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
$953 Per Lead: The Bidding Strategy Nobody Questioned
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$953 for one lead from a commercial water cooler company. Multiple agencies had failed to fix it.
Claire explains why maximise conversions fails without conversion data, how broad match keywords attracted domestic consumers instead of business buyers, and what the actual fix looked like.
She breaks down why a $50 countertop water cooler search and a $2,000 commercial installation search need completely different campaigns — and why Google will always take the cheap route if you let it.
Welcome to Clicks and Clarity with Claire.
$953 for one lead.
That is what a commercial water cooler company was paying when they came to me. $953 for a single enquiry. And they had already worked with a number of internet marketing companies trying to fix it.
I was surprised. Because to me, the fix was really obvious.
The account was set to maximise conversions. Which sounds like a reasonable strategy. But maximise conversions only works when you are already getting enough conversions for Google to learn from. If you have had 1 lead in 2 months, Google has nothing to work with. It does not know what a good lead looks like. It does not know which keywords or which audiences are likely to convert. It is guessing.
And when Google guesses, it tends to default to the cheapest clicks it can find. Which in this case meant domestic consumers.
The business sold commercial water systems. Office water dispensers. Installed solutions for businesses willing to spend a couple of thousand dollars on an ongoing service.
But the keywords in the account were broad match terms like water dispensers for sale and water coolers for sale.
Now, who do you think searches for water dispensers for sale?
Not office managers looking for a commercial installation. Consumers. People looking to pop down to Amazon or their local shop and buy a $50 countertop unit.
There are hundreds of thousands of those searches. And there are just a handful of searches from the commercial buyers this business actually needed. Google took the easy route. It spent the budget on the high volume domestic searches because those were cheap and plentiful.
The budget went to one ad group. One broad match keyword was eating most of the spend. And that keyword was attracting entirely the wrong audience.
The fix was straightforward.
Download lists of keywords that competitors are using in the commercial space. Everything mentioning office water dispensers. Commercial water solutions. Water coolers for offices. Business water systems. Build themed ad groups around those specific terms.
And then the other half of the job. Negative keywords. Many hundreds of them. Every variation of domestic, home, Amazon, cheap, personal, countertop. Everything that signals a consumer rather than a business buyer. Because Google will always try to go sideways. You add the commercial keywords and Google thinks well, this one looks close enough. So you add the guardrails. No, not that keyword. No, not that one. You are constantly adding them. That is what ongoing management actually looks like.
And the bidding strategy needed to change. You cannot use maximise conversions when there are no conversions to maximise. Start on maximise clicks with a maximum cost per click cap to control the spend. Get the right traffic coming in. Get enough conversions. Then switch to maximise conversions once Google has data to learn from.
This business had been through multiple agencies. Each one presumably took one look at the account, made a few tweaks, and moved on. But the fundamental problem was never addressed. The keywords were wrong. The audience was wrong. And the bidding strategy was asking Google to do something it physically could not do without data.
$953 for a single lead is not a Google Ads problem. It is a setup problem. And setup problems have setup solutions.
That is it for today.
If you are paying too much per lead and want to know whether it is a Google problem or a setup problem, book a free audit at clairejarrett.com.
So many thanks for listening.
Bye for now.