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Client wants to phase out Google Ads because “leads are the same as last year.” Except last year he had SEO. How do you deal with this logic?
Posted by on March 22, 2026 at 9:04 amNeed to vent and also genuinely looking for advice on how you handle these conversations.
Client came to me last year saying his SEO had completely tanked and leads had dried up. Wanted to start Google Ads from scratch — no existing account, no historical data, nothing. We built it up, got it running, started generating leads.
Fast forward to this year. He pulls up last year's numbers and this year's numbers, sees the total lead count is roughly the same, and concludes that Google Ads "isn't working."
I've tried explaining this multiple times: you lost an entire channel (SEO) that was doing the heavy lifting. Google Ads didn't exist in your marketing mix last year. The fact that a brand new paid channel has managed to replace those lost SEO leads and keep your numbers flat is actually the win here. But he genuinely expects that a new channel should not only cover the gap but also grow leads on top of it. In year one. With a modest budget.
And then there's the attribution mess. He won't let us set up proper tracking across the site. Someone lands on a page from an ad, browses around, fills out a form on a completely different page via direct traffic — and when I try to explain that not everything can be cleanly attributed, he just doesn't buy it. If the CRM says it's not from Google, then Google Ads is useless in his eyes.
Now he wants to "phase off" Google Ads and drop the budget to something like $80/month. The primary keyword he wants to target has a CPC of ~$30. So we're talking about 2-3 clicks a month and somehow expecting results from that.
How do you folks handle clients like this? Especially the ones who think you have a magic wand and refuse to understand that marketing channels don't work in isolation? At what point do you just let them go?
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1 Reply
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I’d have let the client go at this point -> “He won’t let us set up proper tracking across the site.”
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How do I think what the customer says has some truth? CRM is not Google, and I’m curious how you agree to deliver results, like how do you get data without probes?
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