If your dashboard says you’re winning but your bank account doesn’t, the problem isn’t your ads; it’s how they’re tracked. Fix the tracking, then scale.

Their dashboard looked incredible: 6,300 “leads” at $80 CPL - about $504,000 in monthly ad spend.

Except most of those “leads” weren’t real. They were phone-number clicks, not calls.

When we pulled the raw calls & forms, the actual leads were ~5,000, which means the real CPL was $100.80; 26% higher than the dashboard said.

Then we found where the money was disappearing: GDN placements + auto-applied settings. We killed the waste and kept the working campaigns. Same ~5,000 real leads, same revenue, about $200,000 less spent.

New CPL? Roughly $60.80. Same output, $200K back in their pocket.

→ Stefan Georgi on Grand Strategy. Why ‘align unlimited aspirations with limited means’ matters.

Example: a $5M DTC brand stalled by spreading budget across too many products and channels instead of mastering one.

Tree service takeaway: scale one channel properly before adding complexity.

Something that's pissing me off:

Google makes more money when you waste more money. So they've designed their default settings to benefit them, not you.

Search Partners? Turned on by default. Burns budget on garbage websites nobody visits.

Trying to get you to switch your Branded Search to smart bidding? It wastes your money because Google often overbids with smart bidding when applied to branded search campaigns.

Display expansion? Shows your tree removal ads next to cat videos on random blogs.

Some don't even know these settings exist and are turned on in their account. They just accept Google's defaults and wonder why their campaigns leak money like a busted hydraulic line.

This isn't some conspiracy theory. It's Google's business model. They want maximum clicks, maximum impressions, maximum spend. 

Stop trusting Google's recommendations. Stop accepting default settings. And for the love of oak trees, stop paying agencies who do both.

Your Google Ads account is probably robbing you blind right now, and the longer you wait to fix it, the more money disappears into Google's pockets instead of yours.

Want us to look at your marketing and show you how to get an extra 3-5 jobs per week?

Refundable if it's not worth 10x that. All you have to do is ask.

Written by Jacob Hastings
Head of Growth & Client Strategy at Growth Ring Media