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Most businesses assume the secret to better Google Ads is finding the perfect keyword – but that’s only part of the story. Jeff Coleman explains why successful campaigns start with understanding your ideal customer, building the right landing pages, and teaching Google what a qualified lead actually looks like. If you’re spending money on Google Ads, this conversation could help you get much more from every click.
Your Google Ads Keyword List Is Not the Problem
Most people launching a Google Ads campaign start the same way: open Keyword Planner, run some searches, build a list. It feels like the obvious first step. According to Jeff Coleman, founder of Factor Four Marketing, it’s also the wrong one.
Jeff has spent more than two decades building Google Ads campaigns, and his agency now manages accounts ranging from a few thousand dollars a month to half a million. When clicks were cheap, starting with keywords made sense. Now that they cost real money, guessing wrong gets expensive fast, and Jeff’s whole process flips the usual playbook. “We do things backwards from what a lot of agencies do,” he told me, “but I think it’s the right way.”
Start With Who, Not What
Before touching a single keyword, Jeff has his clients build out an ideal customer profile. Not a vague sense of “small business owners,” but a real picture of who buys, what they care about, and what they’re willing to pay for.
Here’s why that matters: a cheap click from the wrong person costs you more than an expensive click from the right one, as only one of them turns into a customer. Jeff’s team worked with a septic company that isn’t the cheapest option in its market, so instead of competing on price, they built out a negative keyword list around terms like “cheap septic pumping.” Every one of those searches would have cost money and gone nowhere.
If you don’t already have an ICP written down, you’re in good company. I’ve watched plenty of business owners skip this step because it feels like busywork compared to writing the actual ads. Jeff says most of his clients have a rough sense of their ideal customer but nothing formal, and he’s found that AI tools are surprisingly good at drafting a starting profile if you feed them the right context. You won’t get it exactly right on the first pass (nobody does). But having something concrete gives you and your team a document to argue with, which beats starting from nothing every time.
“Great Service” Isn’t a Differentiator
Ask most business owners what makes them different, and you’ll hear some version of “we have great service” or “we’re available 24/7.” Jeff hears it constantly, and he’s stopped believing it. Service, in his words, is table stakes. It gets you in the game. It doesn’t make you stand out in an ad.
So his team goes looking for evidence instead. They pull Google reviews, Yelp reviews, and testimonials, then look for patterns in what customers keep saying. For one education client, it turned out students weren’t raving about the curriculum at all. They were raving about specific instructors. That’s the detail worth putting in an ad, because it’s something a competitor can’t copy just by writing similar marketing copy.
If you’re a B2B company without a pile of public reviews to mine, Jeff admits it’s harder. But the exercise still applies: dig for the specific, verifiable thing customers say about you, not the generic claim you’d say about yourself.
Build the Landing Page Before You Finish the Keywords
This is the part of Jeff’s process that tends to catch people off guard. I know it caught me off guard the first time I heard it. Most agencies finalize keywords, write ads, then slap together a landing page at the end. Jeff’s team does it in close to the opposite order. They group keywords loosely, build the landing page, and only then lock in the final keyword list and ad copy around what that page delivers.
The logic holds up once you sit with it. You don’t convert anyone in the ad. The ad’s only job is to get the click. Everything that earns you a customer happens on the landing page, so building that experience first, then working backward to the words that get someone there, keeps the whole funnel consistent from search to signup.
On the page itself, a few things came up repeatedly in our conversation: skip top navigation, or push it down to the bottom, use a hero image that represents the experience someone’s about to have, and consider a lightbox form instead of a static one. Jeff’s team has had success with a small extra step, like clicking “Get a Quote” before the form even appears, as a micro-conversion that pulls people further into the process before they can bail.
Teach Google What a Good Lead Looks Like
Did you know you can train Google’s algorithm to bring you better leads by being stricter about what counts as a conversion in the first place?
Jeff shared an example from a CPR training company. Most of the searches landing on their site were from individuals looking for a single class, but the client’s real business is on-site corporate training. So the team split the landing page: click “on-site training” and fill out the form, that’s a real conversion. Click “individual classes,” you’re routed elsewhere and never counted. The result was a drop from roughly half of all conversions being individuals down to somewhere around five to eight percent in a given month, because Google learned who to show the ad to.
The same logic applies to something as simple as phone call tracking. If every call counts as a conversion regardless of length, you’re telling Google that a ten-second hang-up is just as valuable as a real sales conversation. Jeff’s team typically sets a minimum call duration before it counts toward anything. It’s a small adjustment with a real, compounding effect on lead quality.
What To Check First
If your campaigns aren’t hitting the cost-per-lead number your sales model needs, Jeff’s advice is to work through the funnel in order. Start with your keywords and negative keyword list: are you paying for clicks from people who were never going to buy? Then look at your ad copy: does it speak the language of the customer you actually want? Finally, the landing page: is there friction between what someone searched for and what they land on?
None of this is a one-time fix, and Jeff is upfront about that. His team treats campaigns as something they’ll manage for years, which means testing, revisiting, and adjusting as they go. That’s not a failure of the strategy. It’s the strategy.
Transcript From Jeff Coleman’s Episode
Rich: My next guest is the founder of Factor Four Marketing and has been building results-driven Google Ads campaigns since 2004. His agency manages more than $8 million in annual ad spend, helping businesses move beyond trust the process to trust the results. He works with local service companies to Fortune 500 corporations and has taught digital marketing at UC San Diego Extension and USDA.
He’s known for his transparent, results-driven approach to making Google Ads work. Today, we’re going to be looking at why your Google Ads are underperforming and what to do about it with Jeff Coleman. Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
Jeff: Rich, so good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Rich: My pleasure. I’m curious, how did you get started in digital advertising, and what led you to focus on Google Ads for service-based businesses?
Jeff: Yeah. So when I graduated from college, there was no digital advertising. So I got into it, built my first website for a friend in ’99, kind of got hooked on the whole digital concept, but really started thinking about how are they going to drive people to their website?
And fast-forward a couple years, and I started working at a company where they were using Google Ads. They were a very early adopter. They were doing domains and web hosting, and most of their budget was being spent on Google Ads at that time, which was really unusual, and so I figured I better learn it. And the really cool thing for me was just the combination of getting in front of someone who’s already looking for that specific solution, the whole keywords, matching those with ads that are a really good fit. It all just really clicked for me.
And, you know, I didn’t really look back much after that. I still did some broader marketing, but once I started my own firm about 17 years ago, we did some other marketing for folks but just kept getting narrower and narrower because we were specialized and others were kind of dropping out of the Google Ads space, at least serving smaller customers. And so that’s what we’ve been focused on almost exclusively for the last nine or so years.
Rich: All right. So I think what a lot of us think about launching Google Ad campaigns, we default to keyword research, and yet you seem to have a contrarian approach to this. So where do you feel we should actually begin?
Jeff: You need to start way earlier than the keyword research. You need to understand who is the ideal customer profile because Google Ads, the whole keyword focus made sense when clicks were cheap. But as they’ve gotten more expensive, understanding who you’re really targeting has become more and more important.
And so I think you should start with an ideal customer profile. And then the thing you need to layer on is what’s truly different about the business that’s running the ads. Because you need to stand out from what can look like really cookie cutter ads that other people are running because it’s so expensive to have someone click on your ad and not be interested in what you are really offering. So you want to stand out to the right kind of people.
And then when you combine those two things, along with landing pages that really speak to your ideal customer, you start to train Google to actually show your ads to the right people. And so you get more qualified leads, you spend less money on untargeted leads or clicks, and it’s a virtuous cycle that you get into.
Rich: All right. You’ve dropped a lot of stuff, and I want to dig into each one. So let’s go back to the beginning. I think the first thing that you mentioned is this idea of the ideal client persona. Now, somebody might argue that as long as I know the keywords that people are searching for, why do I care about my ICP, because my ICP would be searching for these terms? What’s your counter argument?
Jeff: Yes, sometimes that is true. But also, we uncover keywords or decide certain keywords aren’t a good fit because they aren’t in line with the customer profile that the business wants to target.
One example would be, we work with a big septic company, and one of their, they’re not the cheapest, so a lot of people are just looking for the cheapest septic. So they already know they don’t want to show up for keywords like ‘cheap septic pumping’ or ‘inexpensive’ or anything like that. So we eliminate that whole group of keywords, we actually put them in as negatives.
And but the other thing is they know that they do well with people who are very time-sensitive or they’re busy, and so they love online booking. So if anyone’s looking for any terms that have to do with online booking or exact time of arrival, those aren’t really common keywords. Some people do search on those, and particularly as people are doing longer types of searches because they’re voice-driven and they’re talking to AI. Those are things that you want to make sure you show up for because they are a great fit for who you who you really want as your customer.
Rich: I don’t want to get bogged down in how do you develop an ICP, because I feel like that’s an entire episode or three unto themselves. But do you have any quick tips or wins that you found in working with your client base who maybe hadn’t thought about developing out an ICP, but now they’re in the situation where they’re trying to develop ads with you and you’re putting their feet to the fire?
Jeff: Yeah. So we actually do it for our clients, because they usually don’t have them. A few clients have. AI is actually really quite good at it if you give it the right information to start. So what do you think is you ideal customer? And most businesses have some sense of that, but they’ll build out a full profile, and it’s not 100% right, but it gives you a really great starting point.
And then we walk through the specifics of that with the client, and then they can be very clear on, “Oh, no, that’s not quite right. That’s the wrong age demographic,” or, “We do that, but that’s not a great fit.” And so it’s a great conversation starter. So we’ve found that to be really a fast way to get started on an ICP.
Rich: One last question before we move on to kind of the next thing that you brought up. My understanding, because I don’t run Google Ads myself, my understanding is that within Google, you do have some filters that you can put in that are demographic-driven. On top of just thinking through your ICP, do you also engage those filters to better focus, or do you feel like just focusing in on your ICP is enough in most cases?
Jeff: It depends on the keywords and how much those differentiate the intent of the person who’s searching. So we do filter for demographic like household income, occasionally male or female. We work mainly in services, but if they know their demographic really well, and then there are other audiences you can layer on top.
We’ve been testing more of that to see if it helps. I can’t say it’s been super clear, but every incremental improvement you get out of it can be worth it. So it is worth testing, and Google has a great feature that you can observe an audience, set it up and not have it impact how it serves ads, but you can go back and look at it two weeks later and see is that audience worth turning into a targeting audience rather than just an observation one.
Rich: Interesting. All right. Now, the next group of things that you focused on was the idea of what makes you different or amazing. Or as I like to say on the show, what makes you remarkable? So what so many of us might say, “Well, no, we have really good service,” or we have 24/7 support or whatever it is.
But I’m getting the impression that that’s not enough. So when you’re talking to your clients about, like, what makes them truly different, what are the kind of things that you’re trying to uncover that will then inform your ads?
Jeff: Yes. So I hear far too often, “We have great service,” as if you just asked the business owner. So we will still ask them, but we’ve stopped believing that’s the thing. Because service is just… you need… that’s table stakes to play the game.
So what we like to do, if it is a B2C company, we look at Google reviews or any Yelp reviews, whatever we can find on the web. And, once again, AI is super helpful here to find the trends of those reviews. Do they say that the service people are really friendly? Or for some of our education clients, we realized that the instructors were what really made the difference for students, and that’s what they talked about in the reviews.
Once we can uncover that, that’s something you can talk about in the ads that make you stand out and also make you more likely to be happy with the results because you got what other people say they got out of the experience.
Testimonials, reviews, anything we can get from the customer is usually where we’re getting most of the value because A lot of business owners don’t know what makes them different, unfortunately, because they’re too close to it, and they don’t know what the competitors are really doing in terms of the experience that customers are having. Reviews is definitely the best one. It’s a little harder with B2B, but we dig up whatever we can, wherever we can find it, to try and get to that as well.
Rich: All right. So we’ve identified our ICPs. We’ve identified what makes us remarkable. You kind of passed over keyword research and then came back to it at the end. Because landing pages, I think, in some ways are the end.
Is there anything different about the keyword research, or how does the keyword research change now that we have a clear picture of who we’re serving and how we’re different than our competition?
Jeff: So yes, it does change the keyword research because you want to make sure all of your keywords align with who you’re targeting specifically. And so, yes, the next step is keyword research and really understanding where you’re going to be most likely to find the ideal customer. That still gets back to really grouping your keywords well, knowing that you can write one very good ad for each group of keywords, and having that be really solid.
But we actually tend to flip it. We usually do the landing page first before we even do the… I mean, we do some keyword research, but we don’t do the final keyword research until we build the landing page, because that is where you convert someone. You don’t convert them in the ad, and so we want to make sure the keywords don’t change much based on the landing page, but we tend to do keywords and ads together.
And so you group them, you do the landing page, and then you build your keyword lists and group them based on how you want to advertise that landing page, how you want to take people from what they’re thinking, what they searched on, to what they’re seeing in the ad. Which then flows very continuously into what they see on the landing page and the experience they have there. So we do things backwards from what a lot of agencies do, but I think it’s the right way.
Rich: All right. So let’s just kind of break down some of what you said, because it sounds like when you’re doing these campaigns, when you take on a new Google Ads client, that you’re creating a few different campaigns, possibly around different services. And, and I am curious how do you split these things up?
And then you’re developing, if I’m understanding you correctly, a specific landing page for each one of these campaigns. So talk to me a little bit about how do you make these decisions? If you’ve got an HVAC company or a service-based company, how are you attracting this?
Because I know that some people would be like, “Oh, well, we’re in three different cities, so we’re going to run different campaigns that are geographically based.” And other people are like, “Well, we offer plumbing and heating, so we’re going to create two different campaigns for those kind of things.” What’s your approach when it comes to divvying up the work that Google Ads needs to do?
Jeff: Yeah. So landing pages come down to being how each different thing shakes out and you want to explain it. So it can be different for different clients even if you’re running a similar type of campaign.
So for example we have a provider of site services that we run everything to the same landing pages because they offer exactly the same thing in each of their 140 locations. But we do separate out temporary fences from porta potties because if you are looking for a temporary fence, that’s all you really want to see. We also have done landing pages for events, because if you are looking for temporary fence for an event, you are thinking about it differently than if you’re in the construction industry.
And if you give us enough of a clue in those keywords that we can send you to something specifically about events. And we also know if you’re getting fence for events, you probably need other things, too. Then we start to be able to offer you something more complete. So there’s not a clear-cut answer to how you break it down. You want to always send someone to the page that is as close as possible to what they searched on.
But it can depend on how your business is structured, how you serve those customers as to what that means at the end of the day. If someone’s looking for heating, you want to make sure you send them to a heating page. You don’t want to send them to an air conditioning page about air conditioning type of thing. But if they’re searching on HVAC, now you have to send them to a place that talks about both because you don’t know how to separate it.
So it’s almost always worth building the landing page if you think it’s going to give the customer a different experience. And we look at it as we’re building campaigns that should last years. So it’s worth all the upfront investment, and most of our clients do stick around for years, and even more than a decade for some of our clients. And their campaigns don’t need a lot of maintenance. They obviously need some, but they still flow through, and it all makes sense in two years from now. So it’s worth doing that investment upfront.
Rich: Okay. I’m taking it that you’ve built out dozens if not hundreds of landing pages over the years. What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned that make for a more effective landing page, keeping in mind all the things you’ve already said about really trying to narrow the focus down as much as you can?
But are there certain things that you’ve seen, like putting the form at the top of the page or the bottom of the page, or getting rid of the navigation? What are some of the go-to things that you always do before you start thinking about little nuances that might be right for this client or this campaign?
Jeff: Sure. So some of the big things are, as you mentioned, no navigation or it’s actually at the bottom. We don’t put it at the top. It depends on the client whether the phone number’s the most prominent thing they see or whether it’s a form. One of the things we’ve been having a lot of success with is not putting the form on the page, but putting it in a lightbox so people have to click get a quote depending on what they do, because that’s a micro conversion that actually is one little step towards them completing things, and we’ve had pretty good success with that.
The hero image is super important because that gives people the feel of your business and the feel of what they’re going to get from it. And then testing different headlines, making sure you’re aligned with what someone was searching on and what they’re thinking.
And we’re not always right. I mean, we’ve done hundreds of landing pages and sometimes they just don’t land. We’re struggling with one client right now who does retirement planning, and we’re using YouTube campaigns, and people just aren’t converting on the page, and we think it’s a trust issue. You know, it’s just too early for them to sign up for an actual consultation, but we’re building micro steps in there for them to help them, and so this is just an ongoing process. We’ve only been working on it a couple months.
But these are the things that it really depends on the business as to if it’s someone who’s going to let a service into your life and you’re making a big commitment, it’s a lot harder than someone who’s going to drop something off at your house on your doorstep. So there are different things you need to test there.
But the headlines, no navigation at the top, and making sure whatever action you want is prominent, and maybe a micro conversion, those are all things that have made a difference for different clients.
Rich: Makes sense. And you bring up an important point, that all marketing is experimentation. And you can have all the experience in the world, but something new comes along and you’ve got to test some things. And yeah, it’s an important thing for anyone who’s out there listening right now, that your agency may not get it right on day one. The goal is to keep on getting closer to that goal.
Jeff: Absolutely.
Rich: All right. So you had talked a little bit earlier on just about training Google to send the right type of clients to us to bring down our acquisition costs. What are the things that we’re talking about here? How can we use conversion tracking or other signals to basically teach Google which leads are valuable to us and which do we want less of?
Jeff: Yeah. So the algorithms in Google are very goal-driven, so you want to make sure you’ve got the right goal in front of them, and it looks different for different clients.
So for example, phone calls. If you are using phone calls as one of your conversions, all you really have right now is the time of the phone call. And I’ve seen this for some big clients, the former agency set it at any phone call counts as a conversion. And that looks good for your metrics, but if they’re only on for 10 seconds, that means they weren’t actually ever going to become a client, at least on that call. So making sure that the length of the phone call is appropriate for your business. 60 seconds is the default we use with most clients, but sometimes it can differ. It can be longer, could be a little shorter. So that’s a pretty straightforward one.
The other thing we’ve done for some clients is we have a CPR training company we work with, and they go on site to organizations to do the training. They run a couple classes for individuals, but that’s not what they want to focus on. That’s not what they want their Google Ads to be spending on. But most of the searches in Google are for individuals looking for a class.
And so we came up with an idea for them. We didn’t want to count the individuals as conversions. So when you get to their landing page and you get a quote, a little box pops up that says, “Are you looking for on-site training? Are you looking for classes for an individual?” If you click ‘classes for an individual’, it takes you to another site which has what they do have available. But we never count that as a conversion. The only ones we count as a conversion are the people who click ‘on-site training’ and then fill in the form.
What that’s done is dramatically reduced the number of conversions they get for individuals. It’s still not zero, but it’s gone from about 50% of their conversions down to maybe 5% to 8% on a given month. And so we have been training the algorithms to only show to people who are within organizations, might have a specific role, all those things.
Google claims they have over 250 signals they’re using before they show an ad to someone, and I believe it. They know enough about us, and we’ve seen this really work for this client in particular, so that they’re not getting many of the individuals filling in. So it brought their marketing qualified leads down almost to half of what they were before because we’ve done this. And we’re experimenting with a few other clients that really get too many people who aren’t a great fit for them.
Rich: That’s a great story, and I just want to make sure that everybody understands. So when you say you’re not counting it as a conversion, it’s not about you, Jeff, counting it or the client counting it. You’re signaling back to Google that when they click on that link that takes them to the individual CPR lessons, that doesn’t count as a conversion. But when they do the other action, that does count as a conversion, and now Google has a better picture of, oh, you want this type of client, not the other type of client.
Jeff: Yes.
Rich: Fantastic. Love it. For people who are listening now and they’re like, “I’m running Google Ads, but suddenly I think that maybe I’m not doing it optimally,” what’s the first thing they should take a look at to see if they can improve their Google Ads in your opinion?
Jeff: I’d love to think that we’re running all the campaigns optimally. We’re probably not. What it comes down to is how much are you paying per lead? How does that fit into your sales model, in your conversion rate to actual customer, and does it work for you?
We work a lot harder on client campaigns where we’re not at that number yet. And so when you’re not hitting that number, it comes down to where is it falling down? And so that could be you have the wrong keywords, Google’s just making it too broad. We do a lot of negative keywords for every campaign these days. Even if you’re using phrase match and exact match, you still need negative keywords. So how can you tighten up the people who are actually seeing your ads?
The next step is, does your ad actually communicate to the right customer? Are you using the language that makes sense to that ideal customer? And then the third step is the landing page. Is it targeted to them? Is it easy to convert? Is there any friction that’s making it harder for someone to become a lead?
And all of those pieces, as you get them going better and better, are going to be effective. And you want to constantly watch how much your cost per lead costs you so that you can keep doing it for as long as you’re making money with it, you want to keep it going.
Rich: All right. If people want to learn more about you and your business and maybe how Factor Four Marketing can help them, where can we send them online?
Jeff: Sure. So you can go to factorfour.com, F-A-C-T-O-R-F-O-U-R.com, and that’s the company. We’re just five people. You can learn about us on there, but if you fill in the contact form and have a question, that’s coming straight to me. I’m still the first contact for any prospects or anyone who wants to talk about what we do.
But yeah, there’s a decent amount of information about us, why we’re a little different than other agencies, and we work with everyone from someone spending a few thousand dollars a month to Google, to half a million dollars a month, because they all need help. A lot of people need help with that, so we’re happy to work with whoever.
Rich: Awesome. Jeff, thanks for your time today. Really appreciate it.
Jeff: Thanks for having me, Rich. It’s been fun.
Show Notes:
Jeff Coleman and his team at Factor Four Marketing has helped businesses of all sizes generate better leads through data-driven Google Ads strategies. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn, or check out their website to find out more about how they could help your business.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, digital agency offering branding, web design, and digital marketing located in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.