Four Google Ads managers. Why couldn't they explain what went wrong?

I read a Reddit post from an international flight school who'd gone through four ad managers in six years. They said:

The reason we keep switching is that eventually the leads completely dry up, and nobody can explain why.

Their frustration got me thinking.

Why could nobody diagnose the problem?

I can think of a few ideas:

Maybe the ad managers were rubbish.

Anyone can sell Google Ads management services. You don't need a qualification, experience or a licence to call yourself an expert. The industry is full of people who've watched a YouTube video and asked "How hard can it be?"

Maybe the ad managers couldn't speak human.

They understood the problem but said something like:

We've seen a drop in Search Impression Share due to rank, compounded by increased CPCs and a reduction in CVR. Smart Bidding is also struggling with low conversion volume, so the tCPA strategy doesn't have enough signals to optimise effectively.

Even if the explanation was spot on, you couldn't blame the flight instructor for not understanding a word of it.

Maybe the client didn't want to accept the explanation.

I've bumped into this a few times where I've been brought on to diagnose a struggling account.

The client decided why the ads weren't working and wasn't willing to consider another explanation.

One client got quite grumpy. His firm wasn't getting the lead quality they'd hoped for. He'd constructed an elaborate explanation - he even had graphs - for why, and handed me a plan to fix it.

But the whole explanation was based on a shaky assumption, with absolutely no evidence to support it. When I asked him how he'd decided it was true he got huffy and claimed that he "just knew".

I didn't cave so he hired someone more compliant. I know it didn't work out because about a year later they contacted me again looking for help. (I said I was too busy.)

I'm not suggesting that's what happened with the flight school. But it should be ruled out.

Maybe there isn't enough to evidence identify a single cause.

I've investigated a lot of struggling Google Ads campaigns over the years. Most of the time there are several viable explanations instead of one definite cause.

For example, suppose during the period that the leads dropped off:

• International news reported horror stories about travellers being denied entry or detained for days at immigration.
• Other flight schools started advertising more aggressively.
• Google changed how they match your ads to people searching for your services.
• The school's website changed.
• The school increased its course fees because the cost of AVGAS went up.

Any one thing might affect Google Ads. Five things at once? How would you know how much, if anything, each contributed to the drop?

You could probably test to try isolate the real cause, but that could take months. And every day without any leads adds pressure.

The ad manager says "We need more data."

The client hears "I don't know what's wrong, and I want you to keep paying while I hope to figure it out."

Not good.

So what would I do if the flight school asked me to help?

Truthfully I'm not sure I could help. But if I was going to try I think I'd do four things in this order:

1. Find out exactly what's meant by "leads dried up".

• Was it no leads at all?
• Was it no genuine enquiries, only spam?
• Did they get enquiries but from people who wanted to learn to fly buy were a poor fit because of price, location etc?

This is important because you don't fix a spam problem the same way you fix a no-lead problem. And, you don't fix the poor-fit problem the same way you fix the no-lead problem. You've got to get the diagnosis right before prescribing the treatment.

2. Check if Google Ads has a reasonable chance of working.

Before spending any more on another attempt, I'd want to know if Google Ads could be profitable for the business, assuming we could generate a steady supply of qualified leads.

I'd want to find out which of these is true:

• "Google doesn't work" or,
• "The way we did Google Ads didn't work".

The thing is, Google Ads isn't a viable channel for every single business.

• In some industries the cost to acquire a new customer is higher than the profit from that customer.
• In industries with long sales cycles successful advertising can create cashflow difficulties.
• If the business doesn't have an effective way of nurturing leads from enquiry to signup Google Ads isn't likely to be profitable.

If we can figure this out early the school can fix things or find another way to land future pilots.

3. Check the obvious stuff.

I'm guessing here, but if four ad managers weren't able to figure things out there probably isn't an easy explanation.

I'd check anyway.

If I found a problem, great. We'd have something to fix.

But what if I couldn't find anything obviously wrong? What if the previous four ad managers were actually competent?

I could dig through the account's history all the way back to Covid, but there's no guarantee I'd unearth anything useful.

And, I expect that the flight school is more interested in getting leads than pinpointing exactly what went wrong before.

It'd be time to see if we could make Google Ads work.

4. Run an inexpensive experiment to see if Google Ads could work.

I've got an approach that works well for generating leads on Google. It's been successful across a wide range of industries. I'd like to test it here.

The flight school has already tried four different Google Ads managers. Why should they expect a fifth attempt to be any different?

They must ask.

I wouldn't promise that my approach would work where the others had failed. I don't know enough about what they did or why it stopped working.

What I could offer is a controlled experiment with a clear definition of success.

• We'd agree on what makes a qualified enquiry.
• Make sure we could measure those enquiries properly.
• And track what happened to them after the flight school received them.

That would tell us if we could attract prospective students at a cost that made commercial sense.

And if we couldn't, we'd at least have better evidence to help us understand why.

That's much more useful than another six months of trying and hoping.

But, you can't make Google Ads successful in isolation. It needs to be part of a working system. I'd need four things from the client to make the system work.

1. A definition of what successful looks like.

The real measure of success is how many paid-up students they can land from Google Ads. But, international flight training isn't an impulse buy. It could take months, maybe even a year between first contact and payment.

Nobody should throw money at Google for months without being reasonably confident it'll be profitable in the end.

That means we'd need to judge the success of the Google Ads on how many leads we could get that looked likely to buy.

I don't know enough about flight schools to know what a good lead looks like. I'd work with the client to figure this out, but I expect it'd be someone:

• Who had a genuine interest in learning to fly.
• Was from a country with no visa restrictions.
• Matched the age, health and other requirements.
• Could afford the training.

2. Enough money and time to give the experiment a fair chance.

If they pull the plug the first day leads drop nobody has learned anything.

3. Treat every single lead like it was made of gold.

I don't know what their lead handling process is like. But I've seen enough cases where Google gets blamed for poor lead quality when the real culprit is that the business dropped the ball.

4. Give me feedback on what happened with each lead.

I'm looking for things like:

• If the person was a good fit
• If not, why not?
• Did the lead progress at all?

I'd use this information to adjust the advertising if needed.

I want to be clear about a two things

First. I'm not saying my way is the "one true way" of running Google Ads. I'm also not saying my approach is guaranteed to work. But there's no point reinventing the wheel. Especially with Google Ads. It's full of inconspicuous settings that can make the difference between profit and despair.

And second. We might never know why the old campaigns failed. But if we can make Google Ads profitable now, does it really matter?

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