Explaining Google Ads to Someone Who Just Wanted Help
Finally, something business related
This started as a private message.
Someone had seen a story I posted about Google Ads analytics and asked, pretty plainly, if I could help them understand how to drive traffic to an existing website. No pitch. No expectations. Just confusion about not knowing where to start.
Those conversations are usually more honest than any strategy meeting.
The First Question Is Never About Ads
The first thing I asked wasn’t about keywords, platforms, or budgets.
I asked what kind of website it was.
E-commerce, service-based, portfolio, lead funnel, that distinction matters more than most people realise. In this case, it was a high-ticket product business. No checkout. No instant purchases. The site existed to turn interest into enquiries, and enquiries into conversations.
That single constraint removes about half of the “standard” Google Ads advice you’ll find online.
When You Can’t Measure Sales, You Have to Approximate Value
Because there were no purchases on the website, Google had no way of knowing what success looked like. That’s where most people get stuck. They want perfect attribution, but perfect attribution doesn’t exist in businesses like this.
So instead, you approximate.
We talked through their rough numbers: how many enquiries usually turn into a sale, and what an average sale is worth. If one in ten enquiries becomes a customer, and the product sells for around $10,000, then one enquiry is worth about $1,000.
Not emotionally. Not hypothetically. Just mathematically.
That number becomes the conversion value. It isn’t elegant, but it gives the system something to optimise toward.
Ads Optimise for Signals, Not Intentions
Google Ads doesn’t understand nuance. It doesn’t know that your product is complex or that your sales process is long. It only understands signals.
If you don’t give it a signal tied to value, it will optimise for the wrong thing, cheap clicks, low-intent traffic, or volume without outcome.
In this case, the signal was simple: a contact form submission, assigned a value that reflects what it’s worth downstream.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than pretending enquiries have no value at all.
Why Performance Max Actually Makes Sense Here
Given the uncertainty around the audience, I suggested a Performance Max campaign. Not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s designed for situations where you don’t yet know exactly who converts.
This particular business had sold simulators to hobbyists, racers, and at one point, an construction company buying helicopter simulators for staff training. That kind of customer spread makes manual targeting difficult early on.
Performance Max lets you feed in context, locations, rough income indicators, interests, and then step back and let the system learn.
The important constraint was geography. Australia only. Anything broader would require a budget large enough to absorb a lot of wasted learning.
Budget Matters Less Than Time
People fixate on monthly spend, but with high-ticket products, time is usually the more important variable.
Performance Max doesn’t behave well in the first month. It improves in the second. By the third, it starts to show something closer to reality. That’s not a promise of success, just a description of how the system learns.
If you shut it down too early, all you’ve done is pay for Google to learn who your customers are, without ever benefiting from that learning.
Attribution Is the Quiet Problem No One Talks About
Even if the ads work, there’s another issue: knowing that they worked.
When sales happen via email, phone calls, or long conversations, the trail goes cold very quickly. One practical solution is passing the Google Ads click ID into your CRM via a hidden form field.
That way, you can later say something grounded, like:
“Out of ten enquiries, three came from ads, and two of those converted.”
That’s how you reason about return on ad spend when Google itself can’t see the full journey.
This Is Why People Pay for Help
By the end of the conversation, I was aware it had turned into a wall of text. That wasn’t intentional, it’s just the reality that once you start pulling on the thread, the system is more complex than most guides admit.
None of this is particularly clever. It’s mostly about being honest with the constraints of your business and then working within them instead of fighting the platforms.
There’s a reason agencies exist. There’s also a reason founders burn money trying to do this blind.
This wasn’t advice meant to impress anyone. It was just one person explaining to another how to avoid the most common early mistakes.
And honestly, that’s probably where most useful marketing conversations actually start.