Google Ads in the West Midlands: Stop Buying Shit Leads
A busy ad account can hide a very quiet sales pipeline. Clicks arrive. The report looks healthy. Your team spends Friday chasing people who want a job, a free answer or something you do not sell.
Then someone suggests increasing the budget. Bollocks to that. First, find out what you are buying.
For businesses running Google Ads in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire and the wider West Midlands, the useful question is simple: are we paying to reach people we can help, at a cost the business can afford?
This guide shows you how to check. Start with the enquiry, work back through the page and the ad, and then decide what deserves more money.
1. Define a good lead before buying another click
A lead is an enquiry. A qualified lead is an enquiry that fits your business. Write down what that means before judging the campaign.
For a commercial service, your checks might be the type of business, the work required, the area you can serve and whether there is a realistic buying plan. A homeowner asking for a one-off repair is the wrong lead for a firm that only sells commercial maintenance contracts.
Use a simple shared record with these fields:
Date and source of the enquiry.
Service requested and location.
Qualified, unsuitable or still unknown.
Reason for rejection, where relevant.
Meeting booked, quote sent, sale won or sale lost.
Keep “unknown” separate from “bad”. An unanswered call tells you very little. Review rejected leads with the person who handles them. “Poor quality” is a complaint; “eight enquiries wanted domestic work” is something you can fix.
2. Read the searches people actually made
Your keyword list is only part of the story. Google Ads has a search terms report showing searches that triggered ads and meet its reporting rules. It does not reveal every individual search.
Look for patterns: recruitment, training, DIY help, unrelated services and places you cannot cover. Add negative keywords where the meaning is clearly wrong. These tell Google which searches to avoid; their match rules need checking too.
Hypothetical example: a Birmingham IT support company keeps getting jobseekers. Searches containing “IT support jobs” deserve attention. Blocking every search containing “support”, however, would damage the very campaign it needs.
Do not reject a useful search after one click and no sale. Look at spend, enquiry quality and the time people normally take to buy. Fix obvious mismatches quickly; give uncertain patterns enough evidence.
3. Check what “local” means in your location settings
A campaign targeting the West Midlands may also reach people outside the region who show interest in it. Google’s default “Presence or Interest” option allows this. Its “Presence” option focuses on people likely to be in, or regularly in, the selected area. Location signals are imperfect.
Choose the setting around the buyer. A local emergency repair service may want presence. A Stratford-upon-Avon venue may want enquiries from people planning an event from elsewhere. A business selling across the UK should not cut off good national demand just to make a report look local. Google explains both location options here.
Compare the locations of actual enquiries with the work you can deliver. If local and national customers need different offers, separate those campaigns so you can judge their costs and results clearly.
4. Make the landing page finish the ad’s promise
A landing page is the page people reach after clicking. If the ad promises a commercial security survey in Coventry, the page should explain that service, where it is available and what happens next.
Dropping everyone onto a vague homepage forces them to start again. “Innovative solutions for ambitious organisations” tells a buyer almost nothing.
Build the page around five questions:
Is this the service I searched for?
Is it suitable for a business like mine?
Can you deliver it where I need it?
What evidence supports your claims?
What happens when I enquire?
Use relevant work, real reviews and honest scope. Give a clear next step, such as “Request a survey”, with a working form and a visible phone option. Test it on a phone. Our guide to websites that lose enquiries covers the checks in detail.
5. Stop teaching Google to chase meaningless actions
A page view is useful information. It does not mean someone has become a lead. Neither does scrolling, starting a form or pressing a button that fails to submit.
For a lead campaign, start by measuring successfully saved enquiries and meaningful calls. Keep a separate record of which become qualified opportunities and customers.
Check the goals used by each Google Ads campaign. Primary conversion actions can guide bidding when their goal is selected. Secondary actions normally support observation, although actions included in a custom goal can still guide bidding. Google’s conversion guidance explains the distinction.
A dashboard full of “conversions” is worthless if the system counts someone arriving on the website as a sales result. Test the whole journey, including failed submissions, before trusting it.
6. Work out what you can afford to pay
Cheap leads can be expensive customers. Track both cost per qualified enquiry and cost per new customer.
Illustration, not a forecast: suppose you set a maximum acquisition cost of £300 per customer. If one in five qualified enquiries becomes a customer, your allowance is £60 per qualified enquiry: £300 × 20%.
That allowance must cover the acquisition costs included in your plan. If it includes agency fees, creative work and ad spend, do not spend the whole £60 on clicks and quietly ignore the rest.
Choose the £300 limit using your own margins, delivery costs and cash position. Do not build the budget around repeat purchases you merely hope will happen.
Your next 30 minutes
Read your last ten enquiries and label their quality.
Check the searches and locations behind wasted spend.
Submit your own form from a phone.
Check which actions each campaign counts as conversions.
Set a spending limit, one change to test and a review date.
If the form is broken, pause traffic to that page while it is fixed. If the enquiries are suitable but sales are poor, inspect the offer and follow-up before blaming the ads. Change one major thing at a time so the result teaches you something.
Questions worth asking before hiring an ads agency
How much should a West Midlands business spend on Google Ads?
There is no useful universal figure. Start with the value and margin of a customer, your buying cycle, likely search demand and a test budget you can afford. Ask what evidence will trigger a pause, a change or an increase.
Should we use Google Search or social ads?
Search can reach people expressing a need. Social ads can introduce an offer to people who were doing something else. Choose around how your customers buy, then measure qualified enquiries and sales. Copying the same ad and page into both channels is a weak starting point.
Make the next pound work harder
Llumor helps businesses across Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, the West Midlands and the UK connect paid ads, search and landing pages with a clear follow-up plan.
Book a call with Llumor to discuss where your enquiries are getting lost. Bring the awkward numbers. Those are usually the useful ones.
