Liz MooreheadYou’re staring at your Google Ads performance and something isn’t adding up.
The traffic isn’t where it should be. The right people aren’t showing up. Or the numbers that used to feel predictable suddenly look shaky, and it doesn’t make sense. Your budget hasn’t changed. Your offer hasn’t changed. Your landing page hasn’t changed. But your traffic has. And now you’re trying to figure out why.
Maybe your boss is pressing for answers. Maybe your client is nudging for “more.” Maybe you’re just tired of guessing why the results aren’t matching the effort.
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I’ve seen this across every kind of account I manage, from e-commerce brands selling watch straps or luxury bouquets to B2B companies bidding on industrial materials most people can’t even pronounce. Different audiences. Different goals. Same pressure. When traffic dips or stalls, everyone feels it: your leadership, your sales team, your agency, and you.
And if you’re the one responsible for performance, you feel it the most.
Because traffic isn’t just a metric in a dashboard. It’s the engine that determines whether anything else downstream can work. You cannot convert people who never arrive.
That’s why this article matters.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an eCommerce brand trying to boost sales, a B2B lead gen team looking to increase qualified conversions, or a business owner watching your traffic and overall ROI like a hawk… you’re in the right place.
I’m going to walk you through the exact strategies I use to increase the right website traffic with Google Ads. Together we’re going to unpack how to increase the volume of high-intent, high-quality visitors who match your real buyers.
Specifically, you’re going to learn:
- How to choose messaging that signals trust and relevance
- How to use the right audience and keyword strategies for intent
- How to avoid wasting budget on impressions and clicks that will never convert
- How to identify the levers that actually influence traffic quality
- How to test and optimize without guessing
- How to evaluate whether your agency or partner is doing the work well
- And how to spot red flags when they aren’t
By the end, you’ll have a clear, practical system you can apply immediately (whether you’re managing your own ads or working with a partner) to increase qualified traffic and get your campaigns back on track.
1. Write ad copy that builds trust and speaks to real people
When I’m trying to increase high-quality traffic, the first place I look is the ad copy. Not because “copy solves everything,” but because it’s the first moment your buyer decides whether you’re worth their click.
A lot of brands lean on generic claims like “#1 in your area” or “Top-rated service provider.” Anyone can say that. It doesn’t prove anything, and users can feel the emptiness of it. I avoid those phrases entirely.
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Instead, I write ads the way real people talk about businesses they trust.
If I’m running campaigns for a foundation repair company, I won’t say “#1 foundation repair near you.” Instead, I’ll say something like “The foundation repair company your friends and neighbors recommend.”
That line instantly tells a homeowner two things:
- I’m talking to them
- There’s social proof behind the work
It also signals that if they click through, they’ll see verified reviews to back it up.
Authenticity beats generic claims every time. When your copy reflects how people actually decide who to trust, you attract users who already have the intent to take action, not people who are just window-shopping.
2. Use customer lists to find more people who behave like your best buyers
One of the most effective traffic strategies I use (especially for lead gen) is building customer lists the right way. If a business has emails, addresses, or other identifiers from people who’ve already converted, I upload that data so Google can find lookalike users who share the same characteristics.
🔎 Go deeper: How to upload your Shopify customer list into Google Ads
This isn’t guesswork. Google analyzes everything it can: household income ranges, demographics, online behavior, interests… whatever signals it can legally match. It then goes out and finds people who resemble your highest-intent customers.
It’s basically saying:
“Here are the people who already bought from us. Go find more just like them.”
This gives you a baseline of qualified users without needing massive budgets or months of trial and error. When you pair lookalike audiences with strong intent-based keywords, you get faster data, better traffic quality, and more consistency across your campaigns.
3. Target keywords that match real intent, not just high volume
You can’t increase traffic with the right buyers if your Google Ads keyword strategy is built on vanity metrics. I see this mistake constantly: people chase big search-volume keywords and then wonder why none of the traffic converts.
Volume matters, but it’s not the whole story.
A great example is one of my eCommerce clients who sells, let’s just say, high-volume essentials for adults. The keyword they rank for has around 20,000 searches a month… but almost none of those searchers have any intent to buy the specific customized version my client offers.
🔎 Go deeper: How to analyze keywords for effective ad campaigns
It looks like a goldmine on paper, but it’s the wrong traffic entirely.
Huge volume. But almost zero purchase intent for what this brand actually sells. Users searching that term are just looking for any generic condom. They’re not looking for custom products. That keyword would burn through budget fast without delivering meaningful conversions.
There’s always a balance:
- Too little volume and your campaign can’t scale
- Too much volume and your targeting becomes diluted
- The wrong kind of volume brings in traffic that looks good on paper but never converts
So I focus on finding the sweet spot: keywords with enough search volume to sustain performance but with clear, specific intent that aligns with what the business actually offers. Tools like Keyword Planner, Semrush, and SpyFu help me evaluate both opportunity and competition, but the intent behind the query is what ultimately drives my decisions.
4. Use location targeting to focus your budget where intent actually exists
One of the biggest advantages you have in Google Ads is the ability to get hyper-specific about where your ads show. And if you’re running lead gen or service-based campaigns, this matters a lot more than people think.
I can target as granular as a single ZIP code. I can widen to a county, city, or state. I can even break out different regions inside your service area and see exactly how each performs. That means I’m not wasting money showing ads to people who will never become customers, either because they’re too far outside your radius or they simply aren’t the right fit.
📊 Case study: Revamping and optimizing a fashion accessories Google Ads account
And yes, I’ll absolutely negate locations that don’t make sense.
If a particular area consistently brings in low-intent or low-income audiences who aren’t going to need your service, I’m going to pull spend out of that zone. On the flip side, if one ZIP code reliably converts at a higher rate, I’ll shift more budget there.
5. Use ad scheduling so your ads only run when your buyers are actually active
You can also tell Google when to show your ads, which is a lifesaver for companies that rely on real-time intent.
For instance, I manage ads for a kitchen remodeling company on the East Coast. We realized we were wasting a chunk of budget between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. because none of their buyers are shopping for $30,000 kitchen remodels at 3 a.m. And because Google starts spending early in the day, those irrelevant clicks were eating the budget before the right customers were even awake.
So we shut off ads during those hours.
When you evaluate your campaign performance by time of day, you start to see clear trends. Some hours produce nothing. Some hours dominate. Your job is to align spend with the hours where real intent shows up, not just where impressions look good.
6. A/B test to understand what actually works (not what you hope is working)
There are countless levers inside Google Ads, but without testing, you’re guessing. And guessing is how you waste money fast.
🔎 Go deeper: 5 key reasons to take advantage of A/B testing
A/B testing lets me isolate variables (audiences, keywords, copy, headlines, or even bid strategies), so I can see what’s truly driving traffic and what’s not. I don’t throw everything into one test and hope for clarity. I test clean and I test with purpose.
This is where strategy and data intersect:
- I’ll test different audiences because Google will often surprise you with who actually converts.
- I’ll test different bid strategies. “Maximize clicks” is good for increasing volume when you need more data. But once you build that data set, you should switch to “maximize conversions,” because then Google can optimize based on real behavior, not guesses.
- I’ll test copy and headlines so we’re not relying on assumptions about what message resonates.
The whole point is control. If something works, I want to know why it worked so I can scale it. If something flops, I want to know why it flopped so we don’t repeat it.
7. Product and eCommerce: same levers, different psychology
I want to take a moment to speak directly to those of you in eCommerce.
What we’ve already discussed so far absolutely applies to you. And that’s because eCommerce isn’t a different universe. The same levers still move performance, but the psychology shifts depending on who’s doing the shopping. You can’t write for a “generic buyer” when your audience ranges from luxury shoppers to everyday consumers to people buying gifts for someone else. Their motivations aren’t the same, so your copy can’t be either.
You have to speak in their language, not yours.
A luxury buyer isn’t hunting for a discount. A budget-conscious buyer cares about value. A gift buyer cares about speed, clarity and whether the product “feels right” for the person they’re buying for. If the message misses the emotional context of the purchase, performance tanks. Not because the product is wrong, but because the angle is wrong.
🔎 Go deeper: How to optimize product titles for effective Google Ads campaigns
And keyword intent becomes even more critical here. You can’t afford to bring in people who are searching for something totally different and think they’ve found it on your site. That’s how you waste your budget and flood your funnel with the wrong traffic. If a keyword sounds adjacent but the intent is miles off, you’ll attract a crowd that has zero interest in what you actually sell.
This is the part most eCommerce brands underestimate. They assume traffic volume is the goal. It’s not. Alignment is. When your message, your targeting and your buyer’s psychology line up, conversion lifts come fast. When they don’t, no amount of optimization fixes the mismatch.
8. What to ask your Google Ads agency when your campaigns are failing
For those of you working with agencies on your Google Ads campaigns, this section is for you.
When performance tanks, most people assume something dramatic is happening inside their ad account, but the truth is usually much simpler. Agencies tend to default to surface-level tweaks or reassuring updates, and if you don’t know what to ask, you’ll never get real visibility into why your traffic is dropping.
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I’ve worked with enough teams to know that the red flags show up the moment you start pushing for specifics. So instead of accepting vague explanations like “seasonality,” “the algorithm is shifting,” or “we’re monitoring it,” here are the questions you should be asking.
If you’re struggling with your agency, the following questions will force clarity, and they will make it very hard for an agency to hide behind buzzwords.
1. “What changed between last month and this month?”
You’re looking for concrete answers here, not feelings or guesses.
If your agency can’t tell you exactly what was adjusted (keywords, bids, targeting, placements, creative, landing page alignment), then they’re not managing your account. They’re babysitting it. Declines always have a cause. If they can’t articulate the cause, they haven’t investigated.
2. “Show me the actual queries driving my traffic.”
This one matters more than anything else.
Your ads don’t run on keywords. They run on queries. And sometimes the thing tanking your performance is just one misleading search term dragging the whole campaign down. If they aren’t reviewing search terms weekly — not monthly — you’re burning budget.
You’ll know you have a problem if:
- They send you a keyword list instead of a query report
- They can’t explain which queries are converting
- They can’t tell you which irrelevant queries are spending money
If they’re not looking at queries, they’re flying blind.
3. “How are you adjusting targeting based on performance, not assumptions?”
Campaigns fail when targeting drifts away from the buyer’s real-world behavior.
If results drop and their only move is “let’s broaden targeting” or “let’s let the algorithm learn,” that’s not strategy. That’s autopilot. You want to hear how they’re tightening or refining targeting in response to actual signals, not just throwing more impressions into the universe.
4. “What tests are currently running, and what hypothesis are you testing?”
If they can’t point to a live test tied to a clear hypothesis, your account is not being optimized. Full stop.
A test should look like:
- a specific change,
- aimed at solving a specific problem,
- with a measurable expected outcome.
If all you get is, “We’re testing some new ads,” that’s not testing. That’s decoration.
5. “Walk me through the story the data is telling, not the dashboard.”
Dashboards are pretty. They’re also deceptive.
You want to hear how your agency interprets behavior patterns, not just how they report numbers. A good partner can explain why things changed, what they’ve ruled out, and what they believe is happening next. If they can only narrate metrics, they don’t understand your account well enough to fix it.
🔎 Go deeper: A client manager’s guide to mastering the Google Ads dashboard
What a healthy agency relationship actually looks like
When a Google Ads agency is doing its job well, you can feel it. They’re transparent with the data. They show you what’s working, what’s not, and how your performance compares to wider industry benchmarks. You’re never left guessing. A good agency will walk you through their strategy in plain language, not jargon, and make sure you understand why they’re making certain decisions.
They’re proactive, too, bringing tests, ideas, and opportunities to you instead of waiting for you to raise concerns. When that level of clarity and communication is consistent, it builds trust. You don’t have to chase them for answers because you already know what’s happening and why.
And here are the signs your agency is holding you back
On the other hand, there are patterns that tell you things are going sideways. Big promises with no proof behind them are always a warning sign, especially guarantees tied to specific click numbers or outcomes no agency can truly control.
If they dodge data, deflect questions, or only react when something is on fire, you’re not looking at a partner. You’re looking at a vendor in survival mode. And if you feel like you have to interrogate them constantly just to get clarity, that’s not you being “too involved.” That’s a breakdown in trust.
High turnover (which is common among agencies) isn’t always the issue; poorly managed turnover is. When communication gets choppy, reporting becomes thin, or strategy seems to reset every few weeks, you end up paying for the chaos.
Move from guesswork to control with your Google Ads
When your traffic drops or the wrong people keep showing up, it’s easy to feel like everything is slipping out of your hands. But nothing about Google Ads has to be guesswork.
Once you understand how intent, messaging, audience signals, and structure work together, the path forward becomes clear. Every lever we walked through (your copy, your customer lists, your keyword choices, your locations, your scheduling, your tests) is a data-driven way to pull your campaigns back into alignment with the buyers you actually want.
And that’s the real goal here.
Whether you’re managing your own account or working with an agency, you now have a system for diagnosing issues, tightening your targeting, and spotting the difference between useful optimizations and wasted spend. And they’re the exact strategies I use every day across industries, budgets, and campaign types.
When you apply them consistently, the results stop being unpredictable. They start becoming repeatable. Your traffic improves. Your lead quality improves. And your confidence improves, because you finally understand why your campaigns behave the way they do, and what to do next when something breaks.
That’s the real power of doing this work well: control.
And now you have it.
