A joiner set up Google Ads himself on a Friday evening. He picked the keyword “windows”, entered a budget and went away for the weekend. By Monday he had spent a good four hundred euros, had three hundred visits to his website and no calls. The ads worked perfectly. They were shown to people searching for car windows, for windows in an operating system, and for the opening hours of a window shop two countries away.
Google Ads isn’t broken. It did exactly what it was asked to do. That is advertising’s most expensive property: the tap opens immediately, and the money starts flowing just as fast, whether or not anything is ready on the other end.
What advertising actually buys
Advertising buys attention you are renting. As long as you pay, visitors come. When you stop, it stops the same day. That isn’t a weakness — it is simply a different nature from optimisation, where you build something that stays but don’t see the effect tomorrow.
So advertising is excellent for three things: quickly checking whether demand for something exists; covering a season that lasts six weeks and can’t be waited out; and being visible for searches where you won’t rank organically for another year or two.
Four things to have before you switch on the first ad
1. A page to send people to, and it isn’t the home page
The most common mistake and the most expensive. Someone searches for “air conditioning installation cost”, clicks the ad and lands on the home page, where they are greeted by a team photograph and a sentence about long-standing tradition. Now they have to work out for themselves whether you even install air conditioning. They won’t. They will go back to the results and click the next one — and you have already paid for that click.
An ad should lead to a page that answers exactly that question, with a price or at least a range, and with an obvious next step.
2. Tracking that counts calls and enquiries
If you don’t know which ad produced the call, you aren’t advertising, you are betting. Conversion tracking has to be set up: form submitted, click on the phone number, order placed. “Visits” and “impressions” are interesting and they don’t feed you.
3. A phone somebody answers
This isn’t a joke. In service businesses a large share of the advertising money is lost between the ringing and the voicemail. If you advertise at times when nobody answers, you are paying for calls a competitor receives thirty seconds later.
4. Enough budget for the system to learn anything
Ten euros a month will produce nothing except the knowledge that ten euros isn’t enough. The system needs a certain volume of clicks before it works out who responds. One month done seriously beats six months done symbolically.
When advertising is the wrong answer
This is the part usually missing from agency pitches. Advertising often isn’t the first thing you should buy.
- When the margin can’t bear the cost per click. If you make three euros on a product and a click costs one fifty, every second visitor has to buy. They won’t.
- When the problem is the site, not the traffic. If out of a hundred visitors nobody enquires, then out of two hundred exactly the same nobody will enquire — you will simply have paid twice. Fix the site first.
- When you work locally and people already search for you by name. Then it is often far cheaper to sort out local visibility and the business profile than to pay for clicks.
- When you haven’t got anything to say. If your offer is the same as five others and dearer, advertising simply reveals that fact faster.
This happens with us regularly: a company comes for advertising, and after a review we advise them to put the money into the site or into visibility first, because they will get more for it. Short term that is bad sales advice. Long term it is the only kind that makes clients come back.
What a sensible start looks like
Not fifty keywords and the “recommended” button. Like this instead:
- A few keywords typed by someone who intends to buy. “Heat pump servicing Bristol” is worth money. “Heat pump” is expensive curiosity.
- A negative keyword list from day one. Free, cheap, jobs, careers, forum, used, DIY, how to. That list is what the joiner was missing.
- A tight area. If you work within a fifty-kilometre radius, don’t pay for clicks from the other end of the country.
- One page, one clear next step. Phone and form, both visible without scrolling.
- A look at the search terms report after two weeks. There you will see what people actually typed, and you will want to exclude half of it.
What it costs
With advertising there are always two separate costs: the ad budget, which you pay directly to Google, and campaign management. That is worth knowing if only because plenty of quotes merge the two into one number, and then it isn’t clear how much money actually goes into ads.
Our campaign management starts at 299 €/month for Google Ads, with the budget separate — what is included is on the advertising pricing page. If what interests you most is long-term visibility, Google Ads management is also included in the VISIBILITY+ subscription (299 €/month, ad budget separate), which is part of the optimisation price list.
If you aren’t sure whether advertising is the first thing for you or something else is, the fastest route is a website audit — a written review within two working days showing where the money is being lost. Or describe your situation through the contact form or call +386 40 529 425, and we will tell you if we think advertising doesn’t make sense for you yet.