Most advice on how to run Google Ads covers the same ground. Keyword research, match types, bid strategies, negative keywords. All of it matters, and none of it explains why a business can spend £1,000 a month on well-built campaigns and still get two enquiries a week.
We see the answer every time we audit a client’s setup. The ads are fine. The traffic is real. The money disappears after the click, on a website that was never built to convert paid visitors.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. Say you’re paying £4 a click and 100 people land on your site this month. That’s £400. If two of them enquire, each lead cost you £200. Fix the site so ten of them enquire and the same £400 buys leads at £40 each. Nothing changed in the ad account. The spend, the keywords and the traffic are identical. What happens after the click decides whether Google Ads works for you or just works for Google.
So before you touch your bids, work through these six fixes. Every one of them sits on your website, not in your campaign settings.
1. Match the landing page to the ad
Your ad says “Emergency electrician, 30-minute response.” Someone clicks and lands on your homepage. Now they’re digging through your services menu trying to confirm you even do emergency call-outs. They won’t dig for long. They’ll go back and click the next result, and you’ll pay for the visit anyway.
Every campaign needs its own landing page carrying the same headline, the same promise and the same offer as the ad that brought people there. When the page repeats what the ad said, the visitor relaxes. They’re in the right place, and the £4 you spent getting them there has a chance of turning into something.
2. Give people one thing to do
Count the actions on your current landing page. Book a call, fill in a contact form, ring this number, join the newsletter, learn more, open live chat. Six options sounds generous. In practice the visitor freezes, chooses nothing, and leaves.
Pick one action. Make the button big, and repeat it three times down the page so it’s always within reach. For most service businesses that action is booking a call or sending an enquiry. Everything else can wait until you’re actually talking to them.
3. Put proof where they can see it
A visitor from a paid ad decides whether to trust you in roughly four seconds. That decision happens at the top of the page, not on your About page and not in a testimonials section buried below your pricing.
Above the fold, you want at least one of these: a real review with a real name attached, a number that means something (“500+ jobs done” beats “trusted by many”), a client logo people recognise, or your Google star rating. A page with zero visible proof gets zero enquiries, no matter how good the ad that fed it was.
4. Get the page loading in under three seconds
Google charges you the same whether your page loads in two seconds or eight. The difference is that around 32% of visitors have already left by the three-second mark, and you paid for every one of them.
Run your landing page through pagespeed.web.dev and look at the mobile score, because that’s where most of your paid traffic arrives. Under three seconds on mobile is the target. Oversized images and bloated page builders are usually the culprits, and both are fixable in an afternoon.
5. Shorten the form
Name, email, phone, company, budget, timeline, project details, “how did you hear about us”. Every field you add cuts your conversion rate, because each one gives a tired visitor another reason to close the tab. Your form is collecting information a human could gather in the first two minutes of a phone call.
Strip it back to a name, an email or phone number, and a one-line message box. Qualify them on the call. A shorter form means more enquiries, and a few unqualified ones in the mix is a fair trade for the qualified ones you’re currently losing.
6. Set up conversion tracking before you spend another pound
This is the fix almost everyone skips, and it’s the one that makes the other five measurable. If you can’t tell which ad, keyword and page produced a real enquiry, every “tweak” you make is an expensive guess. You’ll change five things, leads will go up or down, and you’ll have no idea which change did it.
Set up conversion tracking before your next campaign goes live. Track form submissions, calls and booked appointments back to the keyword that produced them. Then improve what the data shows rather than what you feel. That’s the difference between spending on ads and investing in them.
Ads don’t fix a broken site. They expose one, expensively.
That’s the honest answer to how to run Google Ads profitably as a small business. The campaign settings matter far less than the page you’re sending people to. Work through the six fixes above and the same monthly spend can realistically bring in three to five times the leads, because you’re finally converting traffic you were already paying for.
Open your own landing page on your phone right now and check it against the list. If it fails on two or more, fix those before you put another pound into the ad account.
Not sure where your funnel is leaking?
We’ll tell you. Stacked Studios builds landing pages and websites designed to convert paid traffic, and we’ll happily look at yours before you commit to anything. Book a free call and we’ll walk through your page together, show you exactly where the clicks are going, and what fixing it would look like. Takes 20 minutes, costs nothing, and you’ll leave with a list you can action whether you work with us or not.