Getting Started with Google Ads
Work out the most you can pay for a customer, a lead and a click from your own margin, set up Google Ads whose numbers you have tested by hand, and judge every pause, budget step and test by a rule you wrote before launch.
What’s Inside
- The Allowable Cost Ladder: from contribution to the most you can pay per customer, per lead, per click, and your budget ceiling
- The spreadsheet (allowable-cost-ladder.xlsx): Ladder, Budget, Stage Scorecard and Marginal tabs with live formulas
- Budget derived, not guessed: the ladder run backwards at 3 click prices, and how Google paces a daily budget
- The 3 signal checks and a 10-row Acceptance Test for every conversion
- The Stage Scorecard: lead, qualified, booked, attended, paid and cash, by lead week
- 4 decision rules: pause a keyword, raise the budget on marginal cost, believe a test, spend the next dollar
- Local Services Ads run as a sales channel, a 3-bucket keyword worksheet, responsive search ad structures, a landing page checklist
- A dated 30-day setup, monthly scorecard, 30 and 90-day look-backs
- 18 worksheets, a 24-week tracker and 3 setup guides
The Problem
Most owners cannot say what they can afford to pay for a click. So they cannot tell whether a $6 click is cheap or ruinous, and they set a budget by how it feels. Then Google reports a return figure that is often built from a value somebody typed once, and nothing in the account says so.
Your Google Ads are not failing because Google does not work. You never worked out what a click is worth to you, so nothing told you whether you were winning.
The 5-Layer Google Ads Stack
5 layers, built bottom up, each judged against the Allowable Cost Ladder you build from your own margin.
- Layer 1: ACCOUNT. Owned by you, billing and links set, Search partners off for the first 90 days.
- Layer 2: CAMPAIGN. Local Services Ads run as a sales channel, then Search; Performance Max and AI Max only with data. Budget from the ladder.
- Layer 3: AD GROUP. Keywords grouped by buying intent, phrase and exact only, negatives from day one, the search terms report weekly.
- Layer 4: ADS. Responsive search ads that sell the next step, the offer as the lever, and a page that keeps the ad's promise.
- Layer 5: CONVERSIONS. The 3 traps that make the numbers lie, and a 10-row Acceptance Test before a dollar goes out.
What's In The Book
- Part 1: The 20-minute quick win: when did revenue last fire, and guess, count, compare (the sample chapter)
- Part 2: The 4 ways budget leaks, and ad problem or sales problem
- Part 3: The Allowable Cost Ladder
- Parts 4 to 9: The 5-Layer Stack: account, campaign and budget, ad groups, ads, conversions and the Acceptance Test
- Part 10: After the lead: the Stage Scorecard, cohorts and maturity, why Google and your records disagree
- Parts 11 to 13: The numbers in plain words, the 30-day setup, the 4 decision rules and the Test Card
- Parts 14 to 20: 3 labelled composites (one goes wrong), metrics, mistakes, troubleshooting, look-backs, a dated appendix
From Part 1
Open Google Ads. Go to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. Find the conversion action that fires when money arrives, and check the date it last fired.
If it last fired weeks ago, or never, every return figure in your account is fiction. Google will still show you a number. It is built from whatever value somebody typed into the setup, multiplied by the number of form fills. That is arithmetic performed on a guess.
Then write 2 guesses on paper: what a lead from Google cost you last month, and what a paying customer cost. Then count both from your own records. The gap between what you believed and what you counted is your baseline.
Questions
Does it tell me what a good cost per click is? No. It shows you how to work out the most you can pay from your margin and your sales stages. A benchmark you hit while losing money is worse than none.
How much do I need to spend? The book does not set a starting budget. Your ladder gives you a ceiling from what you can deliver and what a customer is worth, and the budget sheet shows what that means at low, base and high click prices.
Is it current? Platform steps are dated October 2026 and checked against Google's help pages: responsive search ads, the Presence location setting, daily budget pacing, the Local Services Ads move into Google Ads, AI Max for Search, enhanced conversions for leads.
Are there case studies? No client results. The examples are labelled hypothetical composites with round numbers, and one of them goes wrong on purpose.
Who This Is For
The owner of a local service business (a flooring installer, a plumber, a roofer, a clinic, a trade) who has never run Google Ads, or has run them and cannot say what a customer from Google costs.
Read it in your library.
This is included with The Standard, along with every other guide in the library. Your monthly re-audit tells you which one to open next. $497 to start, $297/mo to keep it running. Cancel any month and keep everything.
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