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 April 2021. Last updated July 2026.
This question was asked on Quora. Saving my answer here.
Which are the specifically right targets for a small paper pallet company? I need to get it right before running Google ads.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by targets so I’m going to assume that you want your ads to show to people who want to buy what you sell? I’m also assuming that you want to show your ads when someone searches Google (called the search network), not scattered all over websites (display network).
You’ve got 3 kinds of targets you need to worry about at first:
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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