Google Ads for Small Business

I've audited close to 900 Google Ads accounts over the last decade. The single most common finding — across trades, dentists, lawyers, gyms — is that 30-50% of the monthly spend is going to keywords that have never produced a booked job. Not a bad lead. Not a lead at all.

That waste isn't the agency being lazy or the owner being incompetent. It's the compounding effect of Google's platform quietly nudging every account towards higher spend and looser match types, combined with the fact that most owners look at reports monthly instead of the search terms weekly. The good news: once you know exactly where the leaks are, plugging them is the fastest performance uplift you can get in your whole business. Most owners see meaningful change within two weeks.

This post is the audit checklist I run on new client accounts, written for owners who want to sanity-check their agency or their own hands-on setup. Nothing here needs a PhD — but it does need weekly attention.

Why Google Ads quietly gets worse over time

An account that was tight and profitable 18 months ago rarely stays that way. Google iterates the platform constantly — new match-type behaviours, new automated bidding recommendations, Performance Max campaigns being turned on by default. Every one of those changes tilts the account towards spending more of your budget in places you didn't approve. If nobody is watching, the account drifts. Every account drifts. The only defence is the weekly ritual further down this post.

The three account setups that quietly bleed money

1. Broad match with no negative keyword list

Broad match is Google's default and it's fine — as long as you're feeding it a robust negative keyword list. Without one, a plumber ends up paying for "how to plumb a p-trap YouTube." A dentist pays for "dentist salary Australia." A lawyer pays for "free legal advice reddit." None of them ever become clients.

Start with a universal negative list — free, cheap, DIY, reddit, YouTube, job, salary, course, training, wiki, meaning, definition — and apply it at account level. Then run the Search Terms report weekly and add every irrelevant query. Most accounts should have 300+ negatives within 90 days.

2. Search + Display bundled in one campaign

Google's onboarding wizard loves to tick both boxes. Display eats 60-80% of the budget and produces almost none of the conversions. Separate campaigns, always. Kill Display for lead-gen unless you're running a specific remarketing play.

3. Smart Bidding on a fresh account with no conversion data

Smart Bidding needs at least 30 conversions in 30 days before it stops being expensive guessing. Start on Manual CPC, get the account to that threshold, then flip.

4. Performance Max as the default "easy" campaign

Performance Max is Google's most-pushed campaign type in 2026 and its most opaque. For established brands with existing data it can work; for small businesses it usually spends unpredictably across surfaces you didn't ask for. If you run PMax, at minimum cap its budget, feed it a strong asset group, and exclude your brand terms so it doesn't take credit for demand you'd have captured for free.

Conversion tracking — the invisible foundation

Half the accounts I audit are technically "tracking conversions" but tracking the wrong things. "Page viewed for 30 seconds" is not a conversion. "Contact page opened" is not a conversion. A phone call over 90 seconds, a submitted form, or a booking confirmation is a conversion. Fix this before you optimise anything else — bidding on garbage signals will always beat you.

The gold-standard stack: call-tracking (with 60-90 second qualifying threshold) on every ad extension and the site, form submissions posted into a CRM, and where possible offline conversion imports that mark which leads actually closed. Once Google knows which clicks turned into revenue — not just leads — Smart Bidding gets dramatically better.

What a lean small-business account looks like

1. 1One campaign per service line — not per suburb.
2. 25-15 exact + phrase match keywords per ad group.
3. 3A dedicated landing page per service (not the homepage).
4. 4Call tracking on every ad extension.
5. 5Conversion actions weighted: booked job > form fill > phone click.
6. 6Weekly search-terms review; monthly bid + budget review.

Landing pages: the multiplier no one wants to build

You can cut CPC in half by writing better ads. You can cut cost per booked job by two-thirds by building a proper landing page per service. It's the highest-leverage change in the whole system and it's the one most owners skip because "the website already exists."

• One page per money-service — not per suburb, per service.
• H1 names the outcome the searcher is after, in their language.
• Trust bar in the hero — insurance, guarantees, years in business.
• Phone number tap-to-call top-right and sticky on mobile.
• A 3-5 field form, not the 9-field monster your CRM defaulted to.
• Real reviews with names and dates, not stock testimonials.

What good performance looks like in Australia

The 30-day account rescue plan

1. 1Week 1: Fix conversion tracking. Call tracking, form tracking, offline import if possible. Nothing else matters if this is wrong.
2. 2Week 2: Split any bundled Search + Display campaigns. Kill Display for lead-gen. Cap Performance Max budget.
3. 3Week 3: Purge keywords with 50+ clicks and zero conversions. Build a 200-line negative keyword list from the last 90 days of search terms.
4. 4Week 4: Rebuild one landing page for your highest-spend service. Point traffic at it. Measure the lift.

Do those four weeks and you'll typically see a 25-50% drop in cost per lead. Most owners find the exercise pays for a year of consulting before they hit day 30.

Frequently asked owner questions

Should I use Google's automated recommendations?

Read them, apply nothing automatically. Google's recommendations are optimised for Google's revenue, not yours. Some are genuinely useful (broken ads, disapproved extensions); most are budget-increase nudges dressed as best practice.

How much should I spend?

Enough to hit 30 conversions in 30 days per campaign — that's the threshold at which Smart Bidding starts working properly. In most Australian service categories that's $2,000-$6,000/month per money service. Below that, run manual CPC and be patient.

Do I need an agency or can I run this myself?

If you can dedicate the weekly 90 minutes and enjoy the tinkering, you can run a small account well. If you can't, an agency with a specialist paid-search operator will usually make its fee back within 60 days by plugging the leaks you don't have time to see.