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Hey, I'm Amber

"We got you 100 leads." (Half were telemarketers.)

Published about 2 months ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown  ·  Clicks vs. leads

A click is not a lead.

Hey Reader,

Quick story. An agency told one of my clients they'd landed 100 leads in a month. One hundred. Great number, right? So we did what I always do with great numbers: we went and checked.

The diagnostic · what those 100 "leads" actually were
→ About half were telemarketers. People calling to sell my client something, counted as people who wanted to buy.
→ A bunch of the rest were bot clicks. Not humans. Not customers. Software touching a form.
→ Actual humans who wanted to buy something? A small fraction of that shiny number.
The report wasn't lying about the number. It was lying about the word.

Which brings me to the line that will save you the most money this year:

  A click is not a lead.

A click just means a cursor hit your ad and Google got to charge your card. It does not mean anyone called, booked, or bought. When a report waves “200 clicks!” at you and stops there, that's someone revving your engine in the parking lot. Sounds great. But does the car actually move?

Last week we built the funnel: traffic, leads, qualified leads, closed deals, and how only the bottom levels touch your P&L. This week is the ads-side version of the same disease, and it starts somewhere most business owners never look: the settings Google chose for you.

 

The defaults are not your friends

Here's an uncomfortable truth about Google Ads: the default settings are optimized for Google's revenue, not yours. Out of the box, an account leans toward broader targeting, wider networks, auto-applied “recommendations,” and generous definitions of what counts as a conversion. Every one of those defaults spends your money faster and measures the results looser.

None of it is hidden. All of it is quiet. And a busy business owner running their own account, or trusting an agency that never touched the settings, can leak budget for months without a single alarm going off. On this week's episode of Ready For Traction I walk through the four biggest leaks I find when I take over an account, and exactly how to check each one.

 
🎧 This week on Ready For Traction

The full teardown: how Google's default settings quietly torch your budget, the four leaks draining your account right now, and how to measure the stuff that actually touches your revenue instead of the stuff that decorates a report.
 
 
⚙️ SEO term of the week
Conversion Tracking
By the book

The measurement setup that records when a click leads to a defined valuable action: a call, a booked appointment, a form fill from a real person, a purchase.

In plain English

Conversion tracking is the wiring between your ad spend and reality. When it's set up right, you know which dollars became customers. When it's set up wrong, or left on loose defaults, your dashboard fills with “conversions” that are page views, bots, and telemarketers, and every decision you make downstream is built on that bad wiring. The 100-leads story above wasn't a lying agency so much as lazy wiring nobody ever checked.

Signs your wiring is loose
→ Conversion counts suspiciously close to click counts. Real buyers are never that easy.
→ “Conversions” that turn out to be page views when you actually open the conversion actions list.
→ Nothing in the account maps to your CRM. The ads platform and your sales pipeline live in two different realities.
🔑 The single most revealing question of all
“Which conversions in this account map to actual revenue in my CRM?”
Ask whoever runs your ads, including yourself. If the answer is a list of specific conversion actions tied to real pipeline, you're in good hands. If the answer is a pause, you just found the leak. Google gets paid on the click. You get paid on the close.
 

Your wrench for the week

Because I don't like handing you a problem without a wrench, I made you a free download:

 
🏁 Free download
The 15-Minute Google Ads Budget Audit

The exact checklist I run when I take over an account. Eight checks, in the order I do them. Print it, run it, plug your leaks.
Get the free audit checklist →
 
→ Want me to run the audit myself?

Reply with the word AUDIT and I'll take a look at your account, no charge. Straight read, no pitch: what's leaking, what's wired wrong, and what's actually fine.
  If you don't understand your analytics, how can you track success?

Let's fix that. Talk soon,

Amber
Active Media  |  SEO Sidekick  |  Ready For Traction

 

P.S. This week's episode of Ready For Traction covers all four budget leaks in detail. Forward this issue to anyone running their own Google Ads. Their card is getting charged either way; they might as well know for what.

Listen to Ready For Traction →

Hey, I'm Amber

Let's take control of your growth strategy by learning simple SEO tips each week in my newsletter!

Hey I'm Amber, a seasoned SEO coach specializing in helping marketing professionals learn SEO with ease. With a keen focus on strategy and foundational SEO, I bring a technical approach to the table. My expertise lies in communicating the three foundations of SEO to help you better craft an SEO strategy that will drive impactful results.

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