How to tell if your Google Ads are actually working

A lot of businesses have been running Google Ads for months — sometimes years — without a clear answer to the most basic question: is this actually making money? Agencies send reports full of impressions, clicks, and CTR, which sound impressive but tell you nothing about whether the campaigns are generating real business.

Here's how to cut through the noise and understand what your campaigns are actually doing.

Step 1: Do you have conversion tracking?

This is the non-negotiable starting point. If your Google Ads account isn't tracking conversions — calls, form submissions, purchases, or bookings — you are flying completely blind. You can see that people clicked your ad. You have no idea what they did after that.

Conversion tracking connects the click to the action. It tells you which campaigns, ad groups, and keywords are generating leads or sales, and which are just burning budget. Without it, you can't optimise anything meaningfully.

Step 2: Look at cost per conversion, not cost per click

Cost per click (CPC) tells you how much you paid for each visitor. Cost per conversion tells you how much you paid for each lead or sale. These are completely different numbers and only one of them matters for your business.

A campaign with a €0.50 CPC that generates zero conversions is worthless. A campaign with a €4.00 CPC that generates a €2,000 sale is excellent. Once you know your cost per conversion, you can compare it against your average order value or lifetime customer value and decide whether the campaigns are profitable.

Step 3: Read the search terms report

This is where most budget gets quietly wasted. Your ads don't only show for the exact keywords you bid on — they can show for a wide range of related searches, depending on your match type settings. The search terms report shows you the actual searches that triggered your ads.

Open the report and look at what you find. You'll almost always see searches that are completely irrelevant to your business — things you'd never want to pay for. Every irrelevant click costs you money. Adding these as negative keywords stops them from triggering your ads in future.

Reviewing the search terms report should happen at least monthly. An account that has never had this done has almost certainly been wasting a meaningful portion of its budget from day one.

Step 4: Check whether Google is spending your budget on what you chose

Google Ads has become increasingly automated over the years. Smart campaigns, broad match keywords, and automated bidding strategies can all result in your budget being spent very differently from what you intended. This isn't always bad — automated bidding can work well — but it requires monitoring.

If you're running manual campaigns, check your impression share to see whether your budget is being limited. If you're using automated strategies, check the campaign recommendations with some scepticism — many of them benefit Google's revenue more than yours.

Step 5: Ask the right questions of your agency

If someone else manages your Google Ads, these are the questions worth asking:

• What was our cost per conversion last month?
• Have you reviewed the search terms report recently, and what negative keywords have been added?
• Can I have admin access to the account?
• What have you tested or changed in the last 30 days?

If the answers are vague, or if you don't have access to your own account, those are both red flags.

The honest summary

Google Ads can work exceptionally well for Irish businesses. They can also be an expensive way to generate a lot of clicks and no customers. The difference is usually conversion tracking, negative keywords, and someone paying genuine attention to the account rather than leaving it to run.

The metrics that matter are cost per conversion and return on ad spend. Everything else is context, not proof.

If you'd like an independent view of your campaigns, get in touch. I'll tell you honestly what I find.