Before starting Google Ads, the useful question isn’t how much you’ll spend. It’s whether your business can turn that money into customers and prove that it did. Google Ads doesn’t fix a business that isn’t ready yet: it amplifies whatever is already there, good and bad. If the site doesn’t convert or nobody tracks sales, the platform just speeds up the spending.
When a business asks me to launch campaigns from scratch, I don’t open the account first. I go through seven requirements. This post is that list, with the question I ask at each step and the sign that it’s not time yet. It doesn’t repeat what I’ve covered elsewhere: what a click costs is in how much Google Ads costs, and realistic timelines are in how long Google Ads takes to work. This one is about what has to be in place before either of those matters.
In 30 seconds:
- Check that people actually search for what you sell. Without demand, Search campaigns have nobody to show your ads to.
- Work out how much you can pay per sale or per lead without losing money. With a 40% margin, you need a 2.5 ROAS just to break even.
- Track at least one real conversion (purchase, lead or call) before the first click. For EEA traffic, that includes sending consent signals to Google.
- Set aside budget for learning: Google suggests evaluating Smart Bidding over 2 full conversion cycles, a month or at least 50 conversions.
- If you get leads, answer them fast. In the Harvard Business Review study, contacting a lead within an hour made it nearly 7 times more likely to qualify.
The 7 requirements for starting Google Ads at a glance
This table sums up the checklist. If you fail one of the first four, I’d fix it before launch. The other three can be corrected along the way, though they cost money while you do.
| # | Requirement | Check question | Sign you’re not ready yet |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Demand | Do people search for what you sell, using words you can bid on? | Nobody knows you and nobody searches the category |
| 2 | Unit economics | Do you know your maximum CPA or break-even ROAS? | You don’t know your margin per sale |
| 3 | Landing page | Does the page deliver what the ad promises? | The ad points to a generic homepage |
| 4 | Tracking | Does Google Ads record a real purchase, lead or call? | You only track visits or clicks |
| 5 | Budget runway | Can you afford one or two months of learning? | You need profitable sales in week one |
| 6 | Sales follow-up | Does someone answer every lead the same day? | Forms land in an inbox nobody checks |
| 7 | Account and policies | Is the account yours, and can your industry advertise? | Someone else created it and you’re not an admin |
1. Are people searching for what you sell?
Search campaigns only work when someone types something related to your product or service into Google. It sounds obvious, but it gets skipped a lot: some businesses with a brand-new product and no recognisable category expect Google Ads to “create” demand. Search doesn’t do that. It captures demand that already exists.
The way to check is Keyword Planner. According to Google, it lets you view estimates of the number of searches a keyword gets each month and the average cost for your ad to show on those searches (Google Ads Help). One practical detail: you have to finish setting up the account, billing details included, before you can use it, even if you never launch a campaign. Two caveats when reading the data: average monthly searches are only shown for exact match, and the figures are rounded (Google Ads Help). Use them to compare orders of magnitude, not as a promise.
I look at three things in that report:
- Searches with buying or hiring intent, not just informational queries.
- Volume that makes sense in your country or service area, not worldwide.
- Seasonality that doesn’t leave you without demand right when you want to launch. For that, Google Trends helps you size the budget by season.
If volume is tiny, it’s not the end of the world, but the plan changes: you might need Meta Ads, YouTube or content to build demand first, and Google Ads to capture it later.
2. Do the numbers work for each sale or lead?
Before the first click, you need to know how much you can pay to win a customer without losing money. Without that number, nobody can tell you whether a campaign works. Not you, and not whoever manages it.
There are two calculations I run with every new business:
Break-even ROAS (ecommerce). It’s 1 divided by your gross margin. With a 40% margin, break-even ROAS is 1 / 0.40 = 2.5: for every euro spent you need €2.50 in sales just to not lose money. With a 20% margin, the bar rises to 5. Plenty of shops find out here that their “reasonable” ROAS target actually loses them money.
Maximum CPA or cost per lead (services and B2B). Start from what a customer leaves you and multiply by your close rate. A round-number example: if a customer brings in €1,000 of margin and you close 1 in 5 leads, a lead can’t cost you more than €200. Anything above that loses money, however good the Google Ads dashboard looks.
If your margin is very thin, or the ticket is low with no repeat purchases, Google Ads may not pay off at your industry’s CPCs. If you’d rather not do the maths by hand, the ROAS and CPA calculator gives you your break-even point from your own numbers. Benchmark prices by industry are in the cost article linked above.
3. Is your landing page ready for the click?
The ad makes a promise, and the page has to keep it within seconds. Google measures this: landing page experience is defined as how relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad (Google Ads Help). Ad and landing page quality feed into Ad Rank, and Google says that higher quality ads can often lead to lower CPCs (Google Ads Help).
My minimum landing page checklist before launch:
- One page per main offer. Sending all traffic to the homepage wastes clicks.
- The headline repeats the ad’s promise in the same words.
- Price, timing or terms are visible. If you can’t publish a price, explain what it depends on.
- A short form or a clear buy button that works properly on mobile.
- Real trust signals: reviews, client logos, guarantees.
If you sell services or B2B, I have a longer guide on landing pages that capture qualified leads.
4. Can you track a real conversion?
This is the requirement I don’t negotiate on. Google Ads learns from the conversions you tell it are valuable: you choose what you identify as valuable, like a purchase, sign-up or phone call (Google Ads Help). Automated bid strategies such as Target CPA optimise towards the conversion actions you include in the “Conversions” column (Google Ads Help). Track the wrong action and the algorithm optimises for the wrong action.
Before launch, I check that:
- There’s at least one primary conversion action tied to money: a purchase, a submitted lead or a call above a set length.
- Micro-actions (page views, scrolls, button clicks) are secondary or don’t exist.
- The conversion fires once per purchase or lead, and has been tested with a real purchase or form.
- If your traffic comes from the European Economic Area, your cookie banner sends consent signals. Google is blunt about it: to keep using measurement tags, ad personalisation and remarketing, you must collect consent from EEA users and share those consent signals with Google (Google Ads Help).
If you have long sales cycles or close deals by phone, form conversions aren’t enough in the medium term, and you should plan to import sales from your CRM. If tracking is in place and results still don’t come, the diagnosis is in why your Google Ads isn’t converting.
5. Can your budget survive the learning period?
A campaign’s first days are expensive by definition: the account doesn’t yet know which searches and users convert. Google explains that a bid strategy can take a few conversion cycles (1-2 typically) to calibrate, and that the duration depends on conversion volume, conversion cycle length and the bid strategy (Google Ads Help). To evaluate Smart Bidding, it recommends a time frame of at least 2 full conversion cycles, or longer periods like a month or at least 50 conversions (Google Ads Help).
What does that mean in practice? Your launch budget can’t be money you need back in week one. For the daily amount, Google gives a reference point in its Performance Max setup guide: an average daily budget of at least 3 times your CPA or cost per conversion (Google Ads Help). If you expect to pay €40 per lead, that’s €120 a day. I ask every business to set aside at least two months of spend without counting on it being profitable.
Something that surprises people who are starting out: the daily budget is an average. Google can spend up to twice your average daily budget on a given day, but never charges more than 30.4 times your average daily budget in a month (Google Ads Help). Plan around the monthly figure, not the daily one.
What to expect month by month is covered in my post on Google Ads timelines. If you run an online shop, the week-by-week plan is in Google Ads for ecommerce: the first 30 days.
6. Does someone answer leads in time?
This requirement doesn’t show up in any Google dashboard, but it’s one of the places where I most often see lead-gen campaigns fail. You can pay for a good lead and lose it because nobody calls until Monday.
The most cited data is still from Harvard Business Review. The researchers audited 2,241 US companies: only 37% responded to a web lead within an hour, 23% never responded, and the average response time among those that did was 42 hours. Firms that contacted leads within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried even an hour later (Harvard Business Review). The study is from 2011, but the logic hasn’t changed: a prospect asking you for information today is asking your competitors too.
Before launch, I ask three things:
- Who receives each form, and through which channel (email, CRM, WhatsApp)?
- What’s the maximum response time, weekends included?
- Where do you record whether the lead became a sale? Without that, you’ll never know which campaign brings customers and which only brings form fills.
In ecommerce, the equivalent is customer service and stock: if advertised products sell out or delivery takes two weeks, the campaign pays for it in returns and reviews.
7. Is the account yours, and can your industry advertise?
The last requirement is admin, and almost nobody checks it until something breaks. Your Google Ads account should be created with a company email address, and you should be an admin. If an agency creates it from its manager account (MCC), that MCC becomes the owner: Google notes that a client account can only have one owner, although the client account still owns its data and can remove ownership access by unlinking (Google Ads Help). And don’t leave the account with a single admin: Google Ads has five access levels, only an admin can grant and remove access, and Google’s own help warns that with just one administrator you may lose access when that person becomes unavailable (Google Ads Help). I ask for at least two, and neither on a personal email. Which contract terms to ask for so you don’t get locked in is in how to choose a PPC agency or freelancer.
The second part is ad policy. Google separates prohibited content from content you can advertise, but with limitations, such as healthcare and medicines, financial services, gambling, alcohol or cryptocurrencies (Google Ads Help). If you’re in one of those industries, you may have to meet extra requirements, such as a certification, before your ads can run. Then there’s advertiser verification: Google is rolling it out to all advertisers and warns that in some cases, Google Ads will pause your account until you complete it (Google Ads Help). Better to have your company documents ready before launch than to find out with campaigns on hold.
When shouldn’t you start Google Ads yet?
There are cases where the best thing a consultant can do is tell you to wait. These are the ones I run into most:
- Nobody searches for your product or category. Build demand through other channels first.
- You don’t know your margin, or it can’t absorb your industry’s CPCs. Every optimisation starts from a number that doesn’t exist.
- The site isn’t finished or doesn’t work well on mobile. You’d be paying for clicks that bounce.
- You can’t track any conversion. Launching without tracking is the most expensive way to learn nothing.
- You need it to be profitable in week one to pay the bills. Learning takes weeks and there’s no safe shortcut.
- There’s nobody to handle leads. Hire that person before you buy ads.
What if you meet five out of seven? It depends which ones fail. Demand, numbers, landing page and tracking (requirements 1 to 4) block the launch. Budget, sales follow-up and account setup can be fixed in parallel during the first weeks, as long as you have a plan and a date to close them.
How I help you prepare the launch
If you’re not sure where your business stands, this checklist is exactly what I review in the first session as a Google Ads consultant: real demand, unit economics, landing page, tracking and account ownership. Sometimes the conclusion is to launch now. Other times it’s to fix two things first and skip the first months of spending blind.
Book a 30-minute call and we’ll go through the seven points with your data.
Frequently asked questions
What do I need to start Google Ads?
At a minimum: search demand for what you sell, a calculated break-even CPA or ROAS, a dedicated landing page, a real conversion tracked in Google Ads and budget for one or two months of learning. If you collect leads, someone who answers them the same day. And an account created with a company email address where you’re an admin.
Can I start Google Ads without a website?
Technically yes: some formats send people to a call or your Business Profile. But without a website you lose most of what makes the platform useful: dedicated pages per offer, conversion tracking and algorithm learning. For most businesses, I recommend having at least one mobile-friendly landing page before investing.
How much budget do I need to start Google Ads?
It depends on your industry and CPCs, so there’s no universal figure. What matters is that you can keep spending through the learning period: Google suggests evaluating Smart Bidding over 2 conversion cycles, a month or 50 conversions. For daily spend, its Performance Max reference is a budget of at least 3 times your cost per conversion. If you want CPC ranges by industry, they’re in my Google Ads cost guide.
Is conversion tracking required to advertise on Google Ads?
Google doesn’t stop you launching without it, but automated bid strategies optimise towards the conversions you mark in the account. Without tracking, neither the algorithm nor you knows what works. If your traffic comes from the EEA, you also need to send consent signals to keep using measurement and remarketing.
How do I know if my business isn’t ready for Google Ads?
The clearest signs: nobody searches for your product, you don’t know your margin, the site doesn’t convert on mobile, you don’t track sales or leads, you need immediate profitability, or nobody is available to handle enquiries. If two or more sound familiar, it’s wise to fix them before investing.
What needs to be ready before the first click
Starting Google Ads doesn’t take a huge budget or a perfect website. It takes seven boring things in place: demand, numbers, a page, tracking, room to learn, someone who answers and an account that’s actually yours. With those, every euro you spend teaches you something even if the first campaign misses. Without them, the spend teaches you nothing.
Sources
- Google Ads Help. Use Keyword Planner. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7337243
- Google Ads Help. About Quality Score for Search campaigns. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2404197
- Google Ads Help. About Ad Rank. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722122
- Google Ads Help. About conversion measurement. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722022
- Google Ads Help. About Target CPA bidding. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2471188
- Google Ads Help. Updates to consent mode for traffic in European Economic Area (EEA). support.google.com/google-ads/answer/13695607
- Google Ads Help. Duration of the learning period for campaigns and what affects it. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/13020501
- Google Ads Help. Tips on measuring Smart Bidding performance. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6268633
- Google Ads Help. About overdelivery and your average daily budget. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1704443
- Oldroyd, J., McElheran, K. and Elkington, D. The Short Life of Online Sales Leads. Harvard Business Review, March 2011. hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads
- Google Ads Help. Manager Accounts (MCC): About ownership of client accounts. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7456532
- Google Advertising Policies Help. Google Ads policies. support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6008942
- Google Advertising Policies Help. Advertiser verification. support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9703665
- Google Ads Help. Understand your Keyword Planner statistics. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/3022575
- Google Ads Help. Step 5: Set your budget (Performance Max). support.google.com/google-ads/answer/15863846
- Google Ads Help. About access levels in your Google Ads account. support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9978556
Lionel Fenestraz is a freelance Google Ads and Meta Ads consultant based in Spain, working with ecommerce, B2B and service businesses. Google Partner and CXL Certified.
