How I decide which Google Ads evidence gaps matter most

This article is part of a series on how I find high-leverage opportunities to make Google Ads more profitable..

Phase 1 of the profitability review involves mapping the four parts of the Google Ads system to find out what evidence exists and where it disappears.

They are:

Ingress routes. Every way Google Ads can generate an enquiry and how that enquiry enters the business.
Sales journey. How a lead moves through the sales journey from first contact to eventually become a paying customer.
Conversion tracking. What information flows from your business to your Google Ads account.
Decision making. Who makes strategic decisions and what they base them on.

To do this, I meet with the client, their team and the people who manage their Google Ads.

I capture everything I learn in a tool I’ve built for the job. A custom tool is worthwhile for me because I do a couple of these profitability reviews every month. But it definitely isn’t a requirement. Pen and paper work.

Once I’ve finished, I don’t dump everything on the client.

In every business I’ve worked with, we’ve found many places where evidence goes missing.

It'd be easy for my tool to spit out the whole list. But that would be a recipe for overwhelm and inaction.

Instead I aim for the 5-10 most important things. That's more difficult though.

How I prioritise evidence gaps

Not every evidence gap is equally important. I try to prioritise by asking questions like:

How many leads does it affect?
How commercially important are those leads?
Is the missing evidence causing leads to be lost, or merely making them harder to measure?
Is it causing Google Ads to be undervalued or overvalued?
What decisions could be made differently if the evidence existed?
Could it change what the business, its Google Ads manager or Google itself does?
How difficult and expensive would the gap be to fix?

I haven’t been able to turn this into a formula. I depend mostly on my experience and judgement. But the questions help me get there.

For example, in a recent review, we found a shadow SMS ingress route.

A lead could send an SMS message to the telephone number on the landing page. The message appeared in CallRail, but it died there. Nobody responded.

Leads being ignored would normally be a high priority, right?

When we looked into it, we found 12 messages from the previous month. Eleven were sales spam. The twelfth was an existing customer confirming an appointment.

This needs to be fixed eventually, but it was much less important than a problem we found affecting about a third of the 1,800 calls they received every month.

Phase 1 produces an evidence improvement plan

At the end of Phase 1, I know:

How leads enter the business.
How they move through the sales process.
What evidence is created and preserved along the way.
What information reaches Google Ads.
How the business uses that information to make decisions.
Where the most important evidence gaps are.

I then turn the most significant gaps into a short, prioritised evidence improvement plan.

Once the important gaps have been fixed, we’re in a much better position to identify the changes most likely to make the Google Ads system more profitable.

And, we’ll be able to measure if those changes actually worked.

We do that in Phase 2.

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.

Before you download it, what describes you best?