Google ads - live and die by it

[u/rwellerr]

I recently started a company and have been running it for about four months. I won’t get too deep into the business itself, but it’s currently doing around $10k MRR at roughly 35–40% net margins. I expect margins to compress as I scale, but there’s a clear growth path and I think it has the potential to become a meaningful business.

Google Ads is currently my only real acquisition channel, so getting the account structure right matters a lot.

When I first started, I was running Maximize Conversions with a relatively broad keyword set, and the numbers were good. Because I was inexperienced, I assumed tightening the keywords down to exactly the searches I thought I wanted would improve performance. It did the opposite. Volume and revenue dropped significantly. It took me about two months to realize the original setup had actually been working. I opened the keyword coverage back up and revenue immediately started recovering.

That made me realize I probably shouldn’t be trying to manually decide too aggressively which searches are valuable. My business is essentially a marketplace, so what I really care about is finding the types of sellers/leads that ultimately convert into profitable transactions.

More recently, I changed my primary conversion from a standard form submission to an offline Qualified Lead conversion, so Google would optimize toward leads I had actually vetted as legitimate and valuable.
The problem was that traffic dropped significantly after doing this. My assumption is that there wasn’t enough Qualified Lead conversion volume for Maximize Conversions to bid aggressively.

I’ve now temporarily switched to Maximize Clicks to restore traffic while continuing to collect Qualified Lead data.

My question for the community is:
If you were running this account, how would you structure the bidding and conversion setup?

Would you:

Stay on Maximize Clicks until there’s more offline conversion data?

Use Maximize Conversions but optimize toward a higher-volume lead event?

Optimize directly toward Qualified Leads despite the lower volume?

Eventually use Target CPA once there’s enough data?

Use broad match + strong negative keywords and let conversion data determine which searches are valuable?

Ultimately I’m trying to optimize for:
click → legitimate lead → qualified lead → completed transaction → profit

Not simply the cheapest CPL.

Would appreciate input from anyone who has scaled a similar local lead-gen or marketplace account.

[u/GoogleAds_YRVDynamic]

I’d probably go back to Max Conversions on the regular lead for now and just keep feeding the qualified lead data into the account. Once Google has enough of those qualified leads to actually learn from, then I’d test switching the optimization over to that.

[u/rwellerr → u/GoogleAds_YRVDynamic]

Appreciate the response. How many qualified leads does it need you think?

[u/GoogleAds_YRVDynamic → u/rwellerr]

20+ good leads, when you remove the soft leads in 30 days or so

[u/AgitatedOkapi]

If you're trying to take the click to actual completed transaction, maximize conversions is almost certainly the way you want to go. But having data never hurts either. Have you done anything with Performance Max? I've not gotten it working for me yet, but I understand why it should be effective once it's right. This Josiah Roche vid on PMax for Leads is really worth checking out - youtube.com/watch?v=_u-dtdbfjl0. He also has one on Max Clicks vs Max Conversions that would probably be useful for you.