Marketing Myth No. 5: “Google Ads Is Throwing Money Away”
An owner slides a laptop across the desk, open to the Google Ads bill. Three months, no jobs. Here is what a campaign that wastes money looks like, what a measured one looks like, and three checks you can run tonight on your own account.
An owner slides a laptop across the desk, already open to the Google Ads billing page. “We tried this last year. Three months, and I could not point to one job that came from it.” He sits back and waits for me to defend Google.
I don’t. I ask for the login instead.
Ten minutes later we both know where the money went. Nobody threw it away. He handed it over, a few dollars at a time, to searches that were never going to call him.
“Google Ads is throwing money away.” I hear it from dentists, roofers, and property managers, usually with a dollar figure attached and a tone that says the subject is closed. The myth survives because it is half true. Plenty of accounts do throw money away. I have looked inside enough of them to describe the one you probably had.
What a bad campaign looks like
Somebody set it up in twenty minutes, often on a Saturday, and let Google’s suggestions fill in the rest. One campaign. A handful of keywords on broad match, which tells Google that close enough counts. So the ad for “furnace repair” shows up for “furnace filter size,” “furnace for sale,” and “how to fix my own furnace,” and every one of those clicks costs the same as a real one.
The location setting still says United States, or “people interested in Tulsa,” which includes a man in Phoenix reading about tornadoes. The ads run at 2 a.m. when nobody answers the phone. Every click lands on the home page, where the visitor has to hunt for the service they just searched for.
And nobody counts anything. No call tracking, no form tracking. The only number the owner ever sees is the bill.
He checks the account once at the end of the month, sees the spend, sees no leads he can tie to it, and turns it off. He is right about the money. He is wrong about why.
What quietly stopped working
There was a stretch of years when a sloppy campaign still paid. Clicks were cheap and few local businesses were bidding, so a decent company could run a lazy account and come out ahead anyway.
That stretch is over. More businesses bid, so clicks cost more, and Google’s automation has gotten very good at spending whatever budget you hand it. Turn a campaign loose with no fences and it will find clicks all day. It just will not find customers. Google is glad to help you spend. Stopping is your job.
The set-it-and-forget-it campaign moved from wasteful to expensive and wasteful, and nobody announced it.
What a measured campaign looks like
It starts narrow. One service, the one with the best margin or the most empty slots on the calendar. Keywords only a buyer would type: “furnace repair Tulsa,” “emergency furnace repair near me.” A list of negative words that keeps the tire-kickers out: free, DIY, jobs, salary, manual.
A radius drawn around the neighborhoods you actually drive to. Ads that run during the hours a person answers the phone. A page built for that one search, with the ad’s promise repeated at the top and the phone number where a thumb can reach it.
Then the part most accounts skip. You count every call and every form that comes from the ad. A tracking number on the ad means that when the phone rings, you know it came from the campaign and what the caller typed. Once a week, somebody reads the list of actual searches the ads showed up for and prunes the junk.
A measured campaign on $20 or $25 a day tells you within a month what a lead costs. Then you have a decision instead of an argument. If a lead costs less than the job is worth, you add budget. If it costs more, you stop, and you know why.
How to tell which side of the line you are on
Three checks tonight, with the Google Ads login in hand.
- Open the search terms report (Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms). Read the last 30 days of actual searches you paid for. If a third of them are things you would never want to show up for, the campaign has no negative keywords.
- Open the campaign settings and find Locations. If it says United States, or the advanced option reads “Presence or interest,” you are paying for people who will never drive to you.
- Look at the Conversions column. If it is empty, or it counts page views instead of calls and forms, nobody is measuring. You cannot tell whether the campaign works, and neither could the person who set it up.
If all three come back clean and the account still lost money, Google Ads may be wrong for your business right now, and that is a fair conclusion. If any of them failed, that campaign wasted the money, and a campaign is fixable in an afternoon.
If you would rather have someone look at your specific situation than read about it, grab 20 minutes on my calendar. No pitch. You will leave knowing where you stand.