Start Here — 30 Seconds
Answer these three. Count your yes's.
- Can you tell me how much revenue your Google Ads made last month? Not leads — dollars.
- Do you separately track people searching your name vs. people searching the service?
- When a job closes in your FSM, does Google Ads know about it?
0 yes: Start at Level 1. | 1–2 yes: Level 2. | All 3 yes: Level 3.
Pick Your Level. Start There.
Level 1 — Starter: Fix Your Reporting This Week
30 minutes. Anyone on your team. No tech setup.
1. Add Cost-Per-Booked-Job to your monthly report. It's spend ÷ jobs actually booked. That number tells you more in 10 seconds than CPL does in 10 reports.
2. Stop celebrating "form fills." A form fill isn't a job. Make your team report on booked jobs and closed revenue, not lead counts. Lead counts hide the truth.
3. Look at your Google Ads "conversions" list. Anything that's not a phone call or form submission — delete it from "primary." Page views and scrolls aren't conversions, and Google is bidding for them anyway.
Level 2 — Intermediate: Split Your Spend by Who's Actually Searching
A few hours. Needs your marketing person or ad manager.
1. Split your Google Ads into two campaigns. One for when people search your business name (they already know you). One for when people search the service (they don't know you yet). These behave nothing alike and should be reported separately.
2. Send every ad to a page about that exact service. Not your homepage. Homepage landing pages quietly kill conversion rate even when the click looks fine.
3. Ask your ad manager about "Enhanced Conversions for Leads." It's a free Google setting. It lets your FSM tell Google when a lead became a real, paying customer. Without it, Google is guessing.
Level 3 — Advanced: Close the Loop From Ads to FSM
A few days. FSM admin + ad manager working together.
1. Tag every job in your FSM with its source channel. Google Ads. LSA. Referral. Direct. Without this, "where did our revenue come from" is a guess.
2. Reconcile Google Ads vs. FSM every month. Compare Google's conversion count to your FSM's booked-job count for the same window. The two numbers will disagree. The size of that gap is your data quality grade.
3. Switch bidding from "lead volume" to "return on ad spend." Tell Google to optimize for revenue, not lead count. Only do this after Levels 1 and 2 are working — Google needs clean data to optimize against.
Do This Today
- Take the 30-second diagnostic above. Identify your level.
- Pick one fix from your level. Just one. Calendar it for this week.
- Forward this to whoever runs your Google Ads. Ask them what level they think you're at.
The first audit we run on any new account is the gap between Google Ads' conversion count and the FSM's actual booked-job count. Eight out of ten times those numbers don't match — and that gap is where the budget is leaking. Want us to run that on your account? Free.
