Google Ads for industrial companies: six leaks and how to close them

When I took over ITCE’s Google Ads account in June 2026, the first report I opened was the search terms report. Almost half of the search-term spend, 49.5% or €664, had gone to people looking for free courses, other vendors’ certifications and software ITCE does not sell. In the eight months before, nobody had added a single negative keyword.

ITCE sells IT training and ServiceNow consulting from Sofia Tech Park, not machines. I still use it as the example for industrial companies, because the leaks came from how the account was set up and then left alone, not from the product. A machine dealer or a gearbox repair shop that opens an account gets the same defaults. Sixty days after the rebuild, almost the same budget brought ITCE 42 leads instead of 20.

Here are the six leaks in the order I found them. The table is the short version. The sections below explain each fix and what it looks like in an industrial account.

Leak 1: paying for searches that will never become an RFQ

Every new keyword in Google Ads starts in broad match. Google’s own help page calls broad the default “because it is the most comprehensive”, and it lets your ad show on searches that are merely related to your keyword. For ITCE, related meant students looking for free courses and people preparing for another vendor’s certificate.

I closed this leak in two moves. First, 520 irrelevant search terms went in as negative keywords, added on 11 separate dates, because new junk appears every week once the obvious terms are blocked. Second, 521 keywords moved from Broad to Phrase match and 75 were removed. Phrase match still catches longer searches, but they have to include the meaning of the keyword.

In an industrial account the junk uses different words and has the same effect. These negatives belong in almost every machine dealer’s or repair shop’s account:

• free, manual, manuals, pdf: people looking for documentation, not for a supplier
• jobs, salary, course: job seekers and students
• used, second hand: if you only sell new machines
• brands and models you neither sell nor service

Negative keywords do not match close variants, so “manual” will not block “manuals”. Add plurals and common misspellings yourself. If you advertise in Bulgarian, every inflected form is a separate negative: “безплатно”, “безплатен” and “безплатни” are three entries.

The same logic works in reverse for the searches you want. Part numbers and model names are the best keywords an industrial company owns, because people who type “A10VSO 45” or “6205-2RS” usually need that exact part. Put them in phrase match, so the ad shows for “A10VSO 45 price” and not for a loose relative of the search. My buyer keyword playbook shows how to pull these searches out of your own Search Console data.

Leak 2: letting Google choose the landing page

Of the 79 landing pages that received clicks in ITCE’s account, 70 were chosen by Google, not by ITCE. AI Max was switched on, and with AI Max, Final URL expansion is on by default: Google may replace your chosen page with one it thinks fits the search better. In ITCE’s case it guessed badly.

The fix is one chosen landing page per ad group, with AI Max off until there is a reason to test it. For a machine dealer, the ad group for one press brake series goes to that series’ page, with the datasheet and the quote form on it. The gearbox repair ad group goes to the gearbox repair page, not to the homepage and not to a blog post about pump maintenance. What that page needs in order to win the RFQ is in my article on capability pages.

Leaks 3 and 4: networks nobody chose, ads nobody tested

A Search campaign can also run on Google’s search partner sites and on the Display Network. Search partners are included by default when you create a Search campaign. In ITCE’s account, Display took 851 clicks and €150 and produced 2 leads: €75 per lead, more than three times what a lead from ITCE’s own pages cost.

A buyer looking for a hydraulic pump supplier is rarely won by a banner on a news site. I switched off Display and Search Partners, together with AI Max and auto-generated assets. If you want to try any of them later, run it as a separate campaign with its own budget, so the result is visible instead of buried in the average.

The fourth leak sat in the ads. The whole account had 4 ads, and none had ever been tested against another. I split the campaign into 5 themed ad groups, added 255 keywords that match what ITCE actually sells, and wrote 6 new ads with 15 headlines each. In an industrial account, a theme is one product line or one service: CNC retrofits, spindle repair, hydraulic pumps. Each gets its own keywords, its own ads that name the product, and its own page.

Leak 5: advertising where you are, not where your buyers are

All of ITCE’s clicks came from Bulgaria, while the company wanted to grow across the EU. I added 35 European countries, with ads in English, and limited targeting to people physically in those countries. Google’s default location option also reaches people who have only shown interest in a place. For a supplier, the Presence option, people in or regularly in your locations, is the one to choose.

This was the biggest change in the account. If you already deliver to Romania, Greece or Germany, those buyers belong in your campaign too, in their own language and with a landing page in that language. Then set the schedule. ITCE’s ads now run Monday to Friday, 07:00 to 19:00, when its leads actually arrive. Unless someone answers the phone at night, your ads should run in office hours too.

Leak 6: conversion goals that count the wrong things

Smart Bidding only knows what you tell it a conversion is. Google uses primary conversion actions for bidding and keeps secondary ones for observation only. If a page view, a newsletter sign-up or a visit to the contact page counts as primary, Google learns to buy more of those, reports a low cost per conversion, and your sales team sees no extra quote requests.

I rebuilt ITCE’s conversion goals so that only real leads steer bidding, then lowered the target cost per lead from €32 to €15. I also added a lead form asset, which lets people send their details without leaving Google: 1,925 views, 95 clicks, 14 leads. For an industrial company, the primary goals are the actions in my definition of a qualified lead: an RFQ sent, a tracked sales call, a booked site visit. Playbook 1 shows how to track each of them.

The result: fewer clicks, twice the leads, same budget

I compared the 60 days after the rebuild, 19 July to 16 September 2026, with the 60 days before. Part of the clean-up had already started in the “before” window, so if anything the gap is understated.

Clicks fell 37%, from 978 to 614, and impressions fell from 17,919 to 9,806. Each click cost more, about €0.61 before and €1.04 after, because the account stopped buying cheap clicks from students and moved into pricier European markets. Leads more than doubled anyway.

None of this needed a large budget. ITCE’s main campaign runs on about €13 a day. Codeaid, a coding assessment SaaS, is a second data point from my own work: 177 Google Ads conversions in Q4 2022 at $15.77 each. When one machine order or repair job is worth thousands of euros, the question is not whether €15 per lead is expensive. It is whether the leads are real.

What to do this week

You can run this check on your own account in about 30 minutes. Set the date range to the last 90 days and go down the list.

Start with the search terms report: it is the cheapest 30 minutes you will spend on Google Ads this year.