Spent $35,000 on Google Ads, made no sales

I met with a lovely couple and their incredibly cute kids. We sat at the kitchen table which doubled as their office.

Over the last few months they'd spent about $35,000 on Google Ads. They'd made no sales, but their ad manager kept telling them how well the ads were doing. He pointed out the high optimisation score, 1.5 million impressions a month, and thousands of clicks on the 'Start booking' link.

Google takes just under 3 seconds to earn $35,000. But for this little family it's months of hard work. It's putting off dinner out. It's not going on holiday. It's making do with old laptops (slightly sticky from kid-fingers).

The most frustrating thing was that the fix is simple: Don't run Performance Max campaigns unless you're optimising for something with real business value: a booking, a sale etc. If you optimise for a click on a button Google will deliver you clicks on buttons. As many as you're willing to pay for. Even if none of those clicks turn into customers. Their ad manager should have known this.

You could say that they should have been more careful choosing an ad manager, they should have watched their ad spend, they should have ...

You wouldn't be wrong.

But when you're building a business from the kitchen table, juggling work and family, the reality is that you don't have time to develop the skills and insight into every facet of your business. You have to get help with things like accounting, tax compliance, advertising etc.

The solution isn’t for business owners to become experts in Google Ads. That’s not realistic, and it’s counterproductive. Every hour you spend tinkering with your ads would earn you much more if applied to other areas of the business.

What's needed is to keep the focus where it belongs: what the ads are doing for the business. You get this with questions like:

• What action are we actually optimising for?
• How does that action turn into money?
• And how will we know, in plain English, if this is working or not?

Anyway, thank you for listening to my rant.

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