The fundamentals are 90% of your Google Ads results

I have run Google Ads for businesses spending £500 a month and for a pharma client spending more than £5m a month. The interface is the same, the auction is the same, and so is the pattern when an account underperforms. Somebody has been working hard on the clever 10% while one of the boring basics quietly caps everything they do.

That 90% figure is a working rule, not a measurement. Nobody can decompose an account's results into tidy percentages, and if I told you I had, you should stop reading. But it holds often enough across audits that I would bet on it before I opened your account. The result you get from Google Ads is decided almost entirely by a short list of unglamorous things, and the clever work only matters once those are in place.

01What the fundamentals actually are

Fundamentals is a vague word, so let me be specific. When I say fundamentals, I mean six things, and I mean them in this order.

• An offer worth clicking on. Something a stranger can understand in one line and has a reason to choose over the result above and below yours.
• A landing page that converts. Not the homepage. A page that answers the search, shows proof, and makes the next step obvious on a phone.
• Knowing your numbers. What an enquiry or an order is worth, what you can afford to pay for one, and where break-even sits. Without this there is no such thing as a good cost per lead, only a number.
• Conversion tracking that counts real things. Enquiries, calls that last, orders. Not page views, button clicks or engaged sessions.
• A structure Smart Bidding can learn from. Enough conversions flowing into each campaign for the algorithm to see a pattern, which usually means fewer campaigns than you have now.
• Search terms that match intent. The right keywords, and a negative list that stops you paying for the wrong ones.

Ad copy, bid strategies, audiences, scripts and settings all sit on top of these. They matter. But they are multipliers of what is underneath, and multiplying a small number gives you a small number.

02Why they are worth 90%

Google Ads is a chain, and a chain delivers whatever its weakest link allows. That sounds like a poster on an office wall, so here are two versions of it with numbers.

Take two copies of the same account. Same £3,000 budget, same keywords, same ads, same bids. One sends traffic to a homepage that converts at 1%. The other sends it to a dedicated page that converts at 4%. The second account gets four times the enquiries with zero changes inside Google Ads. There is no bidding tactic, no headline test, and no audience layer that gets you a 4x. The page did it on its own.

Now leave the page alone and break tracking instead. The tag fires when the thank-you page loads, but the thank-you page is also linked from the footer. Google Ads reports 300 conversions for the month. The inbox has 40 real enquiries. Smart Bidding is now optimising towards whoever loads that page, and every bid, every budget decision and every winning ad test for the next quarter is measured against a number that is fiction. You can do everything else perfectly and still lose, because the system is steering by a broken compass.

Tactics multiply what the fundamentals produce. Multiply a broken thing and you get a bigger broken thing.

That is why the split is so lopsided. A fundamental that is wrong does not cost you a few percent. It caps or corrupts everything downstream of it. A tactic that is wrong costs you a few percent. The maths is not close.

03Why skilled people skip them

If it is this obvious, why is almost every underperforming account I open full of tactics and short on basics? Four reasons, and I have been guilty of all of them.

• Tactics feel like expertise. Nobody gets invited to speak at a conference about checking a conversion tag. Building a portfolio bid strategy with seasonality adjustments feels like the job. Confirming the form submit fires once feels like admin. The second one moves the number more often.
• Half the fundamentals live outside the account. The offer, the page, the margins and the sales follow-up belong to the founder, the developer or the sales team. Fixing them means an awkward conversation instead of a settings change, and comfortable work beats necessary work when nobody is watching.
• Google keeps pointing at the 10%. The Recommendations tab, the optimisation score and every new feature launch push you towards bids, budgets and broad match. None of them will ever tell you that your landing page is the problem, because Google does not get paid when you fix your landing page.
• Fundamentals are boring to report on. "We added 40 negatives and rewrote the page headline" sounds like a slow month. "We launched a new campaign type with audience signals" sounds like progress. Clients reward the second sentence, so agencies produce it.

04The order matters as much as the list

Fixing fundamentals in the wrong order is nearly as wasteful as skipping them. If you rebuild a landing page while tracking is broken, you cannot tell whether the new page worked. If you add negatives before you know what a lead is worth, you are guessing which terms are waste. Here is the order I use, what each one looks like when it is broken, and what people usually reach for instead.

The rule is simple. Do not work seriously on anything lower in that table while something above it is broken. You can still tidy the lower rows in maintenance time, and you should. You just do not spend your week there, and you do not tell the client that is where the growth is coming from.

05What the other 10% is for

None of this means tactics are worthless. I spend a lot of my time on them. Once the six fundamentals are genuinely in place, the 10% is where the next gains live, and on a mature account they compound: a headline test that lifts click-through rate by 15%, a page variant that adds half a point of conversion rate, a bid target tightened to a number you would defend. Small gains on a solid base add up to a lot over a year.

But that is the point. They are small gains on a solid base. On a broken base they are noise, and expensive noise, because you paid for every click that proved nothing.

The 10% is worth chasing. It is just never worth chasing first.

06A twenty-minute check for your own account

You do not need to be a specialist to check the 90%. Six questions, in order, and be honest with the answers.

• Do the numbers agree? Count the conversions Google Ads reports for the last 30 days. Then count the real enquiries or orders in your inbox or CRM for the same period. If they differ by more than about 15%, tracking is broken and nothing else you read about the account can be trusted until it is fixed.
• What is one enquiry worth to you, and what would you pay for one? Say it out loud. If you cannot, that is the first fix, and it costs nothing.
• Does your own ad pass the phone test? Search for your main service on your phone, click your ad, and see whether the page answers the search in the first screen and lets you enquire in under a minute.
• Would you pay for your top 20 search terms? Open the search terms report, sort by cost, and read the top 20 as if each one were a person walking into your business.
• How many campaigns see fewer than 30 conversions a month? Each one of those is an algorithm guessing.
• When did whoever runs the account last check the five above? If the answer is a date, you are in good hands. If the answer is a description of a new feature, you are paying for the 10%.

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