How to Fix Your Google Ads in 90 Days (Full Blueprint)

I hear it all the time. You’re spending money on Google Ads, you don’t know what you’re getting back, and lead quality is all over the place. You’ve heard the big promises too. An agency comes in, ties you into a long contract, lots of promises, and a year on, nothing has really changed.

So we decided to break that cycle. At Pleon, we run our 90-day transformation where we turn campaigns over a 90-day period from an inconsistent mystery into a reliable lead generating machine that is scalable as we move into an AI search world.

We split that transformation into three distinct phases: Fix, Build, and Grow. The goal is to take your Google Ads account from where it is now, strip out the waste, install proper tracking, build the right structure, and then scale it with confidence.

Phase one is the fix. The goal here is to reduce wasted spend while setting up the campaign on the right foundation so you’re ready to grow. This always starts with our audit. We use our find and fix methodology to look for three key areas of waste: wasted spend, missed opportunities, and just general bad practice.

Key problem number one is spending on the wrong searches. We’ve been able to go into accounts and quickly cut thousands in wasted spend in literally minutes. We do this by reviewing the Google search term report, which is the report where you can see exactly what searches you’re appearing for.

A common area where businesses struggle is commercial versus non-commercial intent. We work with one of London’s leading commercial flooring providers, and before we started, about 80% of their search terms weren’t for commercial flooring at all. They were for standard residential flooring. You can review that list and clearly see how much of your budget is going on the right searches. And almost always when there’s a bad search term report, it’s because of an overuse of broad match at the wrong point in your journey.

A key and common problem we find in Google Ads campaigns is appearing for your own brand name. It seems super simple, but we find it so often. I audited one account just over a year ago where they were trying to spend £3,000 a month on new business, and about £2,700 of that was just going on their brand name.

This is a real negative for two reasons. Obviously you’re spending all your money on people who already know about you rather than on new customers. But the worst part is that on face value, the campaign can look like it’s performing really well because Google keeps going after the quick wins and the low hanging fruit.

The fix is relatively simple. We add a standard negative keyword list of all your brand names to the service campaigns. We also generally recommend that you do bid on your own brand name, but in a separate campaign that you treat differently. For most businesses that can be done on no more than 10 or 20 pounds a month, keeping it in its own silo while the core budget goes after new customers.

Common issue number three is really terrible tracking within Google Ads accounts. Google is basically the easiest marketing channel to attribute success to. You can set up all your tracking so that when a lead form is submitted, you can see it in your Google Ads account. But probably 20% of the campaigns we audit don’t have any conversion tracking in place at all. We believe you shouldn’t spend a penny on ads until your conversion tracking is set up.

It’s not just a quick win for you as a business being able to see how many leads came from your campaigns. It’s vital that you report that data back to Google, because if Google can see that one keyword is more likely to get you lead forms, it will spend more money on that keyword and less on the ones that aren’t working.

But the other error we see is too much conversion tracking. We’ll go into a campaign and they’ll have tracking for lead forms, phone calls, clicks to email, contact page views, people looking for the business on Google Maps. What that does is confuse Google, because you’ve told it to maximise conversions but it doesn’t know which ones are your priority. It’s ranking someone looking for you on Google Maps the same as someone who filled out a lead form. Trim those down and get focused on what actually matters.

Offline conversion tracking is absolutely vital because it takes conversion tracking to the next level. Rather than telling Google that you want lead forms, you’re essentially saying to Google: these lead forms actually led to qualified leads, so we want more of those. Some of the lead forms were spam, job hunters, or just the wrong type of people. You don’t even report those back to Google at all.

So offline conversion tracking is reporting back to Google what happens after the lead form, what happens offline. It’s one of the quick wins of any lead generation campaign in my opinion, moving away from standard conversion tracking and instead reporting back which clicks led to offline sales or qualified leads. That way the signals you’re feeding into Google are the highest intent and the highest value.

We deliver on offline conversion tracking for our clients using our precision tracking tool. All of our clients can go into the tracking tool and see every lead that has come through the Google Ads campaigns. You can see the lead form details, or if it’s a phone call, you can see the full recording and transcript. You rate each lead as quotable or not quotable, and you can add values and sales values too. This feedback loop is absolutely vital as we move into the build and grow phases. Everything is built on signals.

Now that we’ve fixed the leaks and started reporting proper data signals back into the campaign, we move to phase two: the build. First up is building an account structure that works. Very often there are far too many campaigns. It might seem logical that if you’ve got five services, each needs its own campaign. So you split a £2,000 monthly budget into £400 per service across five separate silos.

The problem is £400 a month for most B2B services just isn’t enough. That works out at around £13 a day, which might afford you one, two, or three clicks. What actually happens is you end up appearing for low intent searches because your cost per click is lower. But there’s a reason they’re cheaper, and that’s because there’s no competition there. You’re too small of a fish in too many ponds.

What we want to do is be a big fish in a small pond. We often do that by either significantly reducing the number of services involved in Google Ads, or amalgamating campaigns. Sometimes we have to say to clients, look, you’ve got five services here, but right now we need to pick the priority one or two and force all the budget there. Then we can compete in the high intent auctions where your competitors are, and where the best leads come from.

As part of the build stage, we also look at what happens after the search. When it comes to ad copy, we ask three key questions. Firstly, is the keyword actually in the ad copy? If it’s not, Google will penalise you and your ads will be less likely to show. Secondly, is there a clear reason why someone would click on your ad when you appear next to three to five competitors? Too often ad copy is generic and bland, saying what you do with an “enquire now” and nothing else. Finally, do the descriptions specifically talk to your customers and their pain points?

We’re also on an exciting journey of building out AI tools that give us more intelligence here. We feed in our client’s account and website so the tool can fully review the offer, then it reviews the competitors in the space, sees where they fall short, and we lean into that in the ad copy. It’s not just about generic copy anymore, it’s about using AI to understand the customers of our customers.

Then there are landing pages. All that Google Ads can do for the most part is guarantee you a click. It’s the job of the page to get you leads. If the page loads too slowly, if it’s confusing, or the website isn’t clearly telling people why they should enquire, it will hammer your results. We’ve seen conversion rates double just by changing landing pages from something poor and slow loading to something better optimised. We believe the best Google Ads campaigns send clicks to landing pages on the client’s core website, not old school standalone landing pages, because of the domain authority and SEO benefits.

Finally, building audience lists. These are lists you provide to Google to give it more positive signals of the type of people you want to spend budget on. Remarketing, CRM integrations, mailing lists. Google can then start to see trends so that when someone who looks like your current customers searches, it knows to spend more of your budget there. Combined with the conversion data from precision tracking, this is fundamental for phase three.

Phase three is the growth stage, and everything we’ve done in phases one and two has been leading to exactly this. We’ve fixed the waste, installed precision tracking, and continued to feed Google with more and more positive data signals. Now is the stage where we should be comfortable giving Google slightly more control through smart bidding.

Smart bidding allows Google to decide how much to bid on certain searches. At the start of the journey that would have been a terrible idea because Google didn’t have the right signals. So we kept things very controlled with exact keywords and maximum bids. But now, with all the data we’ve given Google over this 90-day period, it can be incredibly confident that a particular person looks like someone in your audience list, or searches like your qualified leads in the precision tracking tool. Yes, your cost per click may increase. You might spend £20 on a click that previously cost £8. But the quality of those leads and the likelihood they become a customer is significantly greater.

Alongside smart bidding, now is absolutely the time to start using broad match. Remember at the start of this video when broad match was the reason for a lot of waste? Both things can be true. Broad match wastes money without the right signals, but it allows you to scale and grow when you have them. Broad match lets Google understand the intent of the search rather than just the literal keywords. It matters even more as we move into an AI search world where people search in paragraphs, not keywords. Getting broad match right now is vital for your success in AI search.

After 90 days, clients who are happy can move to one of our growth retainer packages to continue scaling. If campaigns just need to keep ticking along, we have monitoring packages. And absolutely, some businesses should feel comfortable keeping an eye on things themselves, and we offer a free one hour handover call to make sure everyone is comfortable. The key is that we’ve transformed the campaign and it’s yours to keep. If the 90-day transformation sounds like it could be of interest, click the link in the description below to apply for your free find and fix audit, and we’ll get the ball rolling from there.