Most businesses do not discover their Google Ads account is broken by looking at the data. They discover it from the quiet. The card gets charged every month, the dashboard shows clicks going up and to the right, and the phone does not ring. That gap between visible activity and actual work coming in is where a lot of small firms lose a year of budget without ever quite being able to say what went wrong.
Chameleon Spray Painting, a spray painting business in North Yorkshire, sat in that gap. A previous marketer had set up Google Ads, the ads had been running for months, and there was very little to show for it. The account was not idle. It was spending. It just was not producing enquiries.
What follows is a google ads audit case study in the useful sense: not a highlight reel, but a walk through what was actually wrong, what got changed, and an honest read on what deserves the credit for the result.
What a badly built account costs before anyone notices
The reason bad accounts survive so long is that they fail quietly, and often look busy while they do it.
A Search campaign on broad match with no negative keyword list will happily spend a full budget every day. The clicks arrive. The impression share looks healthy. If conversion tracking has been set up to count something undemanding, such as any visit to a contact page, the account can even report conversions while nobody has picked up the phone.
Meanwhile the real cost compounds in three directions at once. There is the money leaving the account, which is the obvious part and usually the smallest. There is the time, because every month the ads run badly is a month a competitor with a working account takes the jobs instead. And there is the damage to the learning: Google’s bidding systems optimise towards whatever you tell them a conversion is. Feed them months of junk signals and the algorithm gets steadily better at finding people who will never buy from you.
That is why a long-running broken account is often worse than no account at all. It has been trained.
What the audit found, and how to check the same things yourself
The audit on the sprayer’s account turned up the pattern that badly built accounts tend to share. None of it was exotic. All of it is checkable in an afternoon on your own account, and it is worth doing before you pay anyone to do it for you.
Start with the search terms report. Not keywords, search terms. This is the list of what people actually typed before clicking. Campaigns, Insights and reports, then search terms. If you see queries about jobs you do not do, areas you do not cover, or people clearly researching rather than hiring, that is your budget. A healthy account has a negative keyword list that has been built up over time. An abandoned one has nothing in it.
Check what counts as a conversion. Tools, Conversions. Look at every action listed, whether it is set as primary or secondary, and how it is counted. If a page view, a scroll or a generic button click is sitting there as a primary conversion, the reported numbers are fiction and the bidding is being steered by that fiction.
Check the network settings. Open a Search campaign and look at Networks. If Display Network is ticked, a large share of the spend is going to automatic placements on apps and sites with no purchase intent whatsoever. It is on by default and it catches a lot of people.
Check location targeting. In the location options there is a setting for presence versus interest. Left on the looser option, ads show to people merely showing interest in your area, which for a trades business covering a specific patch of Yorkshire is not what you want.
Check the auto-applied recommendations. Google will happily apply its own changes to your account, including adding keywords, unless someone has gone in and turned that off.
Run those five checks and you will know whether your account has been managed or merely left switched on.
Why fixing the ads alone would not have moved anything
Here is the part that gets skipped in most case studies, because it complicates the story.
The ads were not the only problem. The website was not built to take an enquiry. Fixing the targeting would have meant sending better qualified people to a page that still did not tell them clearly what the business does, which areas it covers, what the work looks like, or how to get in touch without hunting.
Paid traffic is unforgiving in a way organic traffic is not. Somebody who found you through a search result or a recommendation arrives with a bit of patience. Somebody who clicked an ad arrives with none. They are comparing you against the other three tabs they have open. If the page takes too long, does not load properly on a phone, or does not answer the question that made them click, they are gone before you have paid for anything useful.
So the site was rebuilt alongside the account, not after it. Clear statement of the service, the area covered, visible proof of work, and an enquiry form that was not an afterthought at the bottom of a long page.
Routing every enquiry so none goes missing
The last link in the chain is the one that quietly breaks most often. An enquiry form that sends to one email address is a single point of failure, and the failure is nearly always the same: it lands while you are halfway up a ladder, it sits in a crowded inbox, and by the evening the customer has booked someone who answered within the hour.
Enquiries from the rebuilt site were routed three ways at once. To email, so there is a written record. Into a CRM, so there is a list of open enquiries that does not depend on anyone remembering. And to WhatsApp, so the notification arrives on the phone in a pocket rather than in an inbox that gets opened at nine in the evening.
For a trades business this is not an administrative nicety. Speed of response is a large part of why one quote gets accepted and another does not. Automating that routing is exactly the sort of unglamorous plumbing that Nimble Dingo’s AI growth systems are built around, because it is the difference between generating leads and actually converting them.
Eleven enquiries in week one, and what to credit
The first week after launch produced eleven enquiries.
The honest reading of that number is that neither half of the work would have produced it alone. The audit found the waste and stopped the budget going to searches that were never going to turn into jobs, which meant the money started reaching people who actually wanted a sprayer in their part of Yorkshire. The rebuilt site then converted the traffic the ads sent, which the old site would not have done. The routing meant none of those eleven sat unseen.
Strip out any one of the three and the week looks very different. Better targeting into a poor page gives you cheaper clicks and the same silence. A good page with no traffic sits there. A perfect funnel with enquiries landing in an unread inbox loses them at the final step.
It is also worth saying what one week is and is not. It is a strong early signal that the fundamentals are right. It is not a forecast, and seasonality, competitor activity and lead quality all need watching over a longer stretch before anyone draws conclusions about cost per job.
How to tell whether your own ads are being run properly
Beyond the technical checks, there are behavioural signals worth paying attention to.
A properly managed account has a change history with changes in it. Open Tools, Change history, and set the range to the last three months. Recurring negative keyword additions, bid adjustments and ad copy tests are what active management looks like. A flat line is a retainer being collected.
A properly managed account also reports in the language of your business, not Google’s. Clicks, impressions and click through rate are inputs. Enquiries, quotes issued and jobs won are outputs. If every report you receive is made of inputs, nobody is looking at whether the spend turns into work.
And you should own the account. If the advertising runs inside an agency’s own Google Ads account rather than one registered to you, you cannot audit it, and you cannot take the history with you when you leave.
If those three things do not hold, an audit is the cheapest step available to you, because the diagnosis costs a fraction of another quarter of the same spend.
If you are weighing up whether the problem is your ads, your website or the handover between them, it is worth reading our wider guide on choosing a lead generation agency in the UK before you commit to another monthly fee.