PAID MEDIA
PAYING FOR CLICKS THAT NEVER CONVERT?
Search ads for people ready to buy.
Search is the only channel where the buyer tells you exactly what they want, in their own words, at the moment they want it. Most accounts still manage to waste half the budget.
Every search ads account we audit has the same disease in a different place: money flowing to queries that were never going to convert, because nobody was watching closely enough to stop it.
One thing to know about how we work: we don't report CPC as a success metric. CPC is what a click costs - it tells you nothing about whether it was the right click. Obsessing over it is what happens when tracking can't see any further. The numbers we manage to are cost per qualified lead and ROAS.
Sometimes the right move is a "worse" ad
Real example. For INTRO Travel, searches like "group tour" bring two very different people: 18–35s after an adventure trip, and coach-holiday audiences who would not enjoy a hostel bar crawl. So we wrote ad copy that says - plainly - who the trips are for.
CTR went down, deliberately. CPC went up (Google charges you for filtering). And cost per qualified booking improved, because the people who did click were the right ones. Every dashboard metric got "worse" except the one that pays the bills.
That's the standard we hold every ad to: not "did it get clicked?" but "did the right person click it?"
What disciplined search looks like
- Query-level hygiene: search term reviews and negative lists maintained like they matter, because they do.
- Intent tiers: brand, competitor, category, and problem-aware queries funded according to what each is actually worth.
- Ad copy that qualifies: good ads attract buyers and politely repel everyone else, even at the cost of CTR. Qualified clicks are the goal; the INTRO example above is the method.
- Landing page alignment: the ad's promise and the page's content match, or the click was wasted before it landed.
- Value-based bidding: feeding Google real conversion values so its automation optimises for revenue, not volume.
None of it is glamorous. It's just what stops an account leaking.
Questions we get asked
Broad match - yes or no?
Yes, once your conversion data is trustworthy and your negatives are disciplined; no, if the account feeds automation bad signals. Broad match amplifies whatever your account already is. We make sure that's a good thing first.
Our cost per click keeps rising. Should we panic?
Wrong dial. CPC is what a click costs; it says nothing about what the click was worth. If cost per qualified lead is holding or falling, rising CPCs are just the auction repricing - and sometimes a higher CPC is the strategy (see the INTRO example above). If CPQL is rising too, the fix is intent matching, landing pages, and conversion values - almost never 'bid cheaper'.
How fast can you fix an underperforming account?
Obvious waste - bad negatives, broken tracking, budget on junk queries - often comes out in the first fortnight. Structural rebuilds take longer because we do them without torching the conversion history automation depends on.
Related reading
Want this handled properly?
Tell us where you're at. We'll tell you what we'd do - and what it costs.