Agency insights
Thoughts and lessons on client selection, burnout, pricing, and modernising legacy accounts, from someone who's run a Google Ads for years.
Published August 2024. Last updated July 2026.
I consulted on a Google Ads account for a clean room contractor.
If you don't already know, a clean room is designed to be free of dust, contaminants and pollutants. They're used in manufacturing, research, packaging and other fields where microscopic particles can cause problems.
As you can imagine this is a specialist business. The contractor only builds a handful of these facilities every year.
One of Google's reps had helped them set up their account. They were getting more than 10 000 clicks a month, but they hardly ever got a quality lead.
They thought the landing page was the problem till I asked how likely it was that 10 000 people in their area wanted to build a clean room every month.
We dug into the account and found that they'd been showing ads to people who wanted a tidy house. The rep hadn't thought about the difference between a clean room and a clean bedroom or clean bathroom. 99 of every 100 people who clicked their ads weren't into advanced manufacturing. They were looking for tidying tips.
It's always worth doing a quick sanity check to make sure that the numbers in your Google Ads account line up with what you know about your industry.
It is almost always cheaper to get a happy customer to return than to win another one through advertising.
I trace every route from the ad to the CRM to find leads and tracking data that go missing.
A neat sales funnel can hide where leads go missing, follow-up breaks down and the evidence needed to improve your ads gets lost.
If every enquiry looks equally valuable, Google will chase quantity. Does it ever learn which leads actually become customers?
The ad account says the leads are good. The sales team says they aren’t. Who has the evidence needed to decide?
Finding problems is easy. The difficult part is identifying the few evidence gaps that could materially affect leads, decisions and profitability.
Thoughts and lessons on client selection, burnout, pricing, and modernising legacy accounts, from someone who's run a Google Ads for years.
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