What do you do when your agency says your ads are working but your sales team says they're not?

A business owner asked for help on Reddit. His agency wanted him to double the budget. They were confident that the ads were working and pointed to the CTR and average time on site as evidence.

He hadn't seen any sales during the five weeks the ads were live and wanted to know if the agency actually knew what they were doing.

Half the responses on Reddit told him to double the budget. The other half told him the agency were cretins. So basically no help at all.

I'm not going to weigh in on whether the agency was right or wrong. You can't assess that from three paragraphs on Reddit.

But the question highlights an interesting problem.

The agency and the business were looking at different evidence.

• The agency could see what was happening before the lead arrived. (CTR, time on site.)
• The business could see what happened afterwards. (No sales.)

And they were trying to use those two different views to make the same decision.

• Some decisions belong to the agency. They make them based on information in the ad account.
• Some decisions belong to the business. These are based on information in the business systems.
• And some decisions need information from both worlds. Doubling the budget is one of these.

The Google Ads data can tell you if you can spend more.

• Is there enough search demand?
• Where would you allocate the budget?
• What is likely to happen to your cost per lead as you increase spend?

But it can't tell you if you should spend more.

For that, you need to know what the existing spend produced for the business.

• Were the leads any good?
• Did they progress?
• Did they buy?
• What were they worth?

You need both sides of the story.

Imagine the agency had said:

Google Ads has generated 15 leads so far. Eleven of them met your definition of what a good lead looks like. You've quoted four, and the rest are still in progress. You've told us it normally takes about three months from quoting to signing a deal, so it's a bit early to expect sales yet.

We think there's enough demand to double the number of qualified leads if you double the budget. That should get us closer to the number of leads you told us you can handle each month.

Would the business owner still feel like he had to turn to strangers on Reddit for advice?

If you're not already having these kinds of conversations with your ad manager, here's how to start.

Step 1: Put your last 20 Google Ads leads under a microscope

First, can you identify them? The actual last 20 people that came from your Google Ads?

If not, you've already discovered something important: nobody can connect the money you're spending on Google with the leads it produces.

If you can identify them, look at what happened to each one.

• Were they genuine enquiries?
• Were they qualified?
• Did they receive a quote?
• Did they buy?

Then connect that back to the advertising.

• Which campaigns produced them?
• Did they contact you by calling or filling in a form?
• How much did it cost to generate them?

You don't need a perfect attribution system for this exercise. You're trying to answer a much simpler question:

What did our existing Google Ads spend actually produce for the business?

Now you've got information neither the Google Ads account nor your business systems could give you on their own.

Step 2: Decide what "working" means

What would have to be true for both you and your agency to agree that Google Ads was working?

• The business owner who prompted this article thought working ads = sales.
• His agency thought working ads = CTR and time on site.

Until there is an agreement about what "working" means, you can't have a useful conversation about spending more.

Sales are the obvious choice. That's why you're advertising.

But if it normally takes three months for a lead to become a customer, sales are too slow to help you decide what to do with Google Ads today.

You need to find something earlier in the sales journey that gives you good evidence that the ads are bringing the right people.

Maybe that's a qualified lead, a booked appointment or a quote.

You might end up with a definition like:

The ads are working if we generate qualified leads at below $180 each.

Step 3: Make the budget decision using evidence from both sides

Now go back to the question that started all this:

Should we double the budget?

Your agency needs to bring the Google Ads side of the evidence.

Is there enough demand? Where would the extra budget go? What is likely to happen as you spend more?

The business needs to bring the other half.

Are the leads good? Are they progressing? Can the sales team handle more of them? Are you making enough from them to justify the cost?

Put those two sets of evidence together and you can have a useful conversation.

If you're generating qualified leads at an acceptable cost, they're progressing through your sales process and there's room to generate more, increasing the budget might make perfect sense.

But if you don't know whether the leads are any good, what happened to them or what they're worth, you don't have enough evidence to make that decision yet.

Doubling your Google Ads budget isn't a Google Ads decision on it's own. It's a shared decision. And it needs info from the ad account and the business systems.

If my thinking resonates with you, I'd like to give you a free copy of my book Profitable Google Ads.

Related articles

Topics you'll find on this site