Most business owners I meet can tell me exactly what they spend on Google Ads every month. Far fewer can tell me what it brings back, and when I ask, there’s usually a pause and then something along the lines of “well, the agency sends a report”.
I’ve spent years inside these accounts and the same problems come up again and again. Usually nobody has done anything wrong on purpose. The account has just been set up in a way that makes it very hard to see what’s actually happening, and nobody has ever sat down with the business and explained what to look for.
When I started work on the Royal Armouries’ online shop, the first job wasn’t campaigns. It was conversion tracking. Sales were happening that Google never recorded, so every decision about where to put the budget was being made on numbers that weren’t real. We fixed the measurement first, rebuilt the account from there, and over the year that followed return on ad spend went up 141% on Google Ads and 246% on Meta with the same money going in.
So here are nine things you can check yourself this week. You don’t need to be technical and you don’t need to announce that you’re doing it. If you have an agency, a freelancer or someone in-house running ads, these questions are all fair game.
1. Ask what counts as a conversion
Get whoever runs your ads to tell you in one sentence what a conversion is in your account. A sale, a completed form, a phone call over 30 seconds, someone arriving on your contact page?
That last one is the problem. I see plenty of accounts where a page view counts as a conversion, which makes the monthly report look wonderful while telling you nothing about whether anybody bought anything. If the answer comes back wrapped in words like “engagement” and “micro-conversions”, keep asking until you get a plain one.
2. Trace one real order or enquiry
Pick a single order or enquiry you know came in last month and ask to see it in the advertising reporting. Just one.
You’re checking two things. That it’s in there at all, and that it’s in there once. Double counting is very common, usually because a sale gets recorded by the website tag and again through an analytics import, and it makes your advertising look roughly twice as good as it is.
3. Get the spend for every campaign
Ask for a list of what every campaign spent over the last three months, rather than the headline figure at the top of the report.
Two things tend to jump out. There’s often a campaign nobody has looked at since the day it was switched on, still taking its share of the budget every month. And there’s usually a brand campaign taking credit for people who searched your company name, who were going to find you anyway. Brand advertising has its place, but you should know how much of your “success” is made up of it.
4. Read the search terms report
The keywords in your account are what somebody decided to bid on. The search terms report shows what people actually typed. They are never quite the same list, and looking at it for the first time can be an experience.
This is where you find you’ve been paying for people looking for jobs with you, students doing coursework, or a service you stopped offering in 2023. If nobody has been through that report in the last month, you’re buying clicks you don’t want.
5. Find out what Performance Max is really doing
Performance Max campaigns hand most of the decisions over to Google’s automation, spreading your budget across search, shopping, YouTube, Gmail and display. They can do a genuinely good job. They can also absorb an enormous amount of money and hand back a lovely conversion number that turns out to be full of people who searched your business name.
Ask what share of those conversions came from brand searches, and ask what the campaign has been told to optimise for. “Conversions” is a weaker answer than “revenue”, and much weaker than “profitable revenue”.
6. Check who you’re excluding
You can keep your own staff out of your advertising, along with existing customers who are already on a contract, countries you don’t ship to and the competitors having a good look at what you’re up to. In the accounts I audit, most of that has never been set up.
The Royal Armouries shop is a good example of why this matters. The people buying replica armour and collection-inspired gifts are a different crowd from the people checking museum opening times, and advertising to the second group produces traffic that looks fine in a report and sells nothing.
7. Click your own ad on your phone
Search for something you advertise on, click your own ad, and go through the whole thing as though you’d never seen your business before. Time how long the page takes to appear. Count the steps to buy or enquire.
A lot of what gets blamed on advertising is really a landing page problem. Your ads are driving people to your website, and if the website doesn’t convert them, you’re paying for the privilege of showing people something that doesn’t work. Good websites make you money, and no amount of clever campaign work rescues a bad one.
8. Work out what an enquiry costs you
Take last month’s spend and divide it by the number of genuine enquiries or orders that came from advertising. Then work out what one of those is worth to you over a year or two, including repeat business.
Those two numbers, next to each other, will tell you more about your advertising than any dashboard. Sometimes the answer is that everything is fine and the business has been worrying about nothing. Sometimes it’s that you’re paying £400 to win work worth £150, in which case you’ve found your problem.
9. Ask when the account was last rebuilt
Accounts drift. A keyword here, a paused campaign there, a budget nudged up during a busy month and never nudged back. After two or three years the structure reflects a version of your business that doesn’t exist any more.
If nobody can remember the last proper review, you’re paying for maintenance and calling it management.
What to do with the answers
Please don’t sack anybody over a checklist. Half of this can be sorted in an afternoon, and anyone good at their job will be pleased that someone finally asked about it.
If you’re going to act, do it in this order. Fix the tracking, because until you trust the numbers everything else is guesswork. Then sort out where the money goes, which usually means the search terms report, some exclusions and separating brand from everything else. Then look hard at the page people land on. Campaign structure and bidding strategy come after all of that, however much people like arguing about them.
This is the sort of work I do as a Google Ads specialist and fractional CMO, and what you’re really testing with these nine questions is whether the person running your advertising can explain their decisions in language you understand. When someone can’t, it’s rarely because the subject is too complicated for you. My experience is that clear explanations and good results tend to turn up together.
If you’d like a second opinion on your account, book a free consultation and I’ll go through it with you. Sometimes I have to tell people their advertising is in good shape and there’s nothing for me to do, which is a nice enough way to spend half an hour. If you’d rather see the numbers first, my case studies set out what this work has produced for other businesses.