Five quick checks for small business owners who suspect their pay-per-click budget is going somewhere it shouldn't.
Sound familiar?
You set up a Google Ads campaign. You picked a daily budget that felt sensible. You told yourself you'd keep an eye on it.
That was three months ago. The money has gone out like clockwork. The phone, on the other hand, has been suspiciously quiet.
You're not alone. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the fastest ways for a small business to get in front of people who are ready to buy. It's also one of the fastest ways to spend £500 on clicks from people looking for something you don't sell, in a town you don't cover, at 3am.
The good news? Most leaky campaigns leak in the same few places. Here's where to look.
1. Read your search terms (brace yourself)
Your keywords are what you told Google you want to appear for. Your search terms report shows what people actually typed before clicking your ad. They are rarely the same thing.
A bathroom fitter bidding on "bathroom design" might find they've paid for clicks on "bathroom design ideas Pinterest" and "how to tile a bathroom yourself". Lovely people, no doubt. Not customers.
Open the report, sort by cost and add anything irrelevant as a negative keyword. Words like "free", "jobs", "DIY", "course" and "salary" are usual suspects. Do this weekly for the first month, then monthly. It's the single quickest win in most accounts we look at.
2. Check where and when your ads run
If you're a plumber in Leeds, a click from Lisbon isn't a lead. It's a tourist.
In your location settings, make sure you're targeting people in your area, not people "interested in" it. That one tick box has quietly drained more small business budgets than we'd like to count.
Then look at your ad schedule. If nobody answers the phone after 6pm, there's little point paying for calls that ring out. Look at which hours and days bring in enquiries, and trim the rest.
3. Look at the page people land on
This is where many campaigns fall over. You've paid for the click. The visitor arrives. And they land on your homepage, which talks about your company history, your team's dog and twelve different services.
Someone who searched "emergency boiler repair Croydon" wants to see emergency boiler repair in Croydon, a phone number and a reason to trust you. Fast. On their phone.
A dedicated landing page for each main service, with one clear next step, will usually do more for your results than any amount of fiddling with bids.
4. Make sure you're counting the right things
Ask yourself: if Google Ads brought you a customer yesterday, would you know?
If the answer is "probably not", your campaign is flying blind. Set up conversion tracking for the things that matter: form fills, phone calls, purchases, bookings. Clicks and impressions are nice to look at, but you can't pay the rent with them.
Without proper tracking, Google's automated bidding has nothing useful to learn from. It'll happily optimise for whatever it can see, which may not be what you want.
5. Rein in broad match before it rides off
Broad match keywords let Google show your ad for searches it thinks are related. Sometimes it's right. Sometimes it decides that "wedding cakes" is related to "wedding dresses", and off it goes with your money.
Broad match can work well in a mature account with solid conversion data. In a new campaign with a small budget, phrase and exact match give you far more control. Start tight, prove what works, then widen the net.
Is PPC right for your business at all?
Sometimes the honest answer is "not yet". If your website is slow, your offer isn't clear or your margins are wafer-thin, paid ads will simply get more people to a problem faster. Fix the foundations first.
But when the basics are in place, PPC is hard to beat. You can switch it on this week, see what's working within days and turn the dial up or down as cash flow allows. Few other channels give a small business that kind of control.
The bottom line
Most wasted ad spend isn't down to bad luck or a dodgy algorithm. It's down to a handful of settings nobody went back to check. Spend an hour on the five checks above and you'll almost certainly find money you can put to better use.
If you'd rather hand the whole thing to someone who does this every day, it's worth looking at PPC management for small businesses that's open about where your money goes and doesn't tie you into a long contract. Either way, stop paying for clicks from Lisbon.
