before you engage them, because it predicts the advice you will receive.

You do, always. The Google Ads account is created under your billing and your ownership, we are granted access, and access is revoked when the engagement ends. You keep the account, the history, the conversion data and the learning. An agency that runs your campaigns inside their own account is holding your performance history hostage, and it is worth checking this before signing with anyone.

It depends entirely on your cost per click and how many conversions you need before automated bidding has enough signal to work with. In a cheap niche a modest budget produces useful data within weeks. In an expensive one, the same budget produces too few conversions for the algorithm to learn from and manual bidding is more sensible. Send the keywords you are considering and you get an honest read on whether the numbers work before you commit, including the answer that they might not.

Yes, and we will tell you first whether it is worth it. A page that loads slowly, buries the form, or asks for eleven fields will cap performance no matter how well the account is run, and there is no bidding strategy that compensates for it. If you cannot change the page, that constrains what the account can achieve and we would rather set that expectation upfront than bill for optimisation against a ceiling.

The first useful signal is usually wasted spend, visible in search terms within days of launch and often eliminable immediately. Meaningful performance optimisation needs enough conversion volume to distinguish signal from noise, which for most accounts means a few weeks minimum. Anyone showing you a dramatic improvement in week one is showing you variance.

No. Reporting is written and monthly, with the raw numbers included so you can reconcile against the platform yourself. Questions get answered in writing within one business day. In practice written reporting is more useful than a call, because it leaves a record you can compare month to month rather than a recollection.

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Send the account, or the idea

Existing account: we audit the tracking and the search terms first. Starting from nothing: send the keywords you have in mind and get an honest read on whether the numbers work.

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