Most Google Ads accounts we take over are optimised on the wrong metric. They track cost per click, click-through rate, average position: indicators that are easy to improve and say nothing about profitability.
A CPC of CHF 0.40 is excellent. If none of those clicks becomes a customer, it is excellent and useless.
The only chain that matters
Impressions → Clicks → Leads → Customers → Margin
Every agency can measure the first two steps. Few go as far as the fourth. Yet only the ratio between spend and margin generated tells you whether to scale up, scale down or stop.
Two numbers to know before spending a franc:
- Target CPA: what you can pay for a customer. If your margin per customer is CHF 900 and you accept spending a third of it on acquisition, your target CPA is CHF 300.
- Lead-to-customer rate. If one quote in four is signed, a lead is worth CHF 225, and you can pay up to CHF 75 to get one.
Without those two numbers, any optimisation is an opinion.
Conversion tracking: where it all breaks
In one audit out of two, tracking is wrong. The usual causes:
- The thank-you page counted as a conversion, when it is directly reachable and reloaded by visitors.
- Duplicated conversions from double tagging: Google Tag Manager plus a hard-coded tag.
- Cookie consent blocking the tag without anyone noticing: conversions drop 40% and the campaigns get blamed.
- No offline feedback. In a business where deals close on the phone, what matters happens after the click. Without offline conversion import, the algorithm optimises blind.
Fix tracking before touching bids: it is almost always the first lever, and the cheapest.
Structuring a readable account
A simple structure beats a sophisticated one nobody maintains.
- One campaign per commercial objective, not per keyword.
- Exact and phrase match for what matters; broad only with an audience and close supervision.
- A living negative keyword list. In Switzerland, excluding "free", "job", "training" and cross-border searches outside your delivery area quickly saves hundreds of francs a month.
- One landing page per intent. Sending all traffic to the homepage is the most common waste: someone searching "body shop Geneva" should land on the relevant service page, not on a menu.
What paid search cannot fix
Ads buy visibility, not credibility. If your page takes four seconds to appear, shows no proof and hides the phone number, raising the budget only accelerates the loss.
That is why we decline to run campaigns on pages we consider non-converting: it would mean charging for a test whose result we already know.
The rhythm
An account is judged over four to six weeks, not three days. Bidding algorithms need volume to learn, and daily changes reset them permanently. Set a course, let it run, measure CPA: then adjust.
