Google Ads and PPC work I have been hired to do

What I am usually asked for

• An honest audit of an account somebody else built, with the waste quantified in money
• Conversion tracking that reports real leads, calls and sales rather than page views
• Conversion action configuration: category, counting, attribution, primary and secondary goals
• Account restructures: campaign and ad group architecture that can actually be managed
• Search term reviews and negative keyword lists that get maintained, not built once
• Geographic and schedule targeting matched to where the business can actually trade
• Responsive search ad builds and asset management, at the right level of the account
• Shopping and ecommerce feeds, including diagnosing a collapsed return on ad spend
• Bulk changes through the Google Ads API when the volume makes the interface a liability
• Manager account setup, access and customer ID hygiene across multiple clients
• Reporting that separates brand from non-brand so the numbers mean something

How I work

Read-only audit first, across seven, fourteen and thirty day windows so I can tell a trend from a wobble. Everything I find gets written down with the cost attached.

Changes go to you as a numbered list for approval before anything is applied. I do not quietly restructure a live account that is paying someone's wages.

Bulk changes then run through the same sequence every time: group the operations, run each group with validate-only so Google tells me what it would reject, apply atomically so a part-applied mess is impossible, then query the settings back to confirm they are what I intended. The log of that run is part of the deliverable.

A correction I had to make

When my own audit finding was wrong

On the tattoo studio account above, my first audit flagged the page-view conversion action as a vanity metric and said the reported cost per lead was meaningless. That was the headline finding, written up in red.

Then I asked the client what the page actually was. It was the post-submission thank-you page, so the leads were real after all and roughly £8 a form fill was a genuinely good number. My reading was wrong.

I corrected the audit in writing the same day, kept the real underlying issue (wrong category, counted many times per click, no phone call tracking at all), and fixed those properly. The client has the correction on file.

I am putting that on a page meant to win me work because it is the thing I would want to know about somebody before hiring them: what they do when they get something wrong in front of a client.

A fair warning

What I will not do

• Report page views as conversions because the number looks better
• Leave brand and non-brand merged in a single reporting line
• Claim credit for brand searches that would have converted anyway
• Restructure a live account without written approval of the changes
• Hide a bad month. If spend went up and leads went down, that is what the report says

Two platform traps worth knowing

The keyword report includes your negatives

Query keyword performance in GAQL and the results mix positive keywords with negative ones. Report on that without filtering negatives out first and your keyword list, and anything you conclude from it, is wrong.

Presence or interest is not presence

The default location setting includes people merely showing interest in your area. On the account above, that default sent 51% of the brand budget to clicks over ten miles away or abroad, for a single conversion.