Clicks and Clarity with Claire
If you’re spending real money on Google Ads and still asking, “Why isn’t this working?”—this podcast is for you.
I’m Claire Jarrett, Google Ads strategist and founder of Jarrett Digital. Each week, I break down what’s actually going on behind the numbers—so you can stop wasting ad spend, start attracting qualified leads, and scale with confidence.
No fluff. No jargon. Just clear advice, real audits, and proven strategies from accounts managing four to six figures in monthly ad spend.
Whether you're DIY-ing your ads or working with an agency, this is the clarity you've been missing.
Clicks and Clarity with Claire
You're Paying More Than Them! Why You Could Be Paying More Than Your Competitors for the Same Clicks
🎧 Clicks & Clarity with Claire — Episode: Why You Could Be Paying More Than Your Competitors for the Same Clicks in Google Ads
In this episode, Claire Jarrett unpacks one of the most misunderstood aspects of Google Ads: why some advertisers pay drastically more for the same clicks.
Discover how Google’s obsession with relevance shapes ad pricing, and why Quality Score — an often-overlooked metric — could be silently draining your ad budget or boosting your ROI.
Claire breaks down how Google rewards advertisers with cheaper clicks and how you can turn the algorithm to your advantage. If you’re spending on Google Ads without understanding Quality Score, this episode is your wake-up call.
🖥️ Learn more or book a call at clairejarrett.com
Welcome to Clicks & Clarity with Claire, where we turn Google Ads confusion into conversion. Did you know that Google rewards certain advertisers and punishes others with cheaper or more expensive clicks through to your website? One advertiser can pay $10 for a visitor through to their website but another might pay $100 for that same visitor. And this doesn’t happen simply because one is in position 1 and the other is in position 3. This can happen to competitors who are battling for the exact same ad position in the same market and location. So why does this happen? To answer that question it is important to take a step back and look at why Google is the leading search engine in the first place. Over the years Google stood out as the leading search engine because they did a better job at serving more relevant search results to their users.Google will only remain the top search engine if they continue to serve relevant search results to its users. This is Google’s main goal in much of what they do. It drives the bulk of their strategy. They generate hundreds of billions of dollars every year with Google Ads which wouldn’t be possible for them unless their users kept coming back. And their users wouldn't keep coming back unless their searches on Google were returned with relevant results. And this leads us back to the original question: how does Google reward some advertisers whilst punishing others? For the organic search results there is an algorithm called PageRank which was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. It measures a webpage's importance on the web. There are all kinds of SEO tactics to manipulate this algorithm and get to the top of Google organically. For the ads at the top of the search results known as Google Ads, Google used a different strategy. They automatically charge businesses different amounts for clicks. Fundamentally, the amount that you pay for your clicks depends on how relevant your ads are to user searches. But this algorithm goes a lot further than that. There is a scoring mechanism inside Google ads called quality score and your ads and website are scored out of 10. it is not visible automatically. You have to enable this metric to see it which is why so many advertisers do not know much about it. This scoring mechanism inside google ads determines whether you pay from 400% more to 50% less than your competitors, for the exact same clicks through to your website. Quality score is also responsible for another metric inside Google ads called impression share or lost impression share - which tells you when your ads are not making it into the top 4. If your quality score is too low, your ads will simply not show up at all. One could argue that having your ads not show up at all might even be better than having a quality score that’s simply unprofitable for your business. You will struggle to remain profitable in the long term if your quality score is high enough to make it into the top 4 but still low enough so that you are charged substantially more than your competitors. When this happens it leads some advertisers to conclude that Google ads doesnt work for their business when in reality they are not aware of the huge impact of a low quality score on their ad account. So now you understand how & why Google is charging businesses in the same market different amounts for the same clicks. Next we need to uncover what you need to do to increase your own quality scores. From there, we can build and maintain profitable Google ad campaigns for your business. To put it simply, we need to create great ads, match what the visitor is searching for, and deliver a great landing page experience for visitors. I’ll cover all of this in future episodes of the podcast. Thanks for listening and I hope you took something out of this. You can head to www.clairejarrett.com to schedule a call with me and talk about having us manage your Google ads accounts and help increase your quality scores so that you get cheaper clicks. Until next time, this is Claire Jarrett reminding you: Don't let your quality scores destroy your profits in Google Ads. Goodbye for now.