Paid search / AMEY & CO
Google Ads: focus on qualified enquiries, not just more clicks.
A practical way to connect search intent, landing pages and measurement before judging whether your advertising is working.
Amey & Co · 2 min read ·
Define an enquiry worth paying for
A form completion is only the start of the assessment. Agree what makes an enquiry useful: a relevant requirement, an appropriate location, a realistic timeframe and a project the business can serve. The definition should be shared by the people running campaigns and the people responding to leads.
Keep a simple record of what happens after contact. Which enquiries become conversations, proposals and customers? Without that feedback, advertising can appear successful while repeatedly attracting work that is unsuitable or unprofitable. More volume is valuable only when the business can turn it into worthwhile relationships.
Match the promise to the destination
A specific search deserves a specific answer. If the advert is about one service, take the visitor to a page that explains that service, shows relevant evidence and makes the next step clear. A broad homepage may leave them to reconstruct the connection themselves.
Read the advert and landing page together. The offer, terminology and visual cues should feel continuous. Explain who the service is for, what you contribute and what information would help start a conversation. Remove unnecessary fields while retaining the details needed to respond properly.
Inspect what the campaign is actually attracting
Review available search-term information and the quality of the resulting visits. Look for irrelevant intent, location mismatches and ambiguous language. A phrase that sounds commercially useful in isolation can attract a very different audience in practice.
For an ecommerce campaign, make the same connection between query, product and stock. Pucci Gang provides an example of our Google Ads project focus around product discovery. We do not publish an uplift figure for that project; the useful discussion is the relevance of the traffic and the journey it enters.
Give measurement a reliable foundation
Check that the primary conversion represents a meaningful action and is not counted twice. Separate purchases and qualified enquiries from softer events such as page views. Test the process end to end rather than assuming that a tag firing means the whole measurement setup is correct.
Google describes enhanced conversions as supplementing existing conversion measurement with hashed first-party data. Whether it suits a particular setup depends on the integration and data practices. It should be considered as part of a deliberate measurement plan, rather than treated as a substitute for reliable base tracking.
Make budget decisions with commercial feedback
Compare cost per qualified enquiry and eventual customer acquisition cost alongside platform reports. Allow for the time between an initial click and a sale. A campaign with a longer buying cycle can look weak if assessed only against this week’s completed deals.
Bring campaign findings and sales feedback into the same review. Decide whether the next change belongs in targeting, creative, the landing page or the response process. That keeps paid search connected to business growth instead of becoming a separate exercise in generating activity.