Nine things to check in your own Google Ads before you hire anyone
You do not need an agency to find these. You need an hour and the login. If several are wrong, the account is not the problem — the setup is, and knowing that changes the conversation you have with whoever you hire.
Conversions: the four that break everything
- Is a conversion actually recorded? Open Goals → Conversions. If the primary action shows zero recent conversions, the account has been optimising toward nothing for however long that has been true. This is the single most common finding.
- Are phone calls counted? In most contractor verticals the majority of inquiries are calls. If only form fills are tracked, the bidding algorithm is blind to most of your demand.
- Is anything counted more than once? A page-view conversion plus a form conversion plus a call conversion on the same lead inflates the number and makes every report optimistic.
- Are junk actions marked as primary? "Clicked the phone number" and "viewed the contact page" as primary conversions will train the system to find people who browse.
Search terms: where the money leaks
Go to the search terms report and set the date range to the last 90 days. Sort by cost, descending. Read the top fifty.
You are looking for three things: queries about jobs you do not do, queries with "free", "cheap", "DIY" or "how to", and queries in cities outside your service area. Every one of those with meaningful spend is a negative keyword you have not added.
Then check whether broad match is on. Broad match with a thin negative list is the fastest way to spend a contractor's budget on people who were never going to call.
The other five checks
- Location targeting: presence or interest? The default includes people interested in your area, not just people in it. For a local service business you almost always want presence only.
- Ad schedule versus who answers. If the ads run 24/7 and the phone is answered 9 to 5, you are paying for calls nobody picks up. Either change the schedule or change the answering — but stop paying for both to be wrong.
- Landing page match. Does the ad for a specific service go to a page about that service, or to the homepage? Homepage traffic from a specific query converts badly and it is a five-minute fix.
- Auto-applied recommendations. Check whether Google is auto-applying changes to your account. Some are fine. Some quietly broaden your targeting. You should know which are on.
- Who has access. Is the account in your name, with you as owner? If a former agency still holds admin, that is a business risk, not a marketing one.
What to do with the results
Count how many of the nine are wrong.
Zero to two: the setup is sound and your problem is probably offer, response time or close rate rather than the account. Look there before you spend more.
Three to five: fixable, and worth fixing before you judge the channel. The channel has not had a fair test yet.
Six or more: the account has never been managed, only maintained. Whatever you conclude about Google Ads from its current performance is not information about Google Ads.
Either way you now walk into any agency conversation knowing what is broken. That is worth an hour of anyone's Saturday.