Agency insights
Thoughts and lessons on client selection, burnout, pricing, and modernising legacy accounts, from someone who's run a Google Ads for years.
Banging your head against the right problems
Published December 2025. Last updated July 2026.
A fellow PPC professional contacted me because it looked like Google had charged his client twice for the same click.
He sent me a long email with detailed notes covering the many hours he had spent trying to resolve the issue. He was incredibly frustrated because Google Ads support was being, as usual, useless.
He was worried that if he didn’t get to the bottom of it, his client might be charged twice again in the future.
By any measure, his attention to detail showed that he is conscientious and diligent. Exactly the kind of person you want looking after your ad budget.
His email included a link to his client’s website. I clicked out of curiosity.
It was awful.
The page took ages to load. When it finally did, I almost wished it hadn’t. The design was a mess of mixed colours and styles. The text was the kind of written-for-SEO slop that might have worked back in 2012. I don’t have enough words to describe how bad it was.
Google Ads always has problems, but they’re not all the same:
- Some problems are cheap, some are expensive.
- Some problems affect one click, some problems affect every click.
- Some problems are in our control, some are in Google’s control.
The possible double charge is frustrating. My hero has already spent hours going back and forth with support. He is no closer to a resolution, and if it ever is resolved in his favour, he might get a $20 refund.
That awful website is a different kind of problem.
It is 100% within his control. It affects every click he pays for. And the upside is meaningful. Even a half-decent landing page would generate significantly more leads. Time spent improving conversion rate produces an ongoing return.
I think part of our job is deciding which problems we are going to beat our heads against and which ones we are going to ignore for now. I’m not saying we should never tackle problems that sit outside our control or have a low payoff. But we owe it to our clients to prioritise where we spend our time and energy.
I'll be asking:
- How much control do I have over the problem?
- What does fixing the problem actually get us?
- How much of our advertising does the problem affect?
Most Google Ads Problems Aren't Google Ads Problems
If my writing resonates with you, I'd like to give you a copy of my book, Profitable Google Ads. The book was written for business owners, but many PPC professionals have found it valuable too.
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