Your past success can be dangerous for your current marketing strategy.
I have a new Google Ads coaching client who sells high-ticket, specialized home furnishings. We'll call him Lou. He used to manage his own Google Ads campaigns about 12 to 15 years ago, and by his own account, he made "killer money" doing it.
But over the last several years, his Google Ads performance dwindled to zero. As I so often hear from my small business owner clients, he had hired multiple professionals to fix it, spending $4,000 a month for months at a time, but nothing worked.
When we started poking around his account to understand why his Google Ads campaigns weren't working, we saw that the search terms seemed high intent. But the conversion rate? Zilch. However, Lou immediately pushed back on my suggestion that his website was the problem...
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Lou's logic? "Twelve years ago, our website was even worse quality than it is today, and it still made us rich. Nine out of ten of our customers prefer to pick up the phone and call us anyway, not buy online."
While I always want to give my clients the benefit of the doubt, it just didn't seem realistic to me that in 2026, 90% of customers preferred picking up the phone to place an order for home furnishings rather than completing the order online. So I probed deeper.
I pulled up Lou's website, and couldn't have even imagined what I saw. The website loaded painfully slowly, the design felt stuck in a different era, and the checkout process was completely unintuitive. Putting it up against the slick, modern furniture sites that consumers are used to today, it didn’t do his premium products justice at all.
And that is where we hit the ultimate marketing blindspot: Lou saw his high call volume as a positive trait to optimize for, rather than a red flag.
Now, what I haven't mentioned yet is that Lou is a character - in the best possible sense of the word! He has a fantastic social media presence and an incredibly warm, engaging personality on camera. For those buyers who have seen his YouTube videos and are truly determined to buy from him because they trust him, they will willingly make the effort to call his shop and place an order over the phone.
But everyone else? The people searching on Google looking for a simple transaction? Click on the ad, then bounce. Most modern buyers looking for home furnishings aren't going to hunt for a phone number when a checkout page fails; they are simply going to buy a similar product from a competitor with a functional website.
I'll be honest, Lou still wasn't convinced. And that's fine! He knows his industry and his customer base better than I do. But I know Google Ads, and I know online shopper behaviour; his Google Ads campaigns will not work with that website. We agreed to disagree on this issue, completed the call by solving other challenges he was facing, and he left me a 5-star review on Google.
I can lead my clients to water, but I can't force them to drink.
Not sure why your Google Ads aren't working the way they used to? Book a call with me and we'll solve your issues together.
