Is Google Ads worth it for a small business

What worth it should be measured on

The measure that matters is work in the door. Clicks and impressions tell you the ads are running. Enquiries and booked jobs tell you they are working.

A campaign can look healthy on clicks and produce nothing, which is why the reporting has to connect the spend to the enquiries it produced. Anything else is decoration.

When the maths works

Paid search suits businesses where a job carries enough value to cover the cost of finding it. A handful of good jobs can carry a month of spend, and the numbers improve further when the work leads to repeat business.

It also suits markets where people already search for what you sell. The demand exists before the ad does, and the ad simply puts the business in front of it at the moment of choosing.

When it burns money

Ads fail quietly when the landing page makes people hunt for the next step, when nobody answers the phone after hours, or when the account spends on searches that never turn into work.

They also fail when the business sells something people are not searching for yet. Paid search captures demand that already exists instead of creating demand from nothing.

What to fix before the first click

Sort the landing page first. It should repeat what the ad promised, load fast on a phone and make the next step obvious without scrolling. Ready buyers click once and decide fast, so the page has to carry them.

Then sort the follow-up. Calls get missed, forms sit until morning and the ads keep spending through both. The quickest improvement in most accounts is how fast somebody responds.

How to judge it early

Judge it on the enquiries it produced and what those jobs were worth. The dashboard is background information.

Keep a simple record of every enquiry the ads produced and what happened to it. That record answers the question of worth it faster than any report.