What it costs, how the auction actually works here, why accounts underperform, and how to tell whether yours is working.
Almost every Google Ads decision follows from one number, and most accounts have never worked it out. Take your average job or order value, multiply by your gross margin, multiply by the proportion of enquiries you actually win. That's what an enquiry is worth. What you can afford to pay for one is some fraction of it — and that fraction, not a monthly budget, is what should drive every targeting and bidding decision underneath.
Without this number you cannot tell whether a $95 cost per lead is excellent or catastrophic, which is why so many accounts are optimised toward cheaper clicks rather than profitable customers.
New Zealand is a small market with a concentrated advertiser base. That produces two effects worth planning around. First, in the main centres you're often bidding against national brands and lead aggregators with budgets that don't have to make sense at your scale. Second, in specific service-and-location searches there is frequently almost no competition, because nobody has bothered to build for them.
The strategy that follows is the same one that works in every competitive market but matters more here: get narrower, not louder. Twenty specific searches owned profitably beat one generic search lost expensively.
The single most common fault. The account counts page views, button clicks or thank-you page loads that don't correspond to real enquiries — or it counts one enquiry twice. Everything downstream is then optimised against fiction, and modern automated bidding will pursue that fiction with impressive efficiency.
Broad match without a substantial negative list is how budgets disappear. In trade categories a large share of traffic is job seekers; in retail it's researchers; in most categories it's competitors and aggregators.
The ad promises something specific and the page delivers a menu. Every extra decision between the click and the enquiry costs you conversions you've already paid for.
It works when it's fed clean conversion data and structurally separated from branded search. Left alone, it frequently harvests demand you already had and reports it as new.
You can tell a healthy account by whether it can answer a simple question: what did we spend, and what came back? If the answer requires three dashboards and an argument, that's the first thing to fix — usually before touching the campaigns at all. See Data & Measurement for how that layer gets built.
If your margins are thin and your average order value is low, paid search may simply not clear. If your website converts at a fraction of the category norm, fixing that first makes every subsequent dollar of media worth more — see Conversion Engineering. And if nobody is searching for what you sell, ads on search won't create demand that doesn't exist.
Book a free discovery session. We'll audit what you're running, tell you what's leaking budget, and show you what we'd do differently — no obligation.