Clicks and Clarity with Claire
If you’re spending real money on Google Ads and still asking, “Why isn’t this working?”—this podcast is for you.
I’m Claire Jarrett, Google Ads strategist and founder of Jarrett Digital. Each week, I break down what’s actually going on behind the numbers—so you can stop wasting ad spend, start attracting qualified leads, and scale with confidence.
No fluff. No jargon. Just clear advice, real audits, and proven strategies from accounts managing four to six figures in monthly ad spend.
Whether you're DIY-ing your ads or working with an agency, this is the clarity you've been missing.
Clicks and Clarity with Claire
$23,000 a Month and Nobody Was Tracking the Phones
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$23,000 spent in a month. 9 form submissions. Zero phone calls tracked.
Claire audits a home remodelling company where maximise clicks was still running after a year, 60 keywords were crammed together, and luxury leads were being buried by general searches.
She explains why missing phone tracking means you are guessing whether your ads work — and why luxury home remodelling keywords need their own campaign with their own budget.
Welcome to Clicks and Clarity with Claire.
$23,000 in 30 days. 9 conversions. And not a single phone call being tracked.
I audited a home remodelling company that was spending serious money on Google Ads. The dashboard showed 9 form submissions over the past month. No phone calls at all.
Now, for a home remodelling company, that is unusual. People searching for kitchen remodelling or luxury home renovation are not filling in forms. They are picking up the phone. They want to talk to someone about a project that is going to cost them tens of thousands of dollars.
But because phone calls were not being tracked, we had no idea how many actual leads were coming in. We were guessing. After a year of data and $40,000 in spend, we were still guessing.
And it gets worse.
The bidding was set to maximise clicks. Not maximise conversions. Maximise clicks tells Google to bring in as many clicks as possible regardless of whether those people convert. It is what you use at the very beginning of a campaign when you have no conversion data. This account had been running for a year. It should have moved to maximise conversions long ago. But because there was no phone tracking, there were not enough conversions for Google to learn from. So the bidding was stuck on the most basic setting.
The campaign structure was a mess.
60 keywords crammed into ad groups where they did not belong. Home remodelling, renovation, design, build, contractor, luxury. All mixed together. Kitchen remodelling sitting next to design for kitchen cabinets, which is a completely different search. Someone searching for kitchen remodelling wants a company to redo their kitchen. Someone searching for design for kitchen cabinets wants a specific item. Those are not the same customer.
And the luxury keywords were being buried.
When someone types in luxury home remodelling or high end kitchen design, that is a high value lead. But those keywords were sitting in the same ad group as cheaper, higher volume terms. The budget was being eaten up by the general searches before the luxury keywords ever got a chance to show.
Those luxury keywords needed their own campaign with their own budget. Because the moment someone searches for luxury, you want that ad to show every single time. You cannot afford to have it competing for budget against home remodelling near me.
The ad strength was mixed. Some ads were poor. Some were good. A few had eventually been pushed to excellent. But the ones at poor were barely showing in auctions at all. And the owner did not know that, because Google does not tell you when your ads are not being shown. It just quietly stops showing them.
I could see from the change history that the owner was active in the account. Adding demographic targeting. Swapping broad match to phrase match. Testing different landing pages. He was clearly engaged and wanted to learn.
But it looked like the AI recommendations had been guiding a lot of the decisions. And the AI had been suggesting changes that made the structure worse, not better.
The fix was a complete rebuild.
One campaign for kitchens. One for bathrooms. One for interiors. One for condos. One for home additions. And within each, separate ad groups for each keyword theme. Kitchen remodelling near me in one group. Custom kitchen design in another. Kitchen renovation plus the city name in another.
Then split further by geography. One campaign per city within the service area. Because people looking for home remodelling want someone local. And the ads need to reflect that.
And critically, set up phone call tracking. Because without it, you are spending $23,000 a month and you have no idea whether it is working.
That is it for today.
If you are spending money on Google Ads and you do not know how many phone calls are coming from it, book a free audit at clairejarrett.com.
So many thanks for listening.
Bye for now.