A marketing manager is handed the Google Ads login. There’s a monthly budget, no handover notes and a vague feeling that something isn’t right. Usually nobody has done anything wrong on purpose. The account has just grown one sensible decision at a time, and now it’s yours.
This is a Google Ads course taught one-to-one or to your team, using your own account, by me, Caroline Allott, a Google Ads certified specialist. You learn on the campaigns you’ll actually be running, not a practice account you’ll never see again.
Most Google Ads courses teach you a generic account. That’s useful up to a point. The trouble starts on Monday morning, when your real account doesn’t look like the one in the videos.
If you want a certificate or just the basics, Google’s own free Skillshop training covers that well. You’re welcome to start there, and I’d suggest it to plenty of people.
If you need to run a live account with real money in it, this is for you. By the end you’ll be able to:
Owners and managing directors who sign off the budget and want to understand where it goes, without becoming a specialist.
In-house marketers who’ve inherited Google Ads and need to learn it properly, quickly, on a live account.
Teams bringing Google Ads in-house from an agency who want a safe handover and someone on their side for the first few months.
Businesses keeping their agency but wanting to ask better questions. My 9 Google Ads checks for business owners is a good place to start.
If you’re a very early start-up with a small budget, free resources will probably serve you better for now. Come back when the spend is big enough that mistakes start to sting.
Conversion tracking is how Google Ads records the actions that matter to you, such as an enquiry form, a phone call or a sale. If it’s counting the wrong things, every decision you make afterwards rests on bad numbers. So I start here: checking what’s actually being counted and fixing it. Here’s why conversion tracking is broken in most accounts I audit.
Campaigns, ad groups, keywords and search terms, explained in plain words. You’ll learn what to check weekly and what to leave alone for a month.
The search terms report shows what people actually typed before clicking your ad. It’s often a surprise. A firm selling commercial services might find it’s paying for searches containing "free" or "jobs". You’ll learn to spot these and add negative keywords, which are words you tell Google not to show your ads for.
What automated bidding actually does, when target return on ad spend makes sense, and how to tell whether your budget is limiting results or whether more money would just buy more of the same.
Performance Max is a single campaign that shows your ads across Google Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display and Maps, and decides for itself where to spend. It can work well. It can also hide what it’s doing. You’ll learn where to look so it doesn’t quietly spend your budget on things you wouldn’t choose.
Writing ads that match what people searched for, and why a slow or confusing page wastes a click you’ve already paid for.
Return on ad spend is the revenue you get back for each pound spent on ads. Alongside it, I’ll show you cost per enquiry and qualified leads, meaning enquiries that are a genuine fit for your business.
You leave each session with a short list of what to do this week, in order. No guessing about where to start.
A worked example, with illustrative numbers rather than a client’s: you spend £2,000 and get 40 enquiries. That’s £50 an enquiry. If one in four becomes a £3,000 job, that’s 10 jobs and £30,000 of work from £2,000. That’s revenue, not profit, but it’s a far more useful number than clicks.
You tell me about your account, your team’s experience and what you want to be able to do.
Before any teaching, I look through your account and tracking, so the sessions focus on your real problems.
We work through it together, at a pace that suits the people who’ll be running it.
As you start making changes yourself, you can keep me on hand to check your thinking.
Training can also sit alongside Google Ads management and Fractional CMO services. A Fractional CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) is part-time marketing help at senior level, useful if you want someone to own the wider strategy as well.
Generic courses teach the buttons. This teaches the decisions for your business, your budget and your customers.
To be fair to self-paced courses: they’re cheaper and you can fit them around everything else. Tailored training costs more, but you fix real problems while you learn, which often matters more than the course fee.
The mistakes people most often arrive with:
Trusting conversion numbers that count page views. A report full of conversions and a flat inbox is the classic sign.
Broad keywords eating the budget on searches that will never become enquiries.
Judging success on clicks rather than enquiries and sales.
Changing too much too often. Google’s bidding needs time to settle, and so do you.
The teaching comes from current practice, not a slide deck.
I’ve worked with the Royal Armouries shop since 2023. Here’s how the Royal Armouries shop improved Google Ads ROAS by 141% year on year.
I was a specialist marketing adviser on a Department for Business & Trade initiative delivered by UMi, helping 75+ Yorkshire businesses adopt digital with UMi.
You don’t need to be techy. If I use a term, I’ll explain it.
The aim is that you can keep improving without me.
I’ll tell you what to keep, what to change and what to stop, including when your account is basically fine.
If you’re weighing up a few people, these questions to ask before hiring a marketing consultant apply just as well to a trainer.
The point of this training is being able to run your account, not a certificate. If your role needs a formal Google Ads certification, Google offers them free through Skillshop, and the two work well together.
No. I’ll start from where you are. If you’ve used Google Ads for years, we’ll skip the basics.
Yes. Training a team together usually works well, because everyone ends up reading the account the same way.
It helps a great deal, as the whole approach is built around your own campaigns. If you’re about to launch, we can build your first campaign as part of the training.
It depends on your starting point and how complicated the account is. Most people get comfortable with the weekly checks fairly quickly; judgement on bigger changes comes with practice, which is where follow-up mentoring helps.
It depends on team size and the number of sessions. I’ll give you a clear price after the free consultation, once I know what you need.
Yes. Some clients have me manage the account while their team learns, then take over gradually.
I work with businesses across the UK. We’ll agree the format that suits your team in the free consultation.
Book a free consultation, talk me through your Google Ads account and who’ll be running it, and I’ll tell you plainly whether training is worth it or whether a free course would do the job. If you’d rather email, I’m at hello@marketingbycaroline.co.uk.
In the meantime, there are more plain-English Google Ads articles to read.