Why Your Google Ads Are Burning Money (And What to Check First)

Most trade businesses lose money on Google Ads for the same few reasons. They're paying for searches that were never going to turn into work, the clicks land on a home page that doesn't ask the visitor for anything, and nothing tracks which clicks became jobs. All three are fixable, and the first one you can check this afternoon.

If you've run ads before and stopped, you probably remember it as expensive. A few hundred pounds gone, a couple of odd phone calls, no real work out of it. That's the normal experience for a trade business that set the account up and left it running. Ads don't fail because paid search doesn't work for trades. They fail because nobody looks at the one report that tells you where the money went.

1. Look at what people actually searched for

This is the first thing to check and the one that finds the most waste.

The keywords you picked are not the searches you paid for. Google matches your keywords to anything it decides is close enough in meaning, so a keyword like "tree surgeon" can pull in "tree surgeon jobs", "tree surgery courses" and "tree felling near me" from a town forty miles away. You paid for all of them.

In your account, that list sits under Search terms. Open it, set the date range to the last 90 days, and read it properly. You're looking for four things:

• Other towns. Anywhere you wouldn't drive to.

• People who want a job, not a tradesman. Anything with "jobs", "apprenticeship", "salary", "courses" or a qualification code in it.

• DIY and shopping. "How to", "hire", "B&Q", "for sale". Somebody buying a pressure washer is not booking a pressure washing job.

• Competitors and directories. Checkatrade, Rated People, and any rival's name.

Every one of those gets added as a negative keyword, which tells Google not to show your ad for it again. On a typical account that hasn't been touched, this alone usually accounts for a decent chunk of the spend. It's the cheapest improvement available, and it takes about half an hour.

2. Check where the click actually lands

The second common leak is sending everybody to the home page.

Someone searches "gutter cleaning Waterlooville", clicks your ad, and lands on a page about your five services with your van on it. They now have to work out whether you do gutters, whether you cover their road, and what happens next. Most won't bother.

The click should land on a page about the one thing they searched for, with the price or price range, the area covered, and a form or a phone number in view without scrolling. It doesn't have to be a whole new website - one properly built page per campaign is enough.

There's a money argument for this too. Google looks at how relevant your page is to the search when it decides what you pay, so a page that matches tends to cost you less per click than a home page that half matches. You get more clicks for the same budget and more of them turn into enquiries.

3. Can you tell which clicks turned into work?

Ask whoever set your ads up whether conversion tracking is live. If the answer is vague, that's your answer.

Without it, the account can tell you how many people clicked and nothing about whether any of them became a job. You end up guessing which keywords to keep. Worse, Google's automatic bidding has nothing to aim at, so it optimises for clicks rather than customers.

You want three things tracked: form submissions, clicks on your phone number, and clicks on your WhatsApp button if you use one. Once those are recording, the account can start putting money behind the keywords that actually produce work and pulling it off the ones that don't.

4. Give it longer than you think

Paid search takes 60 to 90 days to show what it's worth, and every significant change resets a two-week learning period while Google works out who to show the ad to.

Two things follow from that. Don't judge it on the first fortnight, because early figures are noise. And don't fiddle with it daily - changing bids and budgets every morning keeps the account permanently in learning mode and never lets it settle.

You also need enough budget to gather data at all. Roughly ten clicks a day is the floor. Work out what a click costs for your service in your area and set the daily budget from that, rather than picking a round number and hoping.

5. Are the ads running when you can answer?

You can fix everything above and still lose the work at the last step, because ads run at three in the afternoon when you're on a roof.

Check your ad schedule against the hours you can realistically pick up, and make sure something catches the calls you miss. A caller who gets no answer rings the next name on the list, and you've just paid for the click that sent them there. We've written about what missed calls cost a trade business separately, but it matters twice as much when you're paying for the call.

If you'd rather someone went through your account and told you where the money's going, that's part of our marketing work and we'll do it for trades across Sussex and Hampshire.

Common questions

How much should a trade business spend on Google Ads a month? Work backwards from the cost of a click in your trade and area, and budget for around ten clicks a day. For most trades that lands somewhere between £300 and £900 a month. Below that you won't gather enough data to know what's working, which is how people conclude ads don't work.

Should I use broad match keywords? Start tighter, with phrase or exact match, so you can see clean data and control where the money goes. Once conversion tracking has built up a few months of real results, test broad match on one campaign. Broad match without conversion tracking is how accounts quietly bleed.

Are Google Ads better than getting my Google Business Profile ranking? They do different jobs. Your Business Profile is free and compounds over months. Ads put you at the top tomorrow and stop the day you turn them off. Most trades want both, and if you can only do one thing this week, the free one is the profile.

How do I know whether whoever runs my ads is doing anything? Ask three questions: when did you last add negative keywords, is conversion tracking live, and which keyword produced the most enquiries last month. Anyone doing the job properly answers all three straight away.

Do I need a new website before running ads? No. You need one page that matches what you're advertising. That's often quicker and cheaper than a rebuild, and you'll learn what converts before spending on the full site.

Find out where your budget is going

Pull up your search terms report before you do anything else. If you recognise plenty of searches on that list that were never going to become work, you've found your problem.

Fill in the form here and we'll take a look at your account and tell you straight whether it's worth continuing. Sussex, Hampshire, or anywhere nearby.