Free  ·  Paid advertising, taught by the auction

Your cost per click went up and nobody told you why.

You changed nothing. A competitor raised their bid, another one made their page faster, and your price went up while you slept. There is no alert for this. On the right is that auction, running. Scroll it and watch your position move.

See what your budget wastes → Start the free check
3lessons, free, no sign up
1calculator on your own numbers
0promises about positions
01 / 07

The highest bid does not win. That is the whole problem.

Four facts from Google's own documentation. Every one of them costs money when you do not know it, and none of them appear in the report you get on Monday.

4

things decide your position, not one: your bid, your ad quality, the thresholds, and the context of the search.

Google Ads Help, "About Ad Rank"
1–10

is the quality score range. It is a diagnostic, and it is built from expected click rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.

Google Ads Help, "About Quality Score"
Less

than your maximum bid is what you normally pay. Raising the bid is the most expensive way to fix a position.

Google Ads Help, "How the Google Ads auction works"
2

separate reasons you lose impressions: budget and rank. They need opposite fixes, and most accounts never look.

Google Ads Help, "Search impression share" metrics

Here is what that adds up to. You can lose position without touching anything, pay more for the same click, and see a report that says the campaign is healthy. It is healthy. It is just losing.

02 / 07

Five questions. Then we tell you where your money goes.

Nothing technical, nothing you need to look up. Answer five things about how your account is run and we tell you which leak is yours and what to do about it first.

The five question check 1 of 5

Five questions, about a minute. We ask for your email at the end because a person writes the answer, and they need somewhere to send it.

03 / 07

How much of your budget burns every month?

Move four sliders. The maths is below the result, so you can check it. Nothing is stored and you get the number without leaving anything.

$20,000

What you actually spend on ads, not the agency fee.

$4.00

Your account shows this. If you do not know it, that is finding number one.

3.0%

Out of a hundred clicks, how many become a lead or a sale.

25%

Wrong intent, wrong country, people researching. Your search terms report shows this.

Burns every month
$5,000
$60,000 a year

That is money spent on clicks from people who were never going to buy from you. It is not lost to a competitor. It is just gone.

How the number is built
Clicks you buy each month5,000
Of those, never going to buy1,250
Leads you actually get113
Cost per lead as it stands$178
Cost per lead without the waste$133

Clicks = budget ÷ cost per click. Wasted = clicks × the share that was never going to buy. Leads = the clicks that remain × your conversion rate.

Want us to find your real number? It costs nothing.

The slider is your guess. Your search terms report has the actual figure, and we read it for free. You get the list of what to exclude, in the order that saves the most.

04 / 07

Three lessons. Free. No sign up.

Read them in an hour. Each one ends with something you can change the same day.

Lesson 01
PPC management

You pay more this month for the same clicks. What Ad Rank is built from, why raising the bid is the most expensive fix, and which report tells you the truth.

Free
Lesson 02
Negative keywords

A quarter of your budget goes to searches you never chose. How to find them in ten minutes, what to exclude first, and the exclusions that cost you money.

Free
Lesson 03
Ad creative testing

One ad per group, running for two years. How many variations to run, how long before you can believe a winner, and why most declared winners are noise.

Free
05 / 07

One guide per question people actually ask.

Straight answers, including the ones that are bad news for the agency selling you something.

Guide
How much do Google Ads cost

There is no price list. What sets your price, and the two numbers that decide whether you can afford the channel at all.

Free
Guide
What is a good CTR for Google Ads

A high click rate on the wrong searches is a fast way to spend money. What the number means and when to ignore it.

Free
Guide
What is a good CPC for Google Ads

Your cost per click is good or bad only against what a customer is worth. Here is how to work that out.

Free
Guide
Can I bid on competitor brand keywords

You can bid on the term. You cannot put their name in the ad. What the policy says and what it costs you.

Free
Guide
Is adding too many keywords bad

Two hundred keywords in one ad group means no ad matches any of them well. What the count does to your costs.

Free
All
Every guide →

Six so far, more each week.
06 / 07

Two things that cost other people real money.

Both are public. We explain what each one means for your account.

eBay · 2013 · a controlled experiment

They switched their search ads off and sales barely moved

eBay ran a large controlled experiment on their own paid search, described in a paper by Blake, Nosko and Tadelis. When branded search ads were turned off in test markets, most of the traffic simply arrived through the free listing instead. The ads had been paid for clicks the company was going to get anyway.

What this means for you: before you defend your brand campaign, run a holdout in a few regions. Most people have never tested whether the ad is buying anything new.
Blake, Nosko and Tadelis, "Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness", Econometrica, 2015
Any account · the search terms report

The report that shows what you actually bought

Your keyword list is what you asked for. The search terms report is what you got. In accounts using broad match, those two lists can look almost unrelated, and every gap between them was paid for at your cost per click.

What this means for you: open it, sort by cost, read the top fifty. Most people find something to exclude in the first minute. That is the cheapest money you will save all quarter.
Google Ads Help, "Search terms report" · our own reading, offered as an argument rather than a statistic
Free consultation

Tell us what is wrong. We look for free.

Cost per lead climbing, budget gone by lunch, a campaign nobody can explain. Write what is happening and we reply with what to fix first and why. No cost, no call, no pitch. If the account is fine we tell you that too, and it happens.

One reply from a person
Usually within one working day
No call required
Blog

Longer pieces, with the workings attached

Each one shows where its numbers came from, including the ones we calculated ourselves.

The first pieces are being written. The lessons, the guides and the calculator already work.