Google Ads that count the calls

Most small-business Google Ads accounts we are shown have spent for a year and cannot say what came back. Duffield Removals in Chester had bought 2,577 clicks in twelve months with no lead tracking at all. Voytech Tuning on Merseyside was buying about 1,240 clicks a month into a site that counted only 800 of them as visits, while every campaign lost 37 to 46 per cent of its available impressions to budget and a 363-word "universal negatives" list blocked the words buyers actually use: repair, fix, book. Neither account was badly built. Both were running blind.

So the first job is measurement, before a single ad is touched. Calls from the ads, taps on the number on the website, WhatsApp taps and quote-form sends go into Google Ads and GA4 as conversions, and they are checked against the real inbox and the call log, so a gap shows up as a tracking fault instead of a quiet month. Google's call reporting also shows the calls that were missed; at Duffield it was 22 of 99 in a year, which nobody had seen.

Then the shape. Campaigns and ad groups follow where your customers are, not where Google's defaults put them: Presence targeting so the ad shows to people in the area rather than anyone who has ever shown interest in it, the towns you serve as separate groups with their own budgets, and the daily budget set as your monthly cap divided by 31, never a rolling pause rule that stops the ads on the busiest day. Search terms are read in the first three days and every week after; a keyword with spend and no leads after about thirty clicks is lowered or paused, and the report says why.

Ad copy and landing pages say the same thing, including the price. We will not run a price in an ad that the website does not match, because the click is wasted the moment the page disagrees. Price assets, the business name and logo on the ads, image assets and the 20-second call threshold each have a rule and a timing; some need a verified account or a 60-day-old one before Google allows them. We set them up in the order Google permits and tell you which are waiting.

We run accounts for businesses in Wrexham, Chester, Deeside and Flintshire and on Merseyside, and the method does not change with the postcode. What changes is the map: Chester's searches pull in Ellesmere Port and the Wirral, a Deeside business gets half its searches as Chester searches, and Flintshire can be advertised to in Welsh. The town pages for Chester and for Deeside and Flintshire say what that looks like in practice.

Management is £120 a month, flat, never a percentage of spend, so there is no reason for us to want your budget higher than it should be. With local SEO and AI search optimisation it is £400 a month for all three: the ads bring the calls now, the SEO brings them without paying for every click, and the AI work makes sure the assistants name you when a customer asks instead of searching.