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Join for freePosted: Wed 26th Aug 2026
Running Google Ads but not getting results? It's usually fixable.
Tom Bowen, founder of Google Ads agency Pleon, has audited hundreds of accounts and sees the same problems again and again.
He covers the most common issues and what works now that AI is changing how people search.
The most common issues in underperforming accounts, and how to spot them in yours
What works in an AI search world, and why older tactics are failing
A free one-to-one audit of your account, so you know exactly what to fix first
Bonus: Every attendee is offered a free one-to-one audit of their account, recorded personally by Tom
Tom is the founder of Pleon, a boutique agency that specialises in Google Ads.
He has delivered hundreds of audits for businesses worldwide and shares Google Ads advice daily on LinkedIn, YouTube, and in a weekly newsletter for directors and marketing managers. He's known for explaining ads in plain English.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Tom Bowen, founder of Pleon. In this session, Tom will cover the most common issues with Google Ads and what works now that AI is changing how people search.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we will send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Tom.
Tom Bowen: Hi there, everyone. Great to meet you all, and thank you very much for giving up some of your valuable lunchtime to talk about the wonderful world of Google Ads.
What we'll talk about here, for the most part, is why your Google Ads might not be working, or how they could be performing better – and I'll provide some insight so you can help improve things and move them in the right direction.
The plan for the next 25 minutes is this: we're fortunate enough to audit a huge number of Google Ads accounts. I'm on a mission this year to audit around 100 of them, and what we see constantly is that whether the spend is 500 dollars a month or 50 dollars a month, the same five problems generally occur in the account.
The goal of today is to talk about each of those, give you some indication of why it's an issue, how you can see that it's an issue, and how you can fix it as quickly as possible. The checklist will give you a good guide of what to do.
Some of the specific issues are pretty big, so I won't cover all of them in 25 minutes, but I can point you in the right direction in terms of resources. I've also included at the bottom how AI can help fix some of these issues, or how you can use AI to fix them too.
Google Ads, for the most part, follows a framework from a 90-day transformation process that we run with a lot of clients currently. When we run this process, and ads aren't working the way customers would hope, we see it for five main reasons. These are the five things you need your ads to achieve, and if they're not doing these things, you won't reach your maximum potential.
Firstly, as simple as it sounds, you need to show your Google Ads to the right potential customers – show up for the right searches. There's no point showing up for things that aren't being searched for by your potential customers.
Once you're showing your ads to the right customers, you need to get those customers to click on your ad – get the click. Then turn those clicks into leads through your landing page.
Importantly, tell Google which of those clicks led to great leads. That's vitally important, and it's something so many businesses don't quite do within their Google Ads – I've got a big section on this.
Once you've done that, you repeat the cycle by showing your ads to more potential customers, going back from step five to step one as you open up to more people.
On step one – showing your ads to the right customers, or the wrong customers – a common issue we see within Google Ads accounts comes down to something called match types on the keywords within your campaign. When you set up a Google Ads account, you have three different ways your keywords could be listed.
If we take the example of a home care agency, using that as an exact match keyword means you'll only appear when people search for “home care agency”. But a common issue is people using broad match or phrase match instead, which gives Google far more control over the type of searches you appear for – and Google still isn't very good at understanding nuance.
This is an actual example from something we audited: Google can't tell the difference between a home care agency and a care home. They're two completely different services, using basically the same words but meaning completely different things.
It's vital that at the start of your Google Ads journey, you're incredibly focused on making sure you spend every penny on the right searches for your business. Using broad match almost always leads to wasted money right at the start.
You can see how this is performing by looking at your search term report within Google Ads, which shows the specific search terms your ads appeared for. You'll find it on the left-hand side, or you can search for it in the top bar – just ask for the search term report, and it'll show you what your ads are appearing for. That list is incredibly valuable data for your Google Ads.
When we audit an account, the first thing we look at is the search term report. If it's a complete mess and the budget is being wasted on irrelevant searches, you're simply not showing your ads to potential customers – so I'd look through that list as a first action from today.
If you're set on broad match, use that list to understand whether it's working effectively. If the list is clean and there are only a few issues, broad match might be working fine – but from the huge number of audits we've done, I can almost guarantee it won't be.
Go through that list, see how your match types are working, and use it to add new exact match keywords to your campaign. You could have hundreds, if not thousands, of search terms in there.
That's where the AI tip comes in: run that search term report through AI and ask it to break the terms down into buyers, browsers and junk. The junk can be used as what we call negative keywords in the campaign.
If your search term report shows a lot of people searching for “free”, “cheap”, “alternative”, downloads or PDFs, those are the negative keywords you can add to your campaign – telling Google you don't want to appear for those searches, since anyone looking for something free is unlikely to become a paying customer.
The search term report is a very useful tool. It gives you a huge amount of data on what your ads are appearing for, and from there you can decide whether you want to appear for more of those things or less.
Step two is making sure you get the click. If we've made sure our ads are appearing for your ideal customers, so they search for a particular term and your ad appears, we then need to make sure they click on it.
I've used the example of dog walkers here, because most people know what dog walkers are and what they do. Too many ads we review are boring and look just like Yellow Pages listings – “dog walker near you, enquire now”, for example.
It's called Google Ads because the role of an ad is to be an advert, so we need to stand out against our competitors to get that click. We want people to come to your website rather than a competitor's, but Google also charges you more and shows you less when people aren't clicking on your ads because they're not compelling.
Google rewards you with a bonus through something called your quality score if your ads get clicked on regularly. So how can you help get the click? Firstly, make an actual offer.
If you've got a promotion or offer running – some reason to entice people to click on you rather than the competitors showing those Yellow Pages-type ads – include it.
Show that you understand the customer's particular problem – “too busy to walk your dog” is a great example. Speak to the pain point and show that you really understand your customer.
This works across a full range of businesses, from dog walkers to B2B services. Showing customers you understand their specific problems, and can therefore address them, is a fantastic way to get people clicking on your ads.
Show you can be trusted – five-star reviews, case studies and quotes can all be super useful. It's actually quite difficult to get your Google reviews to show on your ad.
You need 100 reviews through the Google Business Review widget to get them appearing there, so that can take a lot of time. But you can still allude to your five-star reviews, and highlight any qualifications or registrations that show you're a trustworthy business.
You can also use your ad to scare off bad leads, if that's an issue you're having – putting your minimum price or minimum terms in there absolutely works. This helps put off the type of clicks you don't want, since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Using AI at a basic level can help here too, and as we move into an AI ads world, more and more tools will support this. From a manual perspective, if you're using Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude, give it a list of your best reviews and your website – for every client we work with, we have a clear list of 10 to 15 problems, objections and solutions that our customers face.
With all of that information, you can ask AI to generate some potential ad copy, helping you make compelling ads that encourage your potential customers to click.
Step three: we've shown our ads to your ideal customers and got them to click on your ad, so now they're visiting your website.
Websites and landing pages are, I'd say, by far the most neglected part of Google Ads – from some agencies, to be honest, but absolutely from businesses too. The landing page is vital.
Google will always try to take some of your money, and it can largely guarantee a click – it might not be a good click, but it will be a click. Your landing page does the rest.
One of the key metrics within Google Ads is your conversion rate – how many clicks turn into a conversion. You can change your landing page and double that rate, which is the equivalent of spending twice as much on your current campaign.
There are so many different routes we could go down when it comes to landing pages – honestly, that's a lunch and learn in itself. But a couple of things worth mentioning: wherever possible, stay away from sending people to a home page or trying to cover every service and keyword on one catch-all page.
Also make sure the next step is very clear on the landing page – what do you want your customers to do? Call you, make a purchase, or fill out a contact form?
One thing I always recommend businesses avoid is asking people to email them, because an email address is unlikely to be trackable through traditional Google Ads conversion tracking – I'll talk about that later.
You can track when someone fills out a form or makes a call, but if someone clicks on an email address, you can sometimes record the click without knowing whether they actually emailed – that data doesn't get back into Google Ads.
I'd always recommend staying away from email and encouraging people to fill out a form instead. When it comes to landing pages specifically, I recommend one page per service.
If you've got multiple services, break down the keywords we spoke about earlier into small groups – what you'll see as “ad groups” within Google Ads – and send different ad groups to different landing pages, because the page needs to be relevant to what people are actually searching for.
Make the next step obvious, and ideally have one clear call to action – a form or a tracked phone number. As I touched on, what makes a great landing page is a whole session in itself.
There's some fantastic advice out there on how to make brilliant landing pages – there's a YouTube channel by Alicia Connelly Heard [name as heard in the recording; spelling not confirmed], and her landing pages are brilliant.
But at this point, there's no excuse for poor landing pages when it comes to Google Ads. Even when I first started running ads 10 years ago, it was tougher for clients.
You had to go to a web developer, get things built at huge cost, with a lot of back and forth. That's no longer the case.
Even with zero web design or coding skills, there are plenty of options for building landing pages now. There's a tool called Lovable, which is entirely prompt-based for building landing pages and comes with templates.
You can also use Unbounce for something similar. Go High Level, a popular CRM, also has a number of templates you can use to start building out landing pages.
There's really no excuse for rubbish landing pages anymore, and if yours is poor, you'll unfortunately be beaten by the competition – Google Ads is becoming more competitive.
If your page isn't clear, takes too long to load, or doesn't easily show customers what to do next, you're going to fall behind on Google Ads.
So bump landing pages up your priorities once you've made sure you're showing ads to the right customers in step one, and getting clicks from those customers in step two.
Now we're moving into a slightly more technical, but equally important, element of Google Ads: telling Google which leads were great leads.
One of the biggest challenges we see in Google Ads accounts – and I think I've said this about every point – is that businesses don't tell Google which leads were good versus bad.
If someone fills out a form, Google has no idea whether that was the perfect enquiry – a 50,000-pound enquiry from your dream customer – or someone applying for a job.
Because of that, Google optimises for volume rather than value. If you tell Google you want as many conversions as possible – using what's called a maximised conversions bidding strategy – and tell it that a form is a conversion, it will try to get you as many conversions as possible.
It will maximise conversions regardless of quality, which can mean you end up getting enquiries from job hunters – and potentially telling Google you want more enquiries just like that.
Google has a specific system designed to stop this, called offline conversion tracking. It's the process of reporting back to Google when a click became a customer or a qualified lead.
Instead of reporting when a click became a form, you start reporting when a click became a qualified lead or a customer. That process is what's called offline conversion tracking.
I've got a full video explaining offline conversion tracking on my YouTube channel, and I'll include that link in the follow-up email.
By doing this effectively, you tell Google which clicks became customers or ideal buyers, so it knows to spend more money on similar searches in the future.
Of all those keywords and search terms, when Google decides where to spend your budget each day, it will spend it on the types of searches that led – or could lead – to higher-value leads in future, rather than the job hunters looking for an opportunity with you.
On top of this, you can upload audiences to your Google Ads campaigns. These audience signals are vital, because you can include them in lookalike lists within your campaigns.
You can tell Google, “these are our customers” – a great example is if you've got a mailing list, which you can include directly.
There are manual imports, or you can integrate directly with something like Mailchimp. Google can then see a list of your current perfect customers and create a lookalike audience.
So when people from the same demographic, interests and locations also search, Google knows better where to spend your budget. Those audience signals are becoming vital within Google Ads.
AI can help here too – I've trialled this myself, asking Claude to help set up an offline conversion tracking Google Sheet. It will create that full system, so you'll see all the leads that come in.
They'll appear in that Google Sheet, and you can easily mark whether each one is or isn't a quality lead.
Alternatively, there's a brilliant piece of software called WhatConverts, which we use with every client – it does that same job as the Google Sheet, but in a much simpler way.
We go in there and can see every lead generated for clients – marking whether it was a quality lead or not, and logging the quote value, for example. It makes the process a lot easier.
To be honest, WhatConverts is the simple route here – super useful, and it solves this exact problem. Offline conversion tracking is the best thing you can do to quickly improve the quality of the leads you're getting through Google Ads.
Finally, let's talk about reaching more potential customers. One fault a lot of businesses have is waiting for a miracle within their Google Ads campaign.
Presuming you've done everything we've mentioned in steps one to four, and you've got a stable cost per lead of, say, £100, there isn't some magic fix that will halve that cost per lead while maintaining quality.
Google isn't suddenly going to improve that quickly if you've already got the other fundamentals in place – it's a market, and you're competing against other businesses.
So the way to improve your Google Ads results, unfortunately, is to scale – and I find a lot of businesses are quite scared of that.
If you're happy with a cost per lead of £100, and comfortable with those leads becoming customers, the goal is to start scaling and growing.
The real skill is in how you do that – how do you double your spend in a Google Ads account while keeping cost per lead where it is? One of the key ways is moving into new searches and new campaign types.
As I said at the start, broad match can be the worst thing to do in a Google Ads campaign when you don't have good data – you're giving Google a huge amount of control over what searches you appear for, but you haven't told it historically what searches led to customers, so it doesn't know who you need to appear for.
But if you do everything right in steps one to four, and report back to Google what searches became customers, Google builds a pool of people it understands are your customers. Then you can be more comfortable moving back to broad match and giving Google more control over the type of searches your ads appear for.
Importantly, that also means appearing in AI search. Exact match and phrase match, as I said at the start, won't currently let you appear in AI search – but broad match does.
But jumping straight into broad match and trying to appear in AI search, without having given Google the right data on who searches your ads and becomes a customer, is a sure way to waste a lot of money.
Getting everything set up and that data in place will then allow you to appear in other channels, such as AI search.
There are also additional campaign types Google would love you to use, including Performance Max and Demand Gen. Both give Google far more control, but you should be comfortable with that once you've given it the right data.
With both Performance Max and Demand Gen, there's more outreach involved – a bit like Meta ads, showing image or video ads to people Google thinks are your customers.
These are becoming a significant part of Google Ads, since Google Ads is of course linked with YouTube ads too. One stumbling block we've found for businesses early on is that they don't have the ability to make videos.
They want to run YouTube ads but don't want to spend thousands on a film crew – but again, tools for this are becoming increasingly available.
Google VO is very helpful here – you can pretty much give it your landing page and a prompt, and ask it to help make a YouTube ad.
It won't win any awards or make the next Super Bowl, but it'll do the job – especially for retargeting, reminding people what you do, and continuing to show ads to more people Google knows could be your customers, because you've reported back what searches led to customers in the past.
As a quick review of that five-step process, working backwards: if you're getting leads through your Google Ads campaign but they're junk and no good, I'd presume your issues are steps one and four.
That means you're showing up for the wrong searches, and you're not telling Google that you're spending money on irrelevant ads and enquiries – which comes back to offline conversion tracking.
If you're getting clicks but no leads, the ads are probably either boring or too generic, so you're not really speaking to your perfect customers or getting clicks from the right type of customer. Secondly, I'd suggest the landing pages need some work.
As I said at the start, landing pages are so heavily neglected when it comes to Google Ads specifically. And finally, if you've got good leads but you're stuck at the same spend and want to know how to grow and scale, you'll unfortunately have to spend money.
There's no magic bullet to suddenly halve the cost per lead once you've done everything right in steps one to four. The skill is being able to scale – showing your ads to more people while keeping the cost per lead where it is.
That means giving more control over to Google in the type of searches you appear for – in AI search, Performance Max and Demand Gen – but being confident doing so because you've fed Google the right data, whether from offline conversion tracking or the audience lists we mentioned.
So that's a lot there – I'll be honest, we've covered a lot in 20 minutes on fixing Google Ads specifically. I've got another video on my YouTube channel, a half-hour walkthrough of how we transform Google Ads in 90 days, if you'd like more detail.
It talks through that process in even more detail, since there's a lot to cover – some of which I wasn't able to get into today.
What I'm happy to offer anyone who's given up their Wednesday afternoon in the back end of August is a free discovery call to talk through this in more detail. You've got the link here, and it'll also be shared in the follow-up email.
I'm happy to speak to anyone, though I'll caveat that if you're already spending on ads, that's where we're able to give the best advice. But regardless of the spend, if you're already spending money with Google, I'm happy to help you spend it right.
We can run through that discovery call and offer a free audit off the back of it – reviewing the account, looking at what's broken, and talking through what would need fixing.
I'm happy to offer that to anyone here – I'm conscious there's a lot to cover in the world of Google Ads, with lots of different businesses and use cases, but the offer stands for everyone.
That link will be sent out in the email, and you can scan it here too. If you have any other questions or are interested in our other Google Ads content, we've got a YouTube channel.
We're posting videos every couple of weeks specifically about Google Ads and the theory behind it – less “how to add a keyword” and more helping businesses understand how Google Ads actually works.
Because once you know how it works, you can backfill the how-to guides yourself. I'm also posting on LinkedIn almost every day, so send a connection request – it'd be nice to meet you.
Hopefully that content is useful too. We also have a weekly newsletter, Have I Got Ads For You, covering the same stuff directly in your inbox. And that's everything from me.
I could see the chat pinging throughout the presentation – I didn't answer on purpose, because I'm not very good at multitasking and would end up taking an hour of your time. But I'm happy to run through those questions now, or answer any others you may have.
Caitriona: Perfect, thanks, Tom. Let's start with this question here from Fraser: what was the name of the landing page YouTube channel you mentioned?
Tom: The business is called Persuasion Excellence, by Alicia Connelly Heard. I can include that in the follow-up email as well.
Caitriona: I'll include that link in the email as well – could you share it in the chat too?
Tom: Yeah, of course. She's superb – they specifically specialise in landing pages and lead funnels, based in Australia. Super helpful channel.
Caitriona: Thank you. Then we have a question from Everton, which I think might be applicable to a lot of people in the audience. They're saying £5 a click is expensive for a startup, and this seems more suited to large companies – do you have any advice for smaller businesses at that price point?
Tom: I always challenge the idea that it's too expensive – I'd try to backfill it. Unless you're doing really cheap e-commerce, all clicks are at least £2 plus.
We run accounts where the cost per click is £40 or £50. That happens because the market decides the price – if it costs £5 a click but you need 10 clicks to get one customer, that's the level you need to be comfortable with.
Unfortunately, it is a competitive space because the buyers are high intent. Generally speaking, I'd suggest businesses trying Google Ads set a fixed amount they're willing to spend, rather than worrying too much about cost per click, and run that as a project where you make sure the foundations are in place correctly.
On cost per click specifically, I released a video on my YouTube channel about how, generally speaking, we actually want cost per click to go up and become more expensive – because the more expensive clicks are often from the higher-intent buyers.
So I'd try to look at it on a project basis – an amount to invest, like any marketing channel, in building the systems that start to generate traffic through it.
Caitriona: Thank you. Another question, from Missy, which might be hard to answer specifically, but maybe we can take it as a broader one. They're saying they've been paying an SEO expert for over six months without any change – do you have any suggestions as to why that might be?
Tom: So they're paying an SEO agency?
Caitriona: An SEO expert, they've said.
Tom: Okay, so they're paying an SEO expert and not seeing results. I'd say it will completely depend on the business type
But SEO is slow by definition – even the best SEO people would agree with that. I look at it like the hare and the tortoise, for the most part.
I can't comment specifically on why this particular SEO might not be working, but it's very common for businesses to run SEO for six months without seeing meaningful returns.
The hope is that you gain the confidence that traffic will start to come through the site. We know a lot of people who use Google Ads to supplement that, but it is a bit of a hare and tortoise situation when it comes to SEO.
So I wouldn't say it's alarm bells or a red flag if you haven't got results within six months. But try to understand whether there's confidence that results are coming, rather than it just being an endless retainer.
That can be the challenge with SEO. Whereas with Google Ads, it costs money – as we said, £5 a click, sometimes far more than that. But a good Google Ads campaign can be turned on today and start getting people to your website tomorrow.
Caitriona: We're just coming to the end of the session now, but we do have time for one final question: which traditional Google Ads tactics are becoming less effective because of AI, and what should replace them?
Tom: Sure – I'm going to talk out of both sides of my mouth here, because I love that question.
Everything I told you at the start of the presentation about exact match being super specific is becoming completely out of date for businesses looking to grow and scale.
But if you jump straight to the AI-first tactics – broad match, Performance Max, and using audience lists to show people video – it won't work. You have to get the data in first.
So that sniper, super-specific approach, and relying on keywords, is quickly dying with AI search.
Keywords, and everything we've talked about today, don't really make sense with AI search, because we don't search in keywords any more – we search in big, long paragraphs.
That's why a lot of the work we do with businesses is trying to get them to a level where they can work in AI search. But the biggest issue businesses have is they try to run before they can walk.
You've got to do that “walking” bit first – the sniper approach with exact keywords – to then get there. It's a great question.
I've got two or three videos on my YouTube channel about it. Everything I told you at the start of this presentation doesn't work in an AI search world – but you need to do it to get ready for one.
Caitriona: Thank you – that's a great way to end the session. As mentioned, I'll be sending a follow-up email this afternoon, which will include everything Tom's mentioned, as well as plenty more information.
We'll be sharing that this afternoon. Thanks so much, Tom, for your time, and thanks everyone for joining us today.
Tom: Pleasure. Lovely to catch you all, and I'll see you soon.
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