Most articles about Google Ads for small business are written by people selling Google Ads management. The numbers in them are either missing or belong to a client they can’t name. That’s not useful to a contractor in Clarkston trying to decide whether to put $300 into search advertising.
So here’s mine. One campaign, targeted at people searching for web design help in Oakland and Genesee Counties, running for the last 90 days. Real spend from my own bank account.
The raw numbers
| Metric | 90-day result |
|---|---|
| Total spend | $277.63 |
| Times my ad was shown | 4,419 |
| Clicks on the ad | 220 |
| Click-through rate | 4.98% |
| Average cost per click | $1.26 |
| Visits that actually landed on my site | 181 |
| Visits where someone engaged, not bounced | 36.5% |
| Conversion events | 19 |
| Cost per conversion event | $14.61 |
Source: my Google Ads account and Google Analytics 4, last 90 days.
Two things in that table deserve more than a glance.
A 4.98% click-through rate is genuinely good
Roughly one in twenty people who saw the ad clicked it. For local service searches that’s a healthy number, and it tells me the ad copy matched what people were actually looking for. If your click-through rate is under 2%, your ad is probably answering a different question than the one being asked.
220 clicks became 181 visits, and that gap is normal
I paid for 220 clicks. My analytics recorded 181 sessions. Nearly forty clicks vanished somewhere in between, which sounds like something is broken but usually isn’t. People tap an ad on their phone and hit back before the page finishes loading. Ad blockers and privacy settings stop the tracking script from firing. Somebody misclicks while scrolling.
Expect to lose 10–20% of paid clicks between the ad platform and your analytics. If yours is worse than that, then start looking for a real problem — a slow page, a broken tag, a redirect chain. It’s worth knowing the normal range so you don’t panic over something that isn’t wrong.
What “19 conversions” actually means — and doesn’t
This is where most ad reporting quietly misleads people, so I want to be precise. Those 19 conversions are not 19 new clients. They are 19 moments where someone did one of three things:
- Clicked the “book a call” button. Clicked it. Not attended a call, not booked one — clicked the button that opens the scheduler.
- Submitted the contact form. This one is a real lead landing in my inbox.
- Tapped the phone number on a mobile device.
Those are intent signals. They tell me the ad found someone with a real problem who wanted to talk to somebody about it. They are the honest leading indicator of whether a campaign is working. They are not revenue, and anyone who presents them to you as revenue is either sloppy or hoping you won’t ask.
The question to ask any agency running your ads
“When you say conversions, what specific action counts as one?” If the answer is a button click or a page view, that’s fine — it’s a useful signal. But you need to know, because a report showing “40 conversions” means something very different if all forty were people clicking a phone number and none of them stayed on the line.
Whether $1.26 a click is cheap depends entirely on your job value
For my business, $1.26 is a bargain. A website project is worth well over a thousand dollars, so a single client out of ninety days of advertising covers the spend several times over. But that math is specific to me, and copying it blindly is how local businesses lose money on ads.
Here’s the arithmetic that actually matters. Work out what one job is worth to you, estimate how many enquiries you need to win one job, and divide:
| Your average job | Enquiries per won job | What you can afford per enquiry |
|---|---|---|
| $150 service call | 4 | ~$37 |
| $800 repair | 4 | ~$200 |
| $6,000 roof | 6 | ~$1,000 |
Illustrative math, not my data — substitute your own numbers. This assumes you’re willing to spend your entire gross job value to acquire it, which you are not; treat these as ceilings, then target a fraction of them.
The point is that a $6,000 roofing job and a $150 service call are not in the same advertising business, even in the same town. High-ticket trades can tolerate expensive clicks. Low-ticket, high-volume work usually cannot, and those businesses are almost always better served by Google Business Profile and reviews than by paid search.
The one decision that made this campaign work
I did not send ad traffic to my homepage. I built a separate page that answers exactly one question — what it costs and what you get to have a website built in Michigan — and pointed every ad at that.
Over the same 90 days, that single page produced 19 conversion events. My homepage took more visits and produced 3. Same business, same window, same person writing both pages. I wrote about that gap in detail in why my landing page beat my homepage 6 to 1, because it’s the most transferable lesson in this whole experiment.
What I’m changing next
The click side of this campaign is working. The ad gets found, the copy earns the click, and the cost per click is sustainable. The weak spot is everything after the click — 36.5% engagement means roughly two thirds of the people I paid for looked at the page and left.
- Tighten the search terms. Some of what triggers my ad isn’t my market. Every irrelevant click is money gone.
- Keep testing the landing page. The gap between it and my homepage proves the page shape matters more than I assumed.
- Verify the tracking properly. I want the click-to-session gap explained rather than assumed, which is what finally pushed me to actually call the Google Ads rep whose emails I’d been ignoring.
If you’re deciding whether to try this
Ninety days and roughly $280 was enough to learn something real. That is a reasonable price for evidence about your own market, and it’s far better than guessing. But do it in this order: get your Google Business Profile sorted, make sure the page you’re sending people to answers one question well, confirm your tracking works, then turn on ads. Paid traffic pointed at a weak page is just a faster way to spend money.
I also ran Facebook ads over the same period, and the comparison surprised me — cheaper clicks, worse outcomes. That’s in Google Ads vs Facebook Ads for a local business, side by side with the numbers.
If you’d rather talk it through than read another article, book a 30-minute call. I’ll look at your market and tell you honestly whether paid search is the right next move or whether your money belongs somewhere else first. Sometimes the answer is that you’re not ready, and I’d rather say so.