Real Growth Strategy

Before I Touch Your Google Ads, I Need Three Answers That Have Nothing to Do With the Ads

Andrew Killingsworth

6/18/20266 min read

I don't audit your Quality Score first. I don't analyze your ad copy or check your bidding strategy.

Those things matter. But they come later.

Before I touch any campaign settings, I need to understand three things that have nothing to do with the ads themselves. These questions reveal whether the account can actually succeed or if I'm just decorating a sinking ship.

Here's what I ask every time.

Question One: Where Do You Want Your Growth to Come From?

This sounds basic. It's not.

Most businesses answer with "more leads" or "more sales." That's not specific enough to build a strategy around.

I need to know if you want growth from new product lines, new geographic markets, or new customer segments. I need to know if you're trying to steal market share from a competitor or create demand in a category that doesn't know you exist yet.

The answer changes everything.

If you're a medical supplies reseller bidding on branded product keywords, you're paying for traffic that was already coming to you. You get a great return on ad spend, but your cost per sale never improves. You're not growing. You're just paying Google to intercept customers who were already looking for you.

I worked with a business spending $30,000 per month on exactly this strategy. Great ROAS. Zero growth. No plan to target broad search terms so customers who didn't know what they needed could find them.

That's not a Google Ads problem. That's a strategy problem.

The ads were working. The plan wasn't.

Growth requires targeting the traffic you don't have yet. That means understanding where your business actually wants to expand, not just where it's easiest to get clicks.

Question Two: Are You Set Up to Convert What I Send You?

I can send you traffic. I can't make your sales process work.

If your website loads slowly, your contact form is buried, your phone lines aren't staffed, or your sales team takes three days to follow up on a lead, no amount of campaign optimization will fix that.

This is where most audits miss the point. They focus on the account structure, the keyword match types, the ad extensions. All of that matters. But if the business can't convert the traffic, the account was never going to succeed.

I've seen accounts with perfect campaign architecture fail because the landing page was a mess. I've seen accounts with terrible structure succeed because the business had a sales team that called every lead within 10 minutes.

Conversion readiness is not a marketing problem. It's a business operations problem.

Before I optimize anything, I need to know you can handle what I'm about to send you. If you can't, we fix that first.

Question Three: What Does Your Sales Cycle Actually Look Like?

This is the question that reveals whether a client understands their own business.

If you're selling high-ticket services or complex B2B solutions, your sales cycle is long. Buyers don't click an ad and sign a contract. They research. They compare. They take their time.

Too many businesses judge their paid media success within a two-week window. They launch a campaign, see low conversions, and panic.

But B2B sales cycles are long. Expecting instant conversions from a LinkedIn ad is like expecting someone to propose on the first date.

Your attribution model has to match your sales reality.

I worked with a client who sold enterprise software. Average deal size was $50,000. Average sales cycle was four months. They were measuring campaign success based on form fills within 30 days.

That's not how their customers bought. They needed to track initial engagement, nurture sequences, sales conversations, and closed deals across a much longer timeline. The campaigns weren't failing. The measurement was.

Understanding your sales cycle tells me how to set up tracking, what conversion actions to optimize for, and how long to wait before making performance judgments.

If you don't know your own sales cycle, I can't build a strategy that works.

The Pattern I See in Every Failed Account

When I take over an underperforming Google Ads account, the problem is almost never the ads.

The problem is that someone started running ads without answering these three questions first.

They bid on keywords without a growth strategy. They sent traffic to a website that couldn't convert it. They measured success on a timeline that didn't match how their customers actually bought.

Then they blamed the platform.

Google Ads doesn't fail. Strategy fails.

I've seen accounts with identical campaign structures perform completely differently because one business had clear answers to these questions and the other didn't.

The one with answers knew where they wanted growth, had a conversion process that worked, and understood their sales cycle. The campaigns worked because the business was ready for them.

The one without answers was just spending money and hoping something stuck.

Why Most Agencies Skip This Step

These questions take time. They require understanding the client's business, not just their marketing budget.

Most agencies don't ask them because they're not paid to ask them. They're paid to manage ads. So they jump straight into campaign setup, keyword research, and ad copy testing.

They optimize what's easy to measure instead of what actually matters.

I've worked on the client side for 15 years. I've hired agencies. I've fired agencies. I know what happens when an agency treats your account like a campaign management task instead of a business growth strategy.

You get reports that look good and results that don't move the business forward.

The biggest reason why social media advertising fails is poor planning. You need to understand your prospective buyer, what they need, and how they think about the problem you're solving.

That's not a campaign setup issue. That's a strategic foundation issue.

What Happens When You Get This Right

When a business can answer these three questions clearly, everything else gets easier.

Keyword selection becomes obvious because you know where growth needs to come from. Conversion tracking makes sense because you understand your sales cycle. Campaign performance is measurable because you know what success actually looks like.

I had a client come to me after running their ads internally for six months. They thought they had the answers. They didn't.

They were bidding on branded product keywords and getting great ROAS. But they weren't growing. They were just paying to intercept traffic that was already theirs.

We shifted the strategy. Stopped bidding on low-hanging branded terms. Started targeting broader search terms where customers didn't know what they needed yet. Built a two-year plan to reduce cost per acquisition while increasing overall revenue.

The first month looked worse on paper. ROAS dropped. Cost per click went up.

Six months later, they were acquiring customers they never could have reached before. Cost per sale started dropping. Revenue grew.

That only worked because we answered the three questions first.

The Real Cost of Getting This Wrong

When you skip this step, you don't just waste ad spend.

You lose the revenue that spend should have generated.

A campaign that spends $5,000 per month but only achieves 20% of its potential doesn't just waste $4,000. It costs you the clients, revenue, and growth that $5,000 should have delivered.

Properly optimized campaigns can deliver 300-500% ROI. Broken campaigns can deliver negative ROI. The opportunity cost between those outcomes is massive.

I've seen businesses spend $50,000 on campaigns that looked professionally managed but were strategically broken from day one. Perfect campaign structure. Beautiful ad copy. Complete waste of money.

Because nobody asked the three questions.

What I Do Differently

I don't take on every client who contacts me.

If you think you know more than I do, if you're not prepared to follow a plan, or if you want guaranteed results on a specific timeline, we're not the right fit.

Not because I'm difficult to work with. Because those are signals that you're not ready for this to work yet.

The clients who succeed with me are the ones who can answer these three questions or are willing to work with me to figure out the answers.

Once we have those answers, the rest is execution.

Onboarding takes five days. Campaigns go live within two weeks. Tracking is connected properly so we're measuring what actually matters. Strategy is built around where you want growth, how you convert it, and how long your sales cycle actually takes.

That's the difference between managing ads and building a growth strategy.

One keeps you busy. The other moves your business forward.

Start Here

If you're running Google Ads right now, ask yourself these three questions:

Where do you want your growth to come from? Not "more leads." Be specific. New markets, new products, new customer segments.

Are you set up to convert the traffic you're paying for? Is your website fast, your sales process tight, your follow-up immediate?

What does your sales cycle actually look like? Are you measuring success on a timeline that matches how your customers actually buy?

If you can't answer all three clearly, that's where the work starts.

Not in the ads. In the strategy that makes the ads worth running in the first place.

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