Behind the Results: Rebuilding a Google Ads Account From Scratch

When I take on a new client's Google Ads account, the first thing I do is look at what's already there. Sometimes there's a lot to unpick. Sometimes there's almost nothing at all.

This one fell into the second category.

My client is a commercial flooring contractor based in Berkshire, working across London and the South East. Established, experienced, with a solid reputation built over decades. They were running Google Ads, paying for clicks every month, and not seeing the enquiries they expected.

Here's what I found when I opened the account.

What was going on

One campaign. One ad group. No negative keywords. No conversion tracking. No GA4 connection. And several settings that were quietly working against the campaign from day one.

The Display Network was switched on. In practice, that meant ads were appearing on websites and apps with no connection to commercial flooring — foreign news sites, YouTube channels, none of it relevant. A meaningful chunk of the monthly budget was going there. Zero enquiries to show for it.

Location targeting was set to Google's default, which shows ads to anyone interested in a location, not just people in it. For a contractor whose work is physically based in Berkshire and London, that's a problem.

Search partners were running too — third-party sites that show your ads alongside search results. For a niche B2B business targeting a specific region, the traffic quality was poor.

And there was no tracking in place. No way of knowing which clicks led to enquiries, which keywords were generating leads, or whether the budget was doing anything useful at all.

This isn't unusual for an inherited account. Google Ads is set up in a way that encourages you to spend more, not smarter. Default settings favour Google's revenue. A business owner who isn't inside accounts every day would have no reason to know any of this.

What I did — and why I did it in stages

The key to making meaningful changes in a Google Ads account is doing them incrementally. Change everything at once and you can't tell what made a difference. Each step here was given time to bed in before moving to the next.

The first thing I looked at was the bid strategy. The account had been running on Target CPA — a bid strategy that asks Google to optimise towards a target cost per conversion. That sounds sensible, but it needs a substantial bank of conversion data to work from, and this account had very little. Without that foundation, it just gives Google permission to spend the budget however it sees fit.

I switched to Max Clicks to start building up search term data — to understand how people were actually searching for these services before making any decisions about where to focus the budget.

With that running, I turned to the keywords. The existing list had been pulling in a lot of traffic through Google's broad match expansion — searches loosely related to the services but not the ones that matter. I tightened the keyword list, added negative keywords to filter out irrelevant searches, and rebuilt around higher-intent phrases. Fewer people, more accurately reached.

Next I looked at the campaign structure. The single original ad was reorganised into one campaign with four ad groups, each targeting a different type of search: commercial flooring, vinyl flooring, contractors, and branded terms. Different searches signal different intent and need different ad copy. Someone searching for a specific flooring brand is in a different mindset to someone searching broadly for a commercial flooring contractor — and the ads needed to reflect that.

Ad copy was refreshed across all four ad groups, introducing location relevance, the business's sector experience across healthcare, education, and commercial environments, and specific credential signals. Everything was checked against the website so nothing was claimed in the ads that the site didn't support. Sitelinks, callout assets, and structured snippets were all reviewed and updated with specific, verifiable information.

Once the campaign structure and keywords had had time to settle, I looked at the location targeting. I updated it to show ads only to people physically in the target area rather than anyone with a passing interest in it — a much tighter and more relevant audience for a regional contractor.

The Display Network and Search partners were both switched off, keeping spend focused on Google Search where the intent is highest for this type of business.

Call assets were added so potential clients could contact the business directly from the ad. GA4 was connected to the account and a Contact Form 7 tracking event was configured through Google Tag Manager, so form submissions registered as conversions. A phone call conversion action was set up using a Google forwarding number, with a 60-second minimum call duration to filter out misdials, running Monday to Friday in line with the business's hours.

For the first time, the account could actually measure what was happening.

Finally, around six weeks in, I switched off Google's automatically generated imagery and removed the stock photos. Google will pull in AI-generated visuals and stock photography by default — most business owners have no idea this is happening. For a contractor whose reputation rests on the quality of their actual work, generic stock images weren't adding anything. Real project photography replaced everything.

The account now appears in auction insights — meaning it's competing visibly against other advertisers for the same searches. That's a meaningful indicator that the targeting and structure are doing their job.

Where things stand

Paid search is now the largest traffic channel, accounting for over half of all sessions to the website — more than direct and organic combined. The average cost per click is well below typical benchmarks for commercial flooring terms in competitive regions.

Once tracking was in place, the GA4 data gave us something really useful — a clear picture of what was happening after the click. Like a lot of businesses running Google Ads for the first time with proper tracking, it opened up a conversation about the wider customer journey and how to make the most of the traffic coming in.

The next step is a dedicated landing page built specifically for paid traffic, which is currently in progress. Once that's live, we'll look at increasing the budget and moving to a smarter bid strategy — making sure the whole journey is working well before investing more in driving people into it.

The bigger point

The work that makes the real difference in Google Ads is rarely the visible stuff. Switching off Display, tightening keywords, setting up conversion tracking, rebuilding campaign structure incrementally — it's less glamorous than tweaking headlines, but it's where accounts actually improve.

If your Google Ads aren't performing, the first question isn't "are the ads good enough?" It's "is the account set up to give the ads a fair chance?"

If you're not sure whether yours is, I offer a no-obligation account review. Get in touch at adelie-creative.co.uk/contact.