The account was already spending money — just not on the right things.
Smile Line Dental was already running Google Ads on their own before I took over, but the account had never been properly configured. Campaigns were targeting worldwide instead of Islamabad, where the clinic actually operates, and traffic was split across both the Search and Display Networks in the same campaigns rather than kept separate. With zero negative keywords in place, a meaningful share of the budget was going to irrelevant clicks — searches with no local intent, and low-quality Display placements — instead of people who could actually book an appointment.
On top of that, the two most important actions — form submissions and phone calls — were going completely untracked. Even the clicks that were relevant couldn't be measured against real leads, so every optimisation decision was based on clicks alone.
Rebuilt the account structure first, then layered in tracking.
- Advertiser identity verification — identified and completed Google's advertiser verification on the account, which hadn't been done and put campaign delivery at risk
- Account rebuild — restructured the account from the ground up: separated Search from Display and paused Display entirely, since it was consuming budget without producing enquiries
- Negative keywords — built and maintained a negative keyword list to filter out irrelevant and low-intent search terms
- Location targeting — set proper geo-targeting to Islamabad and the areas the clinic actually serves, replacing the default worldwide setting
- Keyword strategy — researched local search terms and structured ad groups by service type (teeth cleaning, implants, whitening, etc.)
Then built the tracking layer the account never had.
- Google Tag Manager setup — installed and configured GTM on the clinic's website as the single source of truth for all tracking
- Form submission tracking — set up GTM triggers to fire a conversion event every time a patient submitted an enquiry form
- Phone call tracking — configured click-to-call tracking so every tap on the clinic's phone number was captured as a conversion
- Google Ads conversion import — linked GTM conversion events to Google Ads so the algorithm could optimise for real patient leads, not just clicks
