A (Failing) $14,000 Monthly Ad Budget
Last year, a residential HVAC company on the Treasure Coast called us. They’d been running Google Ads for over a year, and on the surface, everything seemed fine. Their previous agency was sending them monthly reports that showed plenty of clicks, a decent click-through rate, and growing impressions. So naturally, the owner assumed things were working.
But something didn’t sit right. His phone was ringing, sure. However, he couldn’t tell which calls came from Google Ads and which came from the yard sign his guys put out after every install. He was spending $14,000 a month between ad spend and management fees, and when he asked his agency “how many customers did we actually get from Google Ads this month?” they couldn’t give him a straight answer.
That’s when he reached out to us. So we did an audit. And here’s what we found.
First, his campaigns were running broad match keywords with no negative keyword list. As a result, his ads for “AC repair near me” were also showing up for searches like “AC repair technician salary,” “how to repair AC yourself,” and “AC repair training programs.” In other words, clicks from people who would never, ever become customers. And every one of those clicks cost him between $15 and $45.
On top of that, all of his ad traffic was going to his homepage. Not a dedicated landing page for AC repair. Not a page for new installations. Just the homepage. Which had a phone number buried in the footer, a generic contact form below three paragraphs about the company’s history, and zero urgency to call right now.
But the worst part? No call tracking.
Not a single tracking number. Because of that, the agency had no way to know how many phone calls the ads were generating, let alone which keywords were driving those calls. They were reporting on clicks and impressions simply because that’s all they could measure. Meanwhile, the actual outcome (new customers) was completely invisible to them.
So we rebuilt everything. We restructured his campaigns around tight, intent-driven keyword groups. Then we built dedicated landing pages for each service line. After that, we installed CallRail so every call was tracked back to the specific keyword and ad that generated it. And finally, we added a negative keyword list with over 400 terms on day one.
Within 90 days, his cost per acquisition dropped from somewhere north of $300 (we could only estimate before, since nothing was tracked) to $127. In fact, his ad spend actually went up to $18,000 a month because the campaigns were profitable enough to scale. His return on ad spend went from somewhere around break-even to 3.4x. That’s real money. Not clicks. Not impressions. Customers.
And that’s the difference between Google Ads management and actually managing Google Ads.
Why Most Google Ads Accounts Are Bleeding Money
We’ve audited dozens of Google Ads accounts over the past few years, and the problems are almost always the same. To be clear, it’s not that Google Ads doesn’t work. The platform is incredibly powerful when it’s set up correctly. The real issue is that most accounts aren’t set up correctly, and the people managing them either don’t know the difference or don’t have the incentive to fix it.
Here’s what we find in nearly every audit:
Broad match keywords running wild.
Broad match can certainly be useful in the right hands, but most accounts use it as a default without understanding what it does. For example, your ad for “personal injury lawyer Fort Lauderdale” might be showing up when someone searches “personal injury lawyer salary” or “how to become a personal injury lawyer.” Those clicks aren’t free. In legal markets especially, they can run $100 to $300 each.
No negative keyword strategy.
This is the direct counterpart to the broad match problem. Without a robust negative keyword list, your campaigns inevitably attract irrelevant searches that drain your budget. To put it in perspective, we typically add 200 to 500 negative keywords in the first week of managing an account. That step alone can cut wasted spend by 20 to 40 percent.
Traffic going to the homepage.
Your homepage is designed to explain your business to everyone. A Google Ads landing page, on the other hand, needs to do one thing: convert the specific person who clicked on your specific ad. Someone who searched “emergency AC repair” needs to land on a page about emergency AC repair with a phone number at the top and a clear reason to call now. Not a page about your company’s founding story.
No call tracking.
This is the one that kills us. If your business generates leads by phone (and if you’re in professional services, home services, legal, or healthcare, it absolutely does), and you’re not tracking which calls came from which keywords, then you are making every budget decision based on incomplete data. We wrote an entire breakdown on why call tracking matters and which platforms to use. Bottom line: it’s not optional infrastructure. It’s the foundation of honest marketing measurement.
Platform reporting taken at face value.
Google Ads naturally has an incentive to take credit for conversions. Its attribution models are specifically designed to make the platform look good. As a consequence, if you’re making budget decisions based solely on what Google tells you, you’re almost certainly overestimating performance on some campaigns and underestimating it on others. That’s exactly why we cross-reference platform data with call tracking data, CRM records, and actual revenue to get the real picture.
What Our Google Ads Management Actually Looks Like
We don’t believe in “set it and forget it” Google Ads management. The businesses we work with are spending real money (usually $3,000 to $50,000 per month in ad spend), and because of that, they need someone in the account regularly, making decisions based on data, and connecting what’s happening in the ad platform to what’s happening in the business.
Here’s what the engagement actually includes:
Campaign Architecture
We start by rebuilding your campaign structure from the ground up. That means tightly themed ad groups organized around intent, not just topic. It also means proper keyword match types selected based on search volume, competition, and conversion data. From there, we build a negative keyword list that gets updated weekly as we review search terms reports. And we configure campaign settings to match your actual business goals, not Google’s default recommendations (which, for the record, are designed to get you to spend more).
Dedicated Landing Pages
Next, every campaign gets a purpose-built landing page designed around a single conversion action. If you’re an HVAC company, for instance, your AC repair campaign gets an AC repair landing page. Your new installation campaign gets an installation landing page. Your emergency service campaign gets an emergency service landing page. Each one has a clear headline that matches the ad copy, a strong call to action above the fold, a phone number that’s impossible to miss, and trust signals like reviews and certifications.
This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s actually the single highest-leverage change you can make to an underperforming Google Ads account. We regularly see conversion rates double when traffic is moved from a homepage to a properly built landing page.
Call Tracking and Attribution
Alongside that, we implement call tracking so every phone call from your Google Ads is tracked, recorded, and tied back to the specific campaign, ad group, and keyword that generated it. This is where the real insights live. When we sit down for your monthly review, we’re not showing you clicks. Instead, we’re showing you which keywords are producing signed customers and which ones are just burning through your budget.
For businesses where the phone call is the primary conversion event (law firms, home services, medical practices, B2B companies), this data fundamentally changes how you allocate your ad spend.
Conversion Tracking Across the Funnel
Of course, phone calls aren’t the only conversion event. We also track form submissions, chat interactions, and any other action that represents a real lead. More importantly, we make sure the conversion data is feeding back into Google Ads correctly so the platform’s smart bidding algorithms are optimizing toward the right outcomes. Garbage in, garbage out. If your conversion tracking is broken or incomplete, even Google’s best algorithms can’t save your campaigns.
Weekly Optimization
We’re in your account every week. Not once a month. Not when you ask. Every single week. That means we’re adjusting bids, testing new ad copy, pausing underperformers, scaling what’s working, reviewing search terms for new negative keyword opportunities, and monitoring quality scores. Google Ads is simply not a “launch it and check on it next month” channel. The accounts that perform best are always the ones that get consistent, informed attention.
Reporting You Can Actually Understand
Finally, you’ll get a monthly report that tells you what you spent, what you got, and what we’re doing next. We won’t waste your time or confuse you with jargon and walls of charts that look impressive but don’t answer the question “is this making me money?” We focus exclusively on the metrics that matter to your business: cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, conversion rate, and cost per qualified lead. If a metric doesn’t connect to revenue, we don’t waste your time with it.
Who This Is For
Google Ads management from Foxtown works best for businesses that:
Are spending $3,000 or more per month on Google Ads and can’t clearly connect that spend to revenue. We need enough budget to work with to make meaningful optimizations. Below $3,000, the data comes in too slowly and the math on professional management becomes harder to justify.
Have tried managing ads in-house or with a freelancer and aren’t getting results. This is actually a common starting point for our clients. Typically, someone on the team set up the account, ran it for a while, and it sort of works but nobody has the time or expertise to really optimize it.
Operate in competitive, high-CPC markets like legal, home services, financial services, healthcare, or B2B. When clicks cost $20 to $200 each, every wasted click is expensive. Professional management pays for itself fastest in markets where the cost of getting it wrong is highest.
Need their Google Ads to work alongside their SEO, content, and overall marketing strategy. We don’t run ads in a vacuum. As a fractional CMO firm, we see how paid search fits into your full go-to-market picture.
If you’re spending less than $3,000 per month, we can still help. But we’ll be upfront with you about whether professional management makes sense at that budget or if your money is better spent somewhere else first.
What About Google’s LSAs?
Google Local Service Ads are a separate animal from traditional Google Ads. Unlike standard search campaigns, LSAs sit at the very top of the search results and charge per lead instead of per click, which obviously changes the economics and the management approach entirely.
For businesses that qualify (home services, legal, financial services, and a growing list of other categories), LSAs can be an excellent complement to your Google Ads campaigns. We help clients get set up, verified, and optimized on LSAs, and we manage the lead quality to make sure you’re disputing bad leads and getting the most out of your budget.
If LSAs make sense for your business, we’ll tell you. And if they don’t, we’ll tell you that too.
We’re Not a PPC Shop. That’s Actually the Point.
Most Google Ads agencies are exactly that: agencies that run Google Ads. Their approach is basically to optimize your account, send you a report, and that’s where their job ends. They don’t know what happens after someone clicks your ad, if your intake team is answering the phone fast enough, or if your landing page copy matches how your actual customers talk about their problems. And they certainly don’t know if the lead your Google Ads generated last Tuesday turned into a $50,000 customer or a tire-kicker who never called back.
We’re different. We’re a fractional CMO firm that happens to be very good at Google Ads. What that means in practice is that when we manage your campaigns, we’re also looking at your landing page experience, your intake process, your sales follow-up speed, your call tracking setup, and your overall attribution system. Because even a perfectly optimized Google Ads campaign that sends traffic to a bad website with a slow intake team is still going to underperform.
Context matters. The question isn’t just “are the ads working?” It’s “are the ads working together with everything else to produce revenue?” That’s the question we’re built to answer.
We also don’t lock you into long-term contracts. Instead, we work month to month. If we’re not delivering value, you can walk. We earn your business every month. That’s how it should be.
The Metrics We Actually Care About
We don’t optimize for impressions, and we definitely don’t celebrate click-through rates in isolation. The metrics we track and report on are the ones that connect directly to your business:
Cost per acquisition. What does it actually cost you to get a new customer through Google Ads? Not a lead. Not a click. A customer.
Return on ad spend. For every dollar you put into Google Ads, how many dollars come back? Ideally, we want this number to be high enough that you’re asking us to spend more, not less.
Conversion rate. What percentage of people who click your ad actually become a lead? This tells us whether the landing page and the offer are doing their job.
Cost per qualified lead. Qualified leads are the leads your team actually wants to talk to. The distinction between “total leads” and “qualified leads” is precisely where most reporting falls apart, and where most ad spend gets wasted.
Speed to lead. This one is worth noting because it directly impacts your ROI even though it isn’t technically a Google Ads metric. If someone clicks your ad, fills out a form, and doesn’t hear from you for three hours, your conversion rate is going to suffer no matter how good the ads are.
Let’s Look at Your Google Ads Account
Book a free consultation and we’ll take a look at your current Google Ads setup. We’ll tell you what’s working, what’s wasting money, and whether professional management makes sense for your business.
If you’re already working with an agency and just want a second opinion, that’s perfectly fine too. We’re happy to audit what they’re doing and give you an honest assessment. And if we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you that.
