Paid advertising is the fastest way to the top, and the fastest way to waste money.
SEO is people finding you. Paid advertising is paying for the visit. It works immediately, which is exactly why it is so easy to spend thousands on before anyone checks what came back.
The only number that settles it is what one enquiry cost you. Everything else - impressions, clicks, click-through rate - is on the way to that.
Clutch 5.0/5 · Google Ads & lead generation · Australia-wide
Watch the bottom number, not the top one.
Traffic is what you bought. Enquiries are what you wanted.
A campaign can send hundreds of visitors and produce nothing, and the reporting will still look busy. The narrowing from spend to clicks to actual enquiries is where the truth is.
Once you know what an enquiry costs, the decision becomes simple arithmetic against what a customer is worth to you.
If we cannot measure an enquiry, we will not run the campaign.
Conversion tracking has to be working before money goes in - which calls, forms and messages came from which search terms. Without it you are guessing, and guessing is what makes paid advertising expensive.
It is unglamorous setup work and it is the difference between advertising and donating.
Where the money is won or lost.
Most wasted ad budget goes on the first two of these. Both are fixable in the first week.
Search terms
Which searches you pay for, and just as importantly which you refuse to. Negative keywords stop you paying for people who were never going to buy.
Who you are reaching
Location, timing and device all change what a click is worth. A tradesperson paying for clicks at 2am in another state is paying for nothing.
Where the click lands
The ad is the easy half. If the page it opens does not answer the search immediately, you paid for a visit and got a bounce.
Conversion tracking
Calls, forms and messages tied back to the search that caused them. Set up before spending, not bolted on when the results look unclear.
Cost per enquiry
Reported in a form you can act on, against what a customer is actually worth to you rather than against industry averages.
Continuous pruning
Cutting what is not converting and moving budget to what is. A campaign left alone gets steadily more expensive.
Tracking first, then a small budget, then more.
We would rather prove the arithmetic on a modest spend than commit you to a big one on optimism.
Work out what an enquiry is worth
Step 1What a customer is worth and how many enquiries become customers. Without these two numbers there is no way to say whether any cost per enquiry is good.
Set up the measuring
Step 2Calls, forms and messages tracked back to the search term. This happens before any budget goes live, without exception.
Start small and deliberately
Step 3A tight set of search terms with real intent, a page that answers them, and a budget sized to learn from rather than to win with.
Prune, then scale what works
OngoingCut the terms that cost without converting, put the money behind the ones that do, and only increase the total once the cost per enquiry holds.
What businesses ask about paid advertising.
How much should we spend?
Enough to learn something, which is usually less than people expect to be told. A budget too small to generate any enquiries teaches you nothing; a large one before tracking works just loses more money faster.
We would rather start modest, find the cost per enquiry, and scale from a number than from a hunch.
Is paid advertising better than SEO?
They answer different questions. Paid advertising works this week and stops when you stop paying. SEO takes months and keeps working. If you need enquiries now, advertise; if you want to stop renting the traffic eventually, do both.
We tried Google Ads and it did not work. Why would this be different?
Usually one of three things: no conversion tracking, so nobody knew what was working; paying for search terms with no buying intent; or sending clicks to a page that did not answer the search. All three are visible within a week of looking at the account.
Will you tell us if advertising is the wrong choice?
Yes. If almost nobody searches for what you do, or an enquiry would cost more than a customer is worth, we will say so. Taking a management fee to spend a budget that cannot pay back is not work we want.
Find out what an enquiry would cost you.
Tell us what you sell and what a customer is worth. We will look at what people search for and give you an honest view on whether the arithmetic works.