At our June breakfast — the last one hosted at Dream Bank, our home for the better part of fifteen years — Eagan Heath of Silver Path Marketing took on a question most small business owners carry around quietly: is the money I’m pouring into Google Ads actually doing anything? His short answer was bracing. Clicks are easy to buy and easy to celebrate, but clicks don’t pay the bills. The only thing that does is profit, and most accounts are never built to measure it.
In his tenth year running a Madison digital marketing agency, Eagan has spent a decade watching what separates campaigns that print money from campaigns that quietly drain a budget. He told the story of a therapist who came to him fresh out on her own — a brand-new practice and no idea how to find patients. They turned on Google Ads, and within four months she called him. Not to complain, but to ask him to turn the ads off, because she was completely full. That, he said, is what paid search looks like when the fundamentals are right. The rest of the talk was about how to get them right.
Clicks Don’t Pay the Bills
The first thing to understand about Google Ads, Eagan explained, is what kind of advertising it is. Search is pull. You aren’t interrupting anyone — you’re meeting people at the exact moment they go looking for what you sell. Someone typing “emergency plumber near me” has already decided to buy; the only question left is who they call. That’s fundamentally different from the Santa Claus and polar bears selling you a Coke, which is brand marketing meant to plant a feeling for later. Social ads can create demand. Search captures demand that already exists.
That distinction decides whether Google Ads is even right for you. It’s a strong fit when people actively search for your offer, when a lead or sale is worth real money, when you can handle more customers right now, and when you can actually track and follow up on the leads you generate. It’s probably not the right channel yet if no one’s searching for what you do, if your margins are too thin to afford a click, or if your site is slow, broken, or impossible to measure.
From there, Eagan walked the room through the part of the talk he warned would get “mathy.” Google gets people into the top of your funnel — impressions, then clicks — but the money is made at the bottom, mostly off Google, as leads turn into sales. He sketched the back-of-the-napkin version: spend $2,000 a month, get 500 clicks at $4 each, turn 10% of those into leads, close 20% of the leads, and land 10 new customers worth $1,200 apiece. That’s $12,000 in revenue on $2,000 in spend, which looks fantastic — until you remember margins. At a 10% profit margin, that $12,000 leaves you just $1,200 to keep, and you spent $2,000 to get it. The lesson wasn’t “Google Ads doesn’t work.” It was that four numbers — your average sale value, your close rate, the most you can pay per lead, and your profit margin — decide what a click is worth. Not Google.
Stop Sending Buyers to Your Homepage
If the talk had a soapbox, this was it. Do not send paid traffic to your homepage, Eagan said, and ideally don’t send it to your regular website pages at all. Your homepage is built for browsers, not buyers: ten links and no single goal, a generic message that doesn’t match what anyone actually searched, and muddy attribution that makes it impossible to tell which page earned the lead. Every one of those links is a chance for the visitor you just paid for to wander off.
The fix is a dedicated landing page — one offer, one button, every word pointing at a single action. He showed a page built for a Texas firm that helps homeowners contest their property taxes. No menu, no links, just a headline that matched the search (“Stop overpaying your Texas property taxes”), proof stacked down the page (an 87% historical win rate, thousands of Texans represented, zero upfront fees), and one clear call to action. The result: hundreds of leads at roughly $43 each, in a category where lawyers routinely pay more than that for a single click. In ten years of doing this, Eagan said, he has never once seen a dedicated landing page lose to a generic website page.
A few things have to be true underneath all of it. Conversion tracking comes first — if Google can’t see which clicks become leads or sales, it optimizes for the wrong thing, and so do you. Match types matter too: start tight with exact and phrase match so you control what you show up for, then watch your search terms report and prune the junk with negative keywords. (Eagan keeps a standing list of all 49 other states ready to drop in, so a Wisconsin client never pays for a click from someone Googling assisted living in Florida.) And keyword research, he reminded the room, is really applied psychology — people search “lawyer” far more than “attorney,” and almost no one searches “litigation.” Marketing is understanding how people actually talk. One last warning: Google Ads is not a slow cooker. Accounts left untouched drift, junk searches creep in, and Google’s defaults quietly favor Google — including auto-applied “recommendations” you’ll want to switch off.
Track the Lead All the Way to the Sale
This was the section Eagan called the big unlock, and it’s where most accounts stop short. By default, Google sees “50 leads this month” and counts every one the same. But you know better — some of those leads are worth $50 and some are worth $50,000. Close that gap and you stop optimizing for form fills and start optimizing for revenue.
That starts with counting the leads that don’t fill out a form. For a lot of local businesses, the best prospects pick up the phone, so a call tracking number (Eagan pointed to CallRail) ties each call back to the keyword that drove it — and just as importantly, makes sure someone actually answers. He’s set up beautiful campaigns only to listen back and hear every call going to voicemail, which he likened to fumbling at the one-yard line.
The deeper move is offline conversion tracking. Google stamps each click with a hidden ID (the GCLID); your form or CRM stores it with the new lead; when sales marks that deal won or lost, you send the outcome — and the dollar value — back to Google. Feed real sale values back in and the platform can chase the clicks that become big, profitable jobs instead of just cheap ones. Eagan cared about this enough that he built his own tool to do it for clients whose CRMs couldn’t.
Where AI Helps, and Where It Doesn’t
AI now touches every corner of Google Ads, so the 2026 skill is knowing what to hand it. Eagan put Smart Bidding, first-draft ad copy, pattern-spotting, and report summaries firmly in the green-light column — the work AI genuinely makes faster. What still needs a human is the judgment: whether to run ads at all, what a customer is actually worth, the brand nuance that keeps you out of trouble, and the guardrails that catch automation drifting toward waste. AI can’t see the $54,000 job it never heard about.
His caution on automated bidding came as a thought experiment. Imagine you’re at a farm auction bidding on a tractor — except instead of bidding yourself, you hand that job to the auctioneer, the person selling the tractor, and trust them to get you a good deal. That, he argued, is the conflict of interest baked into letting Google set your bids. He leans manual to keep control, and tests automation only where there’s enough data to feed it. Which is the whole punchline: Smart Bidding is only as smart as the data you give it. Conversion tracking, landing pages, call tracking, and offline conversions all do one job — tell the AI the truth about what a customer is worth, so it can go make you money.
If you do three things, Eagan argued, your ads will start making money instead of just spending it. Judge every campaign by profit, not clicks. Send paid traffic to a dedicated landing page built to do exactly one thing. Track each lead all the way to the sale — and use AI for the work, but keep a human on the judgment. Or, as MC Keith Gilmore put it in the Q&A that followed, borrowing from Moneyball: stop swinging for the home run on day one. The clicks to your landing page and the taps on your CTA are base hits, and base hits are what add up to the win.
Follow this link for the presentation slides.
NONPROFIT SPOTLIGHT: Madison Gay Hockey Association
The Madison Gay Hockey Association (MGHA) is a nonprofit recreational hockey league that creates a welcoming and inclusive space for LGBTQ+ players and allies throughout the
Madison area. Their mission is simple but powerful: build community, foster belonging, and make hockey accessible to adults of all skill levels—from complete beginners learning to skate to experienced players looking to stay involved in the game they love.
MGHA provides more than just a place to play hockey. Through leagues, learn-to-play opportunities, and community events, they help create meaningful connections, boost confidence, encourage physical activity, and provide a safe environment where everyone can experience the camaraderie and joy of team sports. Their work helps remove barriers that have historically limited LGBTQ+ participation in athletics and demonstrates the positive impact inclusive sports spaces can have on a community.
One of MGHA’s signature events is their annual MGHA Classic Hockey Tournament, held each spring. The tournament brings together LGBTQ+ hockey players and allies from across the United States and Canada for a weekend of competition, friendship, and community-building. The organization also recruits new players throughout the summer, with league play beginning each September.
Connect with them at:
Website: madisongayhockey.org
Facebook: @MadisonGayHockey
Instagram: @madisongayhockey
Email: info@madisongayhockey.org
