I figured it might be a good idea to start a thread here about my journey and what's going on currently, using the momentum and heavily inspired by this thread, just to get my a$$ up, leaving my comfort zone and leveling up my skills.
This is a story in two parts. It's about watching a so-called "professional" agency burn through my client's 13,000€ life savings for zero results, and my decision to step in. It's my journey of learning Google Ads from scratch, on a shoestring budget.
Part 1: The agency
It all started with a client a friend referred to me. He runs a decluttering business in Germany.
I built his first website. Clean design, basic on-page SEO, some technical SEO, set up email and SMTP, got him hosted. Nothing fancy. Just a quick two-day job.
Then came the Google Ads talk.
He said, “I want to run Google Ads. All my friends in decluttering are doing it and it’s working for them.”
At the time, I had zero clue about Google Ads. The dashboard looked like a cockpit. Graphs, buttons, diagrams, and labels I couldn’t make sense of. I was overwhelmed and honest with him. “Nope, can’t do that, sorry man.”.
So he started looking for agencies. Oh boy. Because we'd built up so much trust, he'd ask for my opinion, even if he had no intention of following it. He'd show me agency proposals, and my gut reaction was always the same.
"I don't trust them," I'd say. "Most agencies I've seen do shit work. They don't care about you or your business. You're just a number in their invoicing system and filling their pockets with more cash."
It didn't matter. The "Google Ads is the shit" gospel hammered into him by his buddies was too loud. He found a German agency. I said, "Don't do it."
He did it anyway...
I added the agency to the Google Ads account and stepped back, deciding to just observe. For the first few days, I saw a flurry of activity in the changelog. Keyword magic, negative keywords, new callouts, tweaked ad copy. I still had no real clue what any of it meant, so when my client asked what they were doing, all I could say was, "Looks like they're doing a lot of keyword stuff." I couldn't tell him if it was good stuff.
Then, one day, the agency's ad manager calls me.
"Hey Kevin, can you help us set up a landing page?" "Sure," I said. "What do you need?" (Note: I never give agencies direct access. I've learned they F*ck things up.)
They sent over the content. It was the most generic, buzzword-filled bullshit I'd ever seen, clearly spat out by ChatGPT without a single edit to make it sound human. They didn't even understand they shouldn't just be using the generic service pages I'd already built.
After a ton of back and forth, they hit me with the next classic line: "Ah well Kevin, we need tracking."
"Sure. Give me the code, but make sure you have consent mode enabled. Better yet, just give me access to Tag Manager and Analytics and I'll do it right."
"Oh, okay. Why consent mode?"
I had to take a breath. "GDPR? The privacy laws in Germany and the EU? You can't just throw tracking codes around and hope for the best. You're risking massive fines for the client."
The silence on the other end was telling. (It still infuriates me that so-called professional agencies have no F*cking clue about GDPR and are willing to risk their clients' businesses without a thought.)
So, I integrated their tracking properly. What followed was a masterclass in incompetence. They would change things daily, not letting any data accumulate before blowing it all up to try something new. My client, too scared to ask the agency he was paying a fortune to, would call me instead. "Are they doing good? Why am I not getting any calls?"
I had to set a boundary. I was watching my client's ship sink after I'd warned him about the iceberg. "You need to ask the agency," I told him. "You're paying them to get you results."
To cut a long and painful story short: six months and roughly 13,000€ in ad spend later, my client fired them. He had gotten ZERO. F*ckING. RESULTS.
That was 100€-125€ per day flushed down the toilet, plus a 580€ monthly agency fee for the privilege. He had burned through every last cent of his savings.
Here’s the chart of the carnage. The agency took over in around September 2024, you see it in the drop and where it goes up again. Before that, it was my client just trying to manage it himself. After, it was a professional's work.
(All time screenshot from google ads dashboard)
This is where their story ends. And where mine begins.
Part 2: The last chance
The client was broke. The agency was gone. And I was pissed off. This was my time. I decided I was going to learn Google Ads.
I started digging through the Fastlane Forum, determined to avoid the self-proclaimed YouTube gurus and their affiliate links. I found posts by @Andy Black, watched his videos, and understood almost nothing. The theory was one thing, but I knew I had to learn by doing. I decided to jump straight into the cold water.
I called my client.
"Hey," I said, "I want to get into ads. I want to take this over. What's your budget?"
His voice was heavy. "Kevin, you know what happened. I have no money. But I believe in you. I trust you. This is my last chance, man. Go for it. Set it to €15 a day. That's all I can do. I got a job driving trucks at night just to pay my rent. I'm F*cked."
Challenge accepted.
I took the old agency campaign, tweaked a few keywords, set the budget to 15€ per day, and hit "Go."
The results: 2,000 impressions, 19 clicks. A trickle. I knew this wasn't it. "F*ck it," I thought. "Let's start fresh in a different city. More potential."
I paused the old campaign and built a brand new one from scratch. Locations, keywords, negatives, everything which came to my mind. I launched it. Thirty minutes later, heart pounding, I opened a private browser window and searched for his main keyword.
First place. Top of the sponsored results.
I was shaking. I screenshotted it and sent it to my client, who was ecstatic. But I knew we weren't there yet. The campaign showed impressions, but the clicks were low and there were still no conversions. No leads. Just a tiny budget evaporating every day.
Around this time, while setting up my own GA4 tracking, I noticed some old agency code was still firing somewhere in the google tag manager. I shot them an email to get it removed. A little while later, my phone rang. It was the guy from the agency.
"Kevin? How did you do that? Why is your client in the first place for the ads? Tell me how you did that."
I let the question hang in the air for a second. "I learned. I am focused. And I actually care about my client."
(After reading this for the 3rd time, it sounds so made up...but it actually happened, I was so shocked that an Ads agency asked me this)
The silence on his end was awkward and deeply satisfying. He mumbled something about removing their access and the call ended. (To this day, I have no idea how they still had phantom access after I'd removed them. I checked the data manager and I saw their GA4 code, so no clue here)
But the victory was hollow. I was still burning through my client's last few euros with nothing to show for it. Something was fundamentally broken. I was checking competitors, rewriting content, tweaking the site design. Nothing worked.
And then, it clicked. I don't know why or how, but the idea just hit me: A dedicated landing page.
A page that exists only for the ads. It's not in the main navigation, it's not indexed by Google. Its only job is to convert ad clicks into customers. I spent some time looking at high-conversion examples and some youtube videos and built one.
I felt I was close, but still missing a piece. My own funds were tight, I'd recently lost two big clients and my cat's vet bills were piling up. I asked a good friend for a lifeline, and he got me access to Andy's full course. I devoured it. Then, in one of Andy's latest youtube videos, he mentioned "dynamic headlines on a landing page."
That was it. That was the missing piece...Hopefully!
A quick bit of Javascript, and my new landing page was alive, or should I say landing PAGES. Instead of needing dozens of pages for different services or locations, I now had one single, powerful page that changed its text based on the ad the user clicked.
With this new weapon in hand, I went back to the Ads dashboard one more time. Following Andy's course to the letter, I archived everything and started again. Brand new campaigns, new naming conventions, one keyword per ad group, the whole setup recommended by Andy.
The budget is still tiny, but I'm hyped. This is my chance to prove my theory right and, more importantly, to help my client climb out of the hole that agency dug for him.
Now, we wait and see if I actually learned something, this is where I am right now.
I have to give a final shout-out to @Andy Black. Sorry if I sound like a fanboy, but his content gave me so much inspiration. I remember a video where he said something that just clicked: he came from an IT background and loved analytics, so why should anyone with that mindset be scared of Google Ads? He was right. I was in IT too. I love analytical data, but I was letting fear get in the way.
This is a story in two parts. It's about watching a so-called "professional" agency burn through my client's 13,000€ life savings for zero results, and my decision to step in. It's my journey of learning Google Ads from scratch, on a shoestring budget.
Part 1: The agency
It all started with a client a friend referred to me. He runs a decluttering business in Germany.
I built his first website. Clean design, basic on-page SEO, some technical SEO, set up email and SMTP, got him hosted. Nothing fancy. Just a quick two-day job.
Then came the Google Ads talk.
He said, “I want to run Google Ads. All my friends in decluttering are doing it and it’s working for them.”
At the time, I had zero clue about Google Ads. The dashboard looked like a cockpit. Graphs, buttons, diagrams, and labels I couldn’t make sense of. I was overwhelmed and honest with him. “Nope, can’t do that, sorry man.”.
So he started looking for agencies. Oh boy. Because we'd built up so much trust, he'd ask for my opinion, even if he had no intention of following it. He'd show me agency proposals, and my gut reaction was always the same.
"I don't trust them," I'd say. "Most agencies I've seen do shit work. They don't care about you or your business. You're just a number in their invoicing system and filling their pockets with more cash."
It didn't matter. The "Google Ads is the shit" gospel hammered into him by his buddies was too loud. He found a German agency. I said, "Don't do it."
He did it anyway...
I added the agency to the Google Ads account and stepped back, deciding to just observe. For the first few days, I saw a flurry of activity in the changelog. Keyword magic, negative keywords, new callouts, tweaked ad copy. I still had no real clue what any of it meant, so when my client asked what they were doing, all I could say was, "Looks like they're doing a lot of keyword stuff." I couldn't tell him if it was good stuff.
Then, one day, the agency's ad manager calls me.
"Hey Kevin, can you help us set up a landing page?" "Sure," I said. "What do you need?" (Note: I never give agencies direct access. I've learned they F*ck things up.)
They sent over the content. It was the most generic, buzzword-filled bullshit I'd ever seen, clearly spat out by ChatGPT without a single edit to make it sound human. They didn't even understand they shouldn't just be using the generic service pages I'd already built.
After a ton of back and forth, they hit me with the next classic line: "Ah well Kevin, we need tracking."
"Sure. Give me the code, but make sure you have consent mode enabled. Better yet, just give me access to Tag Manager and Analytics and I'll do it right."
"Oh, okay. Why consent mode?"
I had to take a breath. "GDPR? The privacy laws in Germany and the EU? You can't just throw tracking codes around and hope for the best. You're risking massive fines for the client."
The silence on the other end was telling. (It still infuriates me that so-called professional agencies have no F*cking clue about GDPR and are willing to risk their clients' businesses without a thought.)
So, I integrated their tracking properly. What followed was a masterclass in incompetence. They would change things daily, not letting any data accumulate before blowing it all up to try something new. My client, too scared to ask the agency he was paying a fortune to, would call me instead. "Are they doing good? Why am I not getting any calls?"
I had to set a boundary. I was watching my client's ship sink after I'd warned him about the iceberg. "You need to ask the agency," I told him. "You're paying them to get you results."
To cut a long and painful story short: six months and roughly 13,000€ in ad spend later, my client fired them. He had gotten ZERO. F*ckING. RESULTS.
That was 100€-125€ per day flushed down the toilet, plus a 580€ monthly agency fee for the privilege. He had burned through every last cent of his savings.
Here’s the chart of the carnage. The agency took over in around September 2024, you see it in the drop and where it goes up again. Before that, it was my client just trying to manage it himself. After, it was a professional's work.
(All time screenshot from google ads dashboard)
This is where their story ends. And where mine begins.
Part 2: The last chance
The client was broke. The agency was gone. And I was pissed off. This was my time. I decided I was going to learn Google Ads.
I started digging through the Fastlane Forum, determined to avoid the self-proclaimed YouTube gurus and their affiliate links. I found posts by @Andy Black, watched his videos, and understood almost nothing. The theory was one thing, but I knew I had to learn by doing. I decided to jump straight into the cold water.
I called my client.
"Hey," I said, "I want to get into ads. I want to take this over. What's your budget?"
His voice was heavy. "Kevin, you know what happened. I have no money. But I believe in you. I trust you. This is my last chance, man. Go for it. Set it to €15 a day. That's all I can do. I got a job driving trucks at night just to pay my rent. I'm F*cked."
Challenge accepted.
I took the old agency campaign, tweaked a few keywords, set the budget to 15€ per day, and hit "Go."
The results: 2,000 impressions, 19 clicks. A trickle. I knew this wasn't it. "F*ck it," I thought. "Let's start fresh in a different city. More potential."
I paused the old campaign and built a brand new one from scratch. Locations, keywords, negatives, everything which came to my mind. I launched it. Thirty minutes later, heart pounding, I opened a private browser window and searched for his main keyword.
First place. Top of the sponsored results.
I was shaking. I screenshotted it and sent it to my client, who was ecstatic. But I knew we weren't there yet. The campaign showed impressions, but the clicks were low and there were still no conversions. No leads. Just a tiny budget evaporating every day.
Around this time, while setting up my own GA4 tracking, I noticed some old agency code was still firing somewhere in the google tag manager. I shot them an email to get it removed. A little while later, my phone rang. It was the guy from the agency.
"Kevin? How did you do that? Why is your client in the first place for the ads? Tell me how you did that."
I let the question hang in the air for a second. "I learned. I am focused. And I actually care about my client."
(After reading this for the 3rd time, it sounds so made up...but it actually happened, I was so shocked that an Ads agency asked me this)
The silence on his end was awkward and deeply satisfying. He mumbled something about removing their access and the call ended. (To this day, I have no idea how they still had phantom access after I'd removed them. I checked the data manager and I saw their GA4 code, so no clue here)
But the victory was hollow. I was still burning through my client's last few euros with nothing to show for it. Something was fundamentally broken. I was checking competitors, rewriting content, tweaking the site design. Nothing worked.
And then, it clicked. I don't know why or how, but the idea just hit me: A dedicated landing page.
A page that exists only for the ads. It's not in the main navigation, it's not indexed by Google. Its only job is to convert ad clicks into customers. I spent some time looking at high-conversion examples and some youtube videos and built one.
I felt I was close, but still missing a piece. My own funds were tight, I'd recently lost two big clients and my cat's vet bills were piling up. I asked a good friend for a lifeline, and he got me access to Andy's full course. I devoured it. Then, in one of Andy's latest youtube videos, he mentioned "dynamic headlines on a landing page."
That was it. That was the missing piece...Hopefully!
A quick bit of Javascript, and my new landing page was alive, or should I say landing PAGES. Instead of needing dozens of pages for different services or locations, I now had one single, powerful page that changed its text based on the ad the user clicked.
With this new weapon in hand, I went back to the Ads dashboard one more time. Following Andy's course to the letter, I archived everything and started again. Brand new campaigns, new naming conventions, one keyword per ad group, the whole setup recommended by Andy.
The budget is still tiny, but I'm hyped. This is my chance to prove my theory right and, more importantly, to help my client climb out of the hole that agency dug for him.
Now, we wait and see if I actually learned something, this is where I am right now.
I have to give a final shout-out to @Andy Black. Sorry if I sound like a fanboy, but his content gave me so much inspiration. I remember a video where he said something that just clicked: he came from an IT background and loved analytics, so why should anyone with that mindset be scared of Google Ads? He was right. I was in IT too. I love analytical data, but I was letting fear get in the way.
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