Two accounts, one fencing franchise, and a tracking setup that had been quietly lying about performance for months.
This fencing franchise owner runs two Google Ads accounts covering different parts of the mid-Atlantic — Fairfax and Montgomery in one, Baltimore in the other. The accounts had been running since 2023. Structure existed. Conversions were being tracked. On paper, a CPA of $136 looked manageable.
The problem was that $136 wasn't the real number. A quarter of all reported conversions were "click to call" — someone tapping a phone number on a mobile screen, triggering a conversion event before a single word had been spoken. No call connected. No enquiry made. Just a finger on glass, counted the same as a completed form submission or a 30-second phone call.
Strip those out, and the true CPA in the Fairfax account was $182. The account had been optimising toward a number that didn't exist.
Underneath that: broad match keywords absorbing nearly half the non-brand budget at a CPA of $275, while the searches most likely to convert were being underbid and missing impression share. A campaign spending over $150,000 a year, with no conversion values, no offline tracking, and ads running unchanged since the account launched.
They came in for an audit. What we found was a clear picture of where the money was going — and why most of it shouldn't have been going there.
"The headline finding here wasn't one dramatic problem — it was several quiet ones that had been compounding since the accounts launched. A tracking setup that made performance look better than it was."
The audit went directly to the agency managing Google Ads across all franchise locations. A clear, evidenced brief — here are the seven issues, here's the data behind each one, here's the fix order — that gave the owner something concrete to hand over rather than a vague instruction to "do better." One audit, applied across multiple accounts.
The headline finding here wasn't one dramatic problem — it was several quiet ones that had been compounding since the accounts launched. A tracking setup that made performance look better than it was. A match type strategy that prioritised volume over intent. Bids that spent more where the account should have spent less, and less where it should have spent more. None of it was obvious from the top-line numbers. That's exactly what an audit is for.
20 minutes. Enough to spot the major issues, understand what you need, and give you a realistic idea of what we'd do and what it would cost.
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