"We tried Google Ads. It doesn't work for our kind of business."
It is one of the most common things we hear, and the businesses saying it are usually right about what they observed. They spent money, they got some enquiries, the enquiries were not very good, and the ones that turned into real orders seemed to have nothing to do with the ads. So they turned it off, or they left it running at a level low enough to ignore.
In most of those cases the ads were working and the business had no way of knowing. The problem was not the budget, the keywords or the agency. It was that nobody had ever told the platform which of those enquiries turned into money.
Google Ads only knows what you tell it
This is the single most useful thing to understand about paid advertising, and it takes one paragraph.
Modern advertising platforms are not really renting you keywords any more. They are running an automated system that decides, thousands of times a day, which clicks are worth paying for and how much. That system learns from outcomes. You tell it what a good outcome looks like, and it goes and finds more of that.
So the quality of your advertising is capped by the quality of what you report back. And what most businesses report back is whatever happens to finish on the website: a checkout completed, a contact form submitted. Which is fine if you sell entirely online. If you do not, you have just told the system that the only thing you value is a form submission, and it has done exactly as instructed.
The gap is the sale that happens later
Think about how your best customers actually arrive. Somebody searches, clicks an ad, has a look, and then rings you. Or they fill in a form, and three weeks later a member of your team closes a five figure order over the phone. Or a rep visits and it becomes an account that orders every month for six years.
None of that is visible to the advertising platform. As far as it is concerned, that click produced nothing at all.
Meanwhile a small online order, placed by somebody who will never buy again, is reported back as a success within about ninety seconds. Repeat that for a few months and the system does the rational thing: it goes looking for more people like the small order, and fewer like the account that was worth six years of revenue. It is not malfunctioning. It is optimising perfectly towards the target you gave it.
This is what is happening in almost every "Google Ads sends us rubbish leads" conversation we have. The platform is being judged on the sales it cannot see, and blamed for chasing the ones it can.
The fix has a name, and it is worth knowing it
You can send your real, closed sales back to Google after the fact. The mechanism is called offline conversion import, and it is worth remembering the phrase, because it is what you say to whoever manages your advertising to find out immediately whether this is already being done for you.
The idea is simple. When somebody clicks a Google ad, they arrive carrying a click identifier. If your website captures that identifier and keeps it attached to the enquiry, then months later, when that enquiry finally becomes an order in your back office system, you can send a row back to Google that says: this click, on this date, was eventually worth this much, and it counted as this kind of sale.
That row needs four things, and it is worth knowing them because they tell you what to check:
- The click identifier, which is the thread tying the eventual sale back to the advert.
- When the sale happened.
- What it was worth, in actual money.
- What kind of conversion it was, named to match exactly what is set up in the advertising account.
Most businesses already have three of those four sitting in their order system. The one that is usually missing is the last one, and it is the cheapest to add.
Capture the click identifier at the front door, or none of this works
Everything above depends on one unglamorous thing happening correctly: when a visitor arrives from an ad, the website has to notice the identifier they arrived with and keep hold of it. Through the enquiry form, into the CRM or the order, and onwards.
If that is not happening, nothing downstream can be rescued later. There is no way to work out afterwards which of last quarter's orders came from an advert. The information was available for a fraction of a second when the visitor landed, and if nobody caught it, it is gone.
This is the first thing to check, and it is usually a small piece of work rather than a project.
"But our customers ring us"
This is the objection we get most, and it is the one where the answer surprises people.
Phone calls are not a black hole. If somebody clicks your advert, browses for a couple of minutes and then picks up the phone, they are still carrying that identifier while they are on your site. With call tracking in place, a meaningful share of your phone enquiries can be tied back to a paid click. In our experience it is often something like a third of them, which is a great deal more than most owners expect and considerably more than nothing.
So a business that assumes advertising is unmeasurable because its sales happen on the phone is usually leaving the most valuable third of its data on the floor. Those calls are frequently the better enquiries too, because picking up the phone takes more effort than filling in a form.
A trap worth knowing about: your own reports may say you have no paid traffic
Here is one that causes genuine arguments between businesses and their agencies.
Advertising platforms tag their own clicks automatically, and that automatic tagging does not always include the campaign labels that website reporting tools group by. So if your internal reports categorise traffic by those labels, paid visits can land in a pile marked "unknown" or vanish from the report altogether.
The result is a business looking at its own attribution report, seeing almost no paid traffic, and concluding the advertising is doing nothing, while the advertising account simultaneously reports plenty of clicks. Both reports are accurate. They are just counting different things, and one of them has been set up to look for a label that is not there.
If your reporting and your ad account have never agreed with each other, this is the first place to look.
Somebody has to own the mapping, and it has to be exact
There is one ongoing job in all of this, and it is worth naming so it does not fall between your team and your agency.
Your business already classifies orders somehow: online, phone, email, trade counter, a rep's account. Each of those needs to be matched to a conversion type in the advertising account, and the names have to match character for character. A near miss does not produce a warning. It produces silence, and a sale that was never counted.
This is a five minute administrative task that materially changes what you get back, and it needs a named owner, because new order types get added and nobody thinks to map them.
Send the value, not just the count
One last point, and it is the difference between a modest improvement and a large one.
If every sale is reported back as simply "a sale", the system will optimise for the cheapest possible sale, which is very often the smallest one. Send the actual order value and it starts optimising for revenue instead. For businesses with a wide spread of order sizes, and that is most businesses that sell anything configured or specified, this single change alters what the platform goes looking for more than anything else on this page.
What this does not fix
We would rather be straight about the limits.
- It does not fix a weak offer or a poor landing page. Better data makes a working campaign work harder. It does not make people want something they did not want.
- It is not instant. The system needs a reasonable volume of real outcomes before its behaviour changes. If your sales cycle is three months, expect to wait through one before judging it.
- It will not be complete. Some visitors decline tracking, some arrive by another route, some sales genuinely cannot be traced. The aim is a far better picture than you have now, not a perfect one.
- It does not replace whoever manages your campaigns. If anything it makes them considerably more effective, because they finally have real outcomes to work from rather than form fills.
- It is not only a Google matter. The same principle, and largely the same plumbing, applies to Microsoft advertising and the major social platforms. Build it once and it is reusable.
Where to start
Two questions will tell you most of what you need to know.
Ask whoever runs your website: when someone arrives from an advert, do we capture and keep the click identifier all the way through to the order? Then ask whoever runs your advertising: are we importing offline conversions, and are we sending order values?
If the answers are no and no, that is not bad news. It means the thing you concluded was not working for your business has been running with one hand tied behind its back, and it has not had a fair test yet.
If you want a look at what your own systems are already capturing, we would be glad to go through it with you.