Google Ads looks simple on the surface. Pick some keywords, write a headline, set a budget, hit go. But there's a reason some businesses pay $3 per click and others pay $15 for the same keyword in the same area.
The ad copy matters less than you'd think. What Google actually evaluates is your website speed, page structure, conversion tracking, and landing pages. All of that feeds into how much you pay per click and where your ad shows up. A technically solid site performs better in Google's auction, not just for visitors.
Most of this isn't obvious. And it's not something a business owner should have to figure out. That's the point.
Quality Score: The Hidden Multiplier
Every keyword in your Google Ads account gets a Quality Score from 1 to 10. This score directly affects what you pay per click and whether your ad shows up at all. A keyword with a Quality Score of 9 can cost half as much as the same keyword with a score of 5.
Three things determine Quality Score: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Two of those three are about your website. If your landing page is slow, doesn't match the search intent, or gives a poor mobile experience, you're paying a penalty on every single click.
A fast, well-structured landing page converts better and literally costs less per click.
Sitelinks and Ad Assets Need Real Pages Behind Them
Google Ads lets you add sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and other assets to your ads. These make your ad bigger, more relevant, and more clickable. They can significantly increase your click-through rate, which in turn improves your Quality Score, which lowers your costs.
But sitelinks need to point somewhere meaningful. "Services," "Pricing," "About Us," "Contact" only work if those pages exist, load fast, and actually deliver what the link promises. If your site is a single-page template with anchors instead of real pages, you can't use sitelinks effectively. Google may even stop showing them.
Dynamic assets like location extensions, call extensions, and image assets all require proper setup behind the scenes. A Google Business Profile that's verified and synced. A phone number with call tracking. Images that meet Google's specs. Each one is a small technical task, but together they determine whether your ad takes up three lines or seven.
Conversion Tracking: Teaching the Algorithm What Matters
Google's bidding algorithms are sophisticated, but they can only optimize for what you tell them to. Without conversion tracking, Google optimizes for clicks. With it, Google optimizes for the actions that actually matter to your business: form submissions, phone calls, booked appointments.
Setting this up properly is more involved than it sounds. You need a Google Tag or GTM container installed correctly, conversion actions defined in Google Ads, events firing on the right triggers, and the data flowing cleanly between your site, your ad account, and ideally your CRM. A misconfigured tag can mean you're either double-counting conversions or missing them entirely, and both throw off Google's ability to bid intelligently.
When conversion tracking works, the results compound. Google learns which searches, times of day, devices, and audiences produce real leads for your business and automatically shifts your budget toward them.
The Performance Max Trap
Performance Max is Google's campaign type that runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and Discovery all at once. Google recommends it heavily. For large budgets with strong conversion data, it can work well.
For small businesses spending $1,000-$3,000 a month? It often backfires.
The algorithm needs data to learn. When your budget gets spread across six different channels, none of them gets enough volume to train effectively.
You end up with low-quality impressions on Display and YouTube eating your budget while Search, where intent is highest, gets starved. The leads that do come in tend to be low quality because the algorithm hasn't had enough signal to distinguish a real customer from a casual browser.
In most small-budget accounts with weak conversion data, a focused Search campaign will outperform a Performance Max campaign.
Page Speed and Landing Page Quality
Google measures your landing page experience as part of your ad rank calculation. A slow page doesn't just lose visitors, it makes your ads more expensive and less visible.
We worked with a small towing company whose site was built on a heavy WordPress template. Page speed was below 60. After rebuilding the site with clean code and proper structure, scores hit 100 across the board. That kind of improvement doesn't just help SEO. It directly feeds into Google Ads Quality Score and lowers cost per click. In that case, Google Ads started bringing in about three times more paying customers.
Your landing pages also need to match the intent of the search. If someone clicks "emergency AC repair," they should land on a page about emergency AC repair with a clear call to action, not your homepage with a generic contact form somewhere below the fold.
What Good Ad Infrastructure Looks Like
| Common Setup | Optimized Setup |
|---|---|
| All ads point to the homepage | Dedicated landing pages per service |
| No sitelinks or generic anchors | Sitelinks to real pages with specific content |
| No conversion tracking | Form, call, and booking events tracked properly |
| Performance Max on a small budget | Focused Search campaigns with strong conversion data |
| Slow landing pages (3-5s load) | Fast pages that improve Quality Score and lower CPC |
| No CRM connection | Leads tracked from click to closed deal |
Where to Start
If you're already running ads, start with conversion tracking and landing page quality, not the ad copy or the keywords. That technical foundation determines how efficiently Google can spend your money.
If you're about to start running ads, getting the site right first is the smartest thing you can do. Every dollar you spend before the infrastructure is solid is a dollar that's working harder than it needs to.
Better ads start with a better website. The technical setup won't impress anyone at a dinner party, but it's what separates $3 clicks from $15 ones.