Find out why your Google Ads are not paying back.
Most wasted ad budget is a handful of fixable problems. Describe the account and we’ll find which one you have.
Free to use. Ask as much as you like.
Before I suggest anything — what would a good month look like, and what can you pay for a lead?
That’s workable. Here’s how:
- Understand your business, customers and objectivesWhat you sell, who buys, and where you want to get to
- Create your growth strategyWhere the £2.5k goes, and in what order
- Fix what’s holding you backThe changes you can make yourself
- Connect you with a partnerOnly if you need a specialist
AI built on real human expertise
askBizly applies the judgement of people who have grown businesses, led marketing teams and hired agencies — more than twenty years of it. Their criteria shape what it asks and how it answers.
A growth plan built for your business
Not a template. It asks what you sell, where you want to get to and what you have to spend, then sets out what to do, in what order, and what it should cost.
Partners aligned to your objectives
If you want help executing, askBizly briefs partners against the plan you just built — and says why each one fits. It is free to you; partners pay only when an introduction becomes work.
Start here
What’s going wrong with your paid search?
Pick the Google Ads problem that sounds like yours.
Where Google Ads budget actually gets wasted
Google Ads punishes inattention faster than any other channel, because the money leaves whether or not the campaign is set up sensibly. The waste is rarely exotic. It is the same four or five faults in account after account.
The biggest is buying searches that were never going to buy. An account on broad match with no negative keyword list will happily pay for people researching salaries, looking for free alternatives, or shopping in another country. Tightening that alone often cuts a third of spend with no loss of enquiries.
The second is sending everyone to the homepage. If somebody searches for a specific service and lands on a page about your whole company, they have to work out where to go next, and most will not. Matching the page to the search is usually a bigger lever than anything inside the ad account.
The third is not knowing what a lead costs. Without conversion tracking you cannot tell a campaign that is working from one that is burning money, so you end up judging by clicks. askBizly will work through your account with you and tell you which of these is costing you most.
How it works
Work out why your Google Ads are not paying back.
Describe the spend, clicks and enquiries. askBizly separates wasted search terms from landing-page and tracking problems, then tells you what to do next.
Understand your business and your Google Ads goals
Your goals for Google Ads, what you’re doing now and what you’ve got to work with — in your own words, one question at a time.
Work out what’s holding your Google Ads back
What you tell it — and any proposal, report or figures you share — is assessed against clear Google Ads criteria, with what’s known kept apart from what’s assumed.
Create your Google Ads strategy
An action plan, a budget, a review or a brief for Google Ads — with its evidence, assumptions and limits shown.
Help you execute
Do it yourself, go back to your supplier with better questions, or look at Google Ads partners — you decide.
Fix the problem
Four ways askBizly can help with Google Ads and PPC
Get a plan for the account, a realistic PPC budget, a review of your agency or proposal, or a brief for the right paid search partner.
Diagnosis
Most wasted Google Ads spend is the same four faults.
Broad match with no negatives, the homepage as a landing page, missing conversion tracking, and a click that costs more than a lead is worth. askBizly works out which one you have.
- Search terms, page and tracking kept apart
- Says whether the budget can ever work
- What to change this week, not a 30-page audit
Budget
Know what PPC management and media should cost.
askBizly separates ad spend from the management fee, shows what a UK PPC retainer usually looks like, and tests whether your monthly budget can buy enough clicks to learn anything.
- Media and management kept apart
- Minimum viable monthly spend for your market
- Percentage fees vs flat retainers explained
Review
Check a PPC agency, proposal or the account you already pay for.
Share the scope, fee or results. askBizly looks at whether you have account access, whether reporting ties to enquiries, and whether the fee matches the work.
- Incentive problems in percentage pricing flagged
- Reporting judged against cost per enquiry
- Questions to put before you renew
Partners
A clear PPC brief, then only agencies who fit.
If you need someone to run the account, askBizly turns your spend, market and goals into a brief and looks for PPC partners whose records fit. Nobody is contacted until you say so.
- You see the brief before anyone does
- You approve the brief first
- No obligation to hire
Google Ads and PPC questions people ask first
The two common models are a percentage of ad spend, usually 10% to 20%, or a flat monthly retainer, typically £500 to £2,000 for a small to mid-sized account. Percentage pricing is simple but gives the agency an incentive to increase your spend; flat fees avoid that but can be poor value on very small accounts. Either is fine if you have direct access to the account and see honest reporting on cost per enquiry.
As a rough floor, you need enough monthly spend to buy around 300 to 500 clicks, because below that you cannot gather enough data to optimise and you are effectively guessing. In cheap markets that might be £400 a month; in competitive areas like legal, finance or trades in cities, clicks can run £8 to £20 and the floor is several thousand. Tell askBizly what your clicks cost now and it will work out the floor with you before you commit.
In most accounts it is one of four things: broad match keywords bringing in searches with no buying intent, missing negative keywords letting irrelevant traffic through, a landing page that does not clearly answer the search it was matched to, or conversion tracking that is not recording enquiries that are actually happening. The fourth is worth ruling out first, because it is free to check and it changes how you read everything else.
Manage it yourself if the account is small, you have a few hours a week, and you are willing to learn Search Console-level basics plus negatives and conversion tracking. Hire an agency when the spend is high enough that a 10% improvement pays their fee, or when you do not have the hours. A useful threshold is around £2,000 a month in ad spend — below that, a competent owner often beats a cheap agency that only logs in once a week.
Compare the fee to the work, not to a percentage of spend. A £1,000 retainer on a £3,000 account that is being actively managed can be fair; 20% of a £20,000 spend with no landing-page work and a monthly PDF is not. You should have owner access to the Google Ads account, see search-term reports, and be able to explain last month’s changes in a sentence. If you cannot, you are paying for a login, not management.
PPC means you pay when someone clicks. On Google Ads you bid on searches that match what you sell, write an ad, and send the click to a page that should turn it into an enquiry. It works when the search has buying intent and the page answers that search. It fails when you buy research queries, send everyone to the homepage, or cannot see which clicks became leads. askBizly will walk through your market and tell you whether paid search is even the right channel.
Yes. The advice is free for business owners and always will be. askBizly is paid by the partners it introduces, and only when you choose to be introduced. Nothing is sent to anyone and nobody contacts you until you say so.
Stop guessing. Start growing.
Describe the spend and the results. Free, with no PPC agency contacting you unless you ask.