Clicks come in.
Enquiries don’t.
Google’s invoice arrives on time.
So the account gets optimised.
New bids, new ads, new search terms.
First the agency changes. Then the tool.
Every report shows what has improved.
The enquiries stay where they were.
It’s rarely the account.
An account does what it is told.
Nobody told it what to sell.
Google Ads is rarely the problem.
It is the first place where it shows.
Five decisions come before every campaign.
What gets sold.
To whom.
What a customer may cost.
What counts as a result.
When to stop.
If one is missing, the algorithm fills the gap.
It bids on what clicks cheaply.
It counts what can be counted.
It sells the offer that moves most easily. Rarely the one that is meant to grow.
One account was optimised for years and brought in less every year.
Agency, team and service providers had all tweaked it.
The fault sat in the basic assumption, beneath all the optimising.
Everyone had optimised. Nobody had checked the assumption.
Whoever doesn’t decide lets Google decide.
The bill stays with the business.