Quick Wins · For Owners
Five fixes that move cost per lead in 30 days.
No retainer. No agency call. Five tactical fixes you (or whoever runs your ads) can ship before the month ends — sequenced by revenue impact, the highest-leverage ones first.
You spend $5K–$50K a month on paid search. One location, or ten. You’re the one signing the cheque. Cost per lead has crept up. You’d rather find the leak yourself than wait five weeks for an agency to explain it. The five fixes below are sequenced — earlier fixes feed later ones.
The five wins
Each one ships in under a sprint.
Click any title for the lexicon entry behind it. The audit will run all five in parallel and document deltas — but you can ship most of these without us.
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01
Why is my Quality Score stuck at 5/10?
↗ QS 5 → 7 · CPC drops without changing bid
FixPull the 20 keywords carrying 80% of spend. Rewrite ad copy so the keyword phrase appears in H1, ad headline, and landing page hero. Re-run after 14 days.
CauseAd copy is talking past the keyword, and the landing page isn’t echoing the search intent. Google reads both as a relevance failure and inflates your CPC by 30–80% as the penalty.
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02
Why is my CPC climbing while bids are flat?
↘ CPC −20–30% · You stop paying for clicks that never convert
FixAfter QS work (#01), audit the search-terms report — flag every match against an irrelevant query as a negative keyword.
CauseAuction price is moving, not your bid. Either Quality Score has slipped (see #01) or broad-match keywords are dragging you into auctions you shouldn’t be in.
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03
Why is broad match eating my budget?
↘ Broad capped at 15% · Wasted spend on tangential queries stops
FixMove top-spend keywords from broad to phrase or exact match. Keep one broad-match campaign for discovery, but cap it at 15% of total. Branded and bottom-funnel queries should never be on broad match.
CauseGoogle’s default broad-match expansion treats your keyword as a topic, not a phrase — you end up bidding on tangentially related queries that never convert.
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04
Why is my Landing Page Experience rated “below average”?
↗ LPE: below avg → above avg · QS rises again as a knock-on effect
FixTest on real mobile-network throttling, cut form fields to 3 (name, email, phone), and rewrite the H1 to mirror the ad headline. Lift typically lands inside 14 days.
CauseThree usual suspects: (1) page load over 3 seconds on mobile, (2) six or more form fields above the fold, (3) H1 doesn’t match the ad headline. Google scores all three.
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05
Why is my CPL still high after the four above?
↘ CPL −30–50% · Stacked with #01–04 inside 30 days
FixRun a 3-question audit on every landing page: What does the visitor want next? Is the CTA above the fold? Does the form ask for anything you don’t need on first contact? Cutting one form field typically lifts CVR by 15–25%.
CauseWins #01–04 lower the cost side of CPL (cheaper, more relevant clicks). #05 is the conversion side — CTA hierarchy, form friction, trust signals, mobile rendering.
Common questions
What owners ask before they start.
Five questions that come up when an owner looks at the list above and decides what to ship first.
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Can I really run these myself?
You can. Each fix is sized for an owner (or a part-time admin) with Google Ads admin access and a few hours per week, and the estimates are conservative. If you want help shipping them faster — or want the audit to read your account before you start — that’s me, at LOCALiQ.
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Do I need to do all five, or can I cherry-pick?
Sequence matters. Quality Score (#01) lifts CPC (#02) and Landing Page Experience (#04). Match types (#03) reinforces #01 and #02. CPL (#05) is the resulting metric. Cherry-picking #05 without the four above is the most common mistake — you’ll move CVR but the cost side won’t budge.
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What if my CPL is already low — do these still apply?
If CPL is already at category benchmark, the gains are smaller (5–15% rather than 30–50%) but the fixes still apply. The bigger reason to run them: protecting CPL as auction prices climb. QS decay is gradual; you only notice once it costs you.
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Why isn’t Performance Max on this list?
Because PMax is a campaign type, not a fix. The five wins above apply inside PMax (Quality Score still matters for Search portions, match types still matter for asset groups). PMax-specific tactics live in the longer audit.
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What if these don’t move my CPL?
Then the issue is upstream of paid search — usually creative, attribution, or category-level demand. That’s where the audit takes over: it pulls 90 days of data, isolates which of those is the real cause, and sequences the next fix list. Or read the strategic briefs for the consideration-set view.
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