You can't afford to be sloppy anymore

As I've written, rewritten, and edited Profitable Google Ads, an idea that's not directly raised in the book has become clear: you can't afford to be sloppy anymore.

When I started with Google Ads forever ago, it was cheap. We were generating leads for new BMWs for under $5. Leads for legal services and big-ticket industrial goods cost very little compared with the sale value. Even home services like plumbing and landscaping were easy.

You could get away with a sloppy setup. Incomplete conversion tracking, slow landing pages, or poor lead handling could still produce a profit.

That's not true today. Ads are expensive. You can't expect to be profitable if you haven't done everything in your power to get the setup right.

You're on the back foot if:

• You've got leaky conversion tracking. You get leads via calls, email, WhatsApp, or live chat, but you're not tracking them as conversions.
• You're not tracking what happens to leads inside your business.
• You're optimising your ads for lead quantity instead of lead quality.
• You're sending Google Ads traffic to pages that aren't designed to convert clicks into leads. Sometimes this is because you don't have dedicated landing pages. Other times it's because Google's automatic sitelinks send visitors to utility pages like Contact or About.
• Your ad copy doesn't resonate with the right people and repel the wrong ones. Google is pushing (and automating) generic ads because they get clicks. But you don't want clicks. You want clicks from the right people.
• You're not tracking calls from ad assets separately from calls from your landing pages. This matters because Google shows your ads when someone searches for another business by name. People click your ad thinking they're calling the business they searched for. Few of these calls turn into sales. Unless you know which calls came from ad assets, it's impossible to know if it's worth having the click-to-call button on your ads.
• You take more than five minutes to contact leads during working hours.
• You don't follow a process for chasing leads who don't answer the first time you call.
• You're not tracking lead quality from Local Service Ads. Google used to let you report and get refunded for mismatched leads. They've replaced this with an AI that reads your messages and listens to your calls to decide if the lead was legitimate or not. At the moment, this doesn't work as well as one would hope, and you still get charged for calls from people who want something you don't sell. That means you need to look at Local Service Ads as a whole to see if they're worth running.
• You don't know how much of your ad budget is wasted on spam and click fraud. Google is expanding where your ads show, but this means some get shown in places where spam or click fraud are more likely.

These are all things that are 100% within your control, and it makes sense to get them right instead of wasting ad spend.

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