When I would not sell you paid search

The whole trade is paid to say yes. The media agency bills a share of the budget, the freelancer bills a monthly fee, and Google sells media. Nobody in that chain benefits from telling you not to bother.

So it rarely gets said. And that is why there are hundreds of accounts in Finland that have been open for years without anyone asking whether they should be.

Here are five situations where I would say no, and how you can check which group you are in.

1. The sale happens on the contract cycle, not at the moment of search

A property maintenance company can buy paid search for five years and notice nothing — because it would have noticed nothing without it either.

A housing company board decides on its maintenance provider in a meeting. The contract runs three years. It changes through a tender or because someone on the board knows someone. A search engine is nowhere in that chain. The same holds for property management, waste handling, security services and occupational health.

The check: ask your own sales team when the last new client actually decided. If the answer is “when the previous contract ended”, paid search does not reach that moment. It comes around once every three years and nobody googles it.

2. Demand is nothing but your own brand, and nobody is bidding against it

This is the most common way money burns in Finnish accounts, and the nastiest, because it looks like success.

If search volume consists almost entirely of your own name and not a single competitor bids on it, you are paying for clicks you would have had organically for free. The user was already looking for you. They would have clicked the first natural result, which is yours.

And then Google reports those sales as conversions. ROAS is ten. The account looks the best you have ever seen it, and nobody questions it — because the report says profit.

The check: open Auction Insights for your brand terms. If nobody else is there, your brand campaign is cash flow to Google. Try pausing it for two weeks and watch revenue, not the account.

3. The margin cannot carry the click price

This is one multiplication, and it is worth doing before the account is opened.

Take the cost per click and divide it by the conversion rate. That is your cost per acquisition. Compare it to gross margin in euros — not percent, euros. If acquiring the sale costs more than the sale leaves behind, the advertising is loss-making no matter what ROAS says.

Low-value consumer goods e-commerce falls over this constantly. A three-euro click and a two percent conversion rate means 150 euros per customer. If the average order is 40 euros and the margin on it is 30 percent, you are 138 euros down on every sale.

4. The demand does not exist and would have to be created

Paid search harvests demand that already exists. It does not create it.

If your product is a genuinely new category with no name, nobody searches for it — because they do not know what to search for. The money then belongs where demand is created: social, video, or sales. Paid search comes after that, once there is something to search for.

The check: Keyword Planner. If generic terms have no volume, the demand does not exist yet.

5. The buyer is not a person but a procurement process

Public sector, large group purchasing, industrial capital goods where there are a handful of deals a year and the buyers are known by name.

If your sales are decided by requests for proposal and reference lists, paid search does not move them. That is sales work, and the money belongs to a salesperson rather than an auction.

And the distinction that settles most cases

Consumer cleaning works. Corporate cleaning does not.

Same service, same word, opposite answer. A consumer searches for a cleaner today, chooses today and buys today. A company tenders its cleaning once every three years through a procurement process that a search engine cannot enter.

The industry does not decide it. What decides it is whether the moment of buying is the same as the moment of searching.

Why telling you this is worth it for me

It is not, in the short term. Every account I call unnecessary is an invoice I do not send.

But I have been doing this for ten years and I have seen where the other road leads. The account gets opened, it produces numbers that look good, and two years later a finance director asks what came of it. At that point there is no answer — and that conversation always ends the same way.

I would rather say it on the first call.