Week one in three sentences

The starting line

Twelve months to 22 September 2026, with the faulty October 2025 data removed. These four numbers do not change again.

$34,653

Invested over the year

392

Real enquiries received

$88.40

Cost of each enquiry

$0

Value assigned to an enquiry

Fix one: adverts on other people's websites

Two campaigns were showing adverts on third-party sites rather than on Google. That traffic behaved nothing like real buyers.

What was happening

45% of the people shown these adverts clicked them. A strong advert on Google gets clicked five to ten percent of the time. A rate that high is not people making decisions.

What it cost

$2,831

Spent there over the year. In the last 90 days it had grown to 22% of all spend. Now switched off.

And what it explains

For ten days in October 2025, the account recorded enquiries that never happened.

873

Enquiries recorded in ten days, from $3,085 of spend. That is 69% of the entire year, in the second cheapest month.

128

Recorded on 15 October alone, from $88 of spend. Under 70 cents each, for projects worth millions.

Now corrected

A new measurement is connected directly to your contact form. It runs alongside the old one for three weeks so the two can be compared before we switch over.

Half the campaigns had no filter at all

A block list did exist, but it covered only three of the six live campaigns, and it was written in a way that catches one exact phrase rather than a whole family of searches.

Before

Fifteen blocked phrases, applied to three campaigns. The other three, which spent more than $13,900 between them, had nothing.

Now

90 blocked terms, written to catch every variation, applied to all six live campaigns.

Fix four: one campaign was told to overpay

You tell Google what an enquiry is worth paying for, and it bids accordingly. One campaign was authorised to pay SEVEN times more than it needed to.

Was authorised to pay

$342.75

Now set at

$90.00

One question we need answered

Did something change on the website in November 2025?

Three things happened at the same time that month: several pages stopped appearing in Google searches overnight, the monthly budget tripled, and the cost of each enquiry jumped from $39 to $109. If one event caused all three, it explains most of what we are seeing.

Things we noticed, for your web team

These sit outside what you have engaged us for. We are flagging them because they affect how well the advertising can work.

Pages that no longer exist

Several service pages, plus the About and Careers pages, return an error. They were appearing in Google searches until November 2025.

62 empty pages

Your website is submitting pages to Google that contain nothing at all, named after each of your services and sectors.

Two pages doing one job

What We Do and Our Services have almost identical content and compete with each other in search results.

What we need from you

Please expect this

Between weeks three and six, the numbers will look worse before they look better.

When the measurement is rebuilt, Google's bidding system starts learning again from scratch. This is expected and temporary. It is also why we will report on 90-day windows rather than month to month: at this volume, a single month is noise.