How I find high-leverage opportunities to make Google Ads more profitable

Over the last few months I’ve put a lot of thought into auditing Google Ads systems (as opposed to Google Ads accounts) to find the biggest opportunities to improve profitability.

I've done this for three professional services firms, a specialist B2B supplier, a multi-branch auto dealer and two home services businesses. Not a massive sample. But enough to develop a process that works across a range of businesses.

I thought I’d share my approach with you in case you want to do your own profitability review. Either for your business or for clients if you manage ads for others.

It is fundamentally different from a typical Google Ads audit.

A typical audit is a one-off pass. It compares how the account is set up with whatever the auditor considers best practice. The thinking is that the closer the account is to what has worked for other businesses, the more likely it is to be profitable.

This isn't a bad place to start. I've done audits like this and they've been useful.

But best practices can only tell you what should work.

One of the home service businesses recently accepted a free account audit from an agency hoping to win their business. The audit included a finding:

Promoting a free consultation in your ads and landing pages is likely to attract tire-kickers who aren't ready to buy.

It was coupled with the recommendation:

Remove the free-consultation offer to discourage people who aren’t serious about buying.

It sounded reasonable, so they made the change. This happened:

• Click-through rate went down.
• Cost per click went up.
• Landing-page conversion rate was worse.
• They got fewer leads at a higher cost per lead.

Was removing the free consultation offer a good decision?

• The remaining leads might be serious buyers, ready to commit. In that case, it was an excellent decision.
• Or they might just have made it harder and more expensive to get the same tire-kickers. In that case, it was a bad move.

But, unless you can follow those leads through qualification, sales and revenue, you can't know. The recommendation might have been right. But without evidence from later in the sales process, it is only a theory, without a way to test it.

I'm guessing that you want more than theory when it comes to spending your ad budget. That's why a profitability review:

1. Establishes if reliable evidence exists.
2. Uses that evidence to find the most likely improvements for this specific business.
3. Identifies what must be measured so we can tell if those improvements actually worked.

I do this in two phases:

• Phase one maps the flow of leads into and through the business and the data that underpins decisions about the ads.

• Phase two uses what we learn in Phase one to identify the most significant opportunities to improve profitability.

Phase 1 maps four parts of your Google Ads system.

They are:

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

I've written about each more detail on the linked page.

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