The mistake I found when a client came back

There's a version of this story where a client comes back to me because their enquiries have gone quiet and asks for an audit of their Google Ads account. I find everything wrong with it, fix it and save the day. But that's not what happened. They did come back to me and ask for an audit, specifically their July and August performance. I did spot some issues and fix them, including one that sat solely at my feet.

Earlier this year I set up a Google Ads account from scratch for a trades business. I managed it for the first four weeks, then handed it over with a report and a mini walkthrough and training session so that they could manage it themselves. Then a couple of months later the enquiries dropped off, so I was the person they called to take a look.

I opened the account back up and went through their July and August data to see what had changed since I'd handed it over. Some of what I found was the sort of thing that happens when you're busy running a business and the ads aren't your main job. Every ad was sending people to the homepage, so someone searching for one specific job ended up on a page about everything the business does. New ads had also been added, but the budget had stayed the same, so it was being stretched across a lot of ads. The search terms were a little overgrown and needed a good old prune. I could see some triggering the ads that didn't need to be there.

Between them, those changes meant fewer of the right people were seeing the ads, and the ones who did click were landing on a page that didn't match what they'd searched for. That's where the drop in enquiries had come from.

While I was going through the numbers, I also noticed that GA4 was showing more form enquiries than Google Ads was recording. When I started to look into why, I found a gap in the call tracking. Calls made straight from the ads were being tracked, but if someone clicked an ad, landed on the website and rang the number from there, that call wasn't being counted. For a trades business, that's often how people get in touch.

I'd set up the tracking on this account, so if something was missing, it was probably down to me. My first reaction was panic. My second was to question whether I'd got this set up right, yes, imposter syndrome kicked in. My third thought was checklist. Their checklist, to be precise.

Because not all clients are the same, each one has their very own checklist and project board in Notion. I opened up theirs and went through it to work out why the call tracking wasn't there. Had the client asked me to leave it off, or had I just forgotten? I'd forgotten. So I added it, then checked all the tracking again. I mean all of it. I didn't charge for it either, because it should have been there from the start. And now it's the first thing I check before any account goes live.

A few weeks later they got back in touch. The ads for one of their services were bringing in plenty of enquiries, but not many of them were turning into booked jobs. So their instinct was to pause those ads and put everything into more general enquiries instead. But the ads were doing exactly what they were meant to do, and this time the problem wasn't in the ads at all. That's what part two is about.