Set up tracking before you launch ads

Conversion tracking is a small piece of code that tells the ad platform when someone fills in a form on your site, adds a product to their basket, or clicks your phone number. Without that code, how is the platform meant to know which click actually worked?

Some businesses say they'll launch the ad first and set up tracking after. The first few weeks of a budget run that way usually turn into spend you can't measure a return on, because the data collected in that period is incomplete and can't be recovered later.

Some businesses set this code up once and never check it again. A site update can quietly break it, so a monthly check is the most practical way to make sure the setup is still working.

• Are events like form submissions, searches, and add-to-basket defined on your site
• Are those events connected to the ad platform (Google, Meta)
• Is there call tracking for customers who ring in
• Have you sent a test conversion and checked it shows up on the platform

A meaningful share of a search-network budget goes to searches you never meant to target. Words like free, second-hand, job vacancy — close but unrelated to what you sell — eat into the budget through clicks that were never going to convert.

A negative keyword list isn't something you write once and leave. Reading the search terms report weekly and adding irrelevant searches to it steadily steers the budget towards the right audience.

Being too broad with negative keywords is risky too — you can accidentally block a relevant search. Before adding each one, checking it's genuinely irrelevant strikes the balance between protecting budget and not losing a potential customer.

• Do you review the search terms report weekly
• Are there words that overlap with your product but meet a different need
• Have terms clicked by job seekers or bargain hunters been added as negatives

Opening five or six campaigns at once on a new account spreads the budget so thin that none of them gathers enough data to learn from. Starting with a single campaign, a single audience, gives you a much clearer read on whether that campaign is actually working.

Adding a second campaign once the first has run a few weeks and built up data is a safer way to grow the budget in stages. Giving the account time to learn, rather than rushing into a broad setup, means less waste in the long run.

Starting with one campaign takes patience — results might not be clear in the first couple of weeks. But that patience builds the knowledge you need to set up the second and third campaigns correctly.

When you open an ad report, look first at cost per conversion, not total spend. If spend has gone up but the number of conversions hasn't, budget is going to waste somewhere.

Three things are worth checking weekly: which campaign, which keyword, and which ad is spending the most while converting the least. Tracked regularly, these three steer the budget to the right place on their own.

When reading the report, note the campaigns doing well too, not just the ones doing badly. Understanding what's working is the most valuable input when setting up your next campaign.

• How has cost per conversion changed compared to last week
• Which campaign is spending the most while converting the least
• Did the newly added negative keywords make a difference

A small budget isn't a reason to skip tracking. If anything, seeing the return on every click matters more when the budget is small, because you don't have the room to absorb a campaign going wrong without noticing.

Starting with one campaign, a narrow audience, and a clear conversion goal on a small-budget account takes more discipline than a large one, but gets you a result faster.

The biggest mistake with a small budget is testing more than one product or service in the same campaign. Focusing on a single product, a single audience, gets a limited budget results faster.

Too many keyword groups, too many ad variations in one account slows down how quickly the budget learns. A small number of clearly separated groups is easier to manage and shows faster which group is working.

Making the campaign structure more complex usually feels like more control, but in practice it's the opposite. A simple structure makes it easier to spot problems and fix them — worth asking before adding a new group or ad whether it's genuinely needed.