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To be honest, I think we’ve all been there. You set a target for the team, or you set a goal in your Google Ads dashboard, and everyone works hard to hit it. But then you look at the bank account at the end of the month, and the numbers just don't add up.
I was reading about this properly the other day, and I suppose it’s a comfort to know this isn’t a new problem. Humans have been gaming the system for centuries. But when it happens in your business, it’s not just an anecdote—it’s your profit margin going down the drain.
I reckon we need to have a serious chat about why chasing the wrong numbers is effectively turning your marketing strategy into a rat farm.
You know, history is full of people thinking they’re smarter than the system. There are three stories I came across that really hit the nail on the head for me.
Back when the French were running Vietnam, they had a massive problem with rats in Hanoi. To sort it out, they offered a bounty: for every rat killed, they’d pay a few cents. To claim the money, the rat catchers just had to hand in the tail.
It seemed like a sensible idea at the time. Thousands of tails were coming in every day. But then, officials started spotting rats running around the city with no tails. It turns out, the catchers realised that if you kill the rat, you get paid once. But if you cut off the tail and let it go, it breeds more rats—and that means more tails.
They were literally farming rats to sell the tails back to the government.
Then there’s the story from Java. A paleontologist was paying locals for every fragment of ancient bone they could find. He wanted to study human evolution. But he noticed he was only getting tiny, smashed pieces—never a whole skull.
It turned out the locals had found pristine, complete skulls. But they did the maths: why sell one skull for a few quid when you can smash it into fifty pieces and get paid fifty times? They were destroying the value just to hit the volume target.
And if you think this is just old history, look at Wells Fargo a few years back. Executives put massive pressure on staff to hit "cross-selling" targets. They wanted every customer to have multiple accounts.
The target was so aggressive that employees couldn't hit it honestly. So, to keep their jobs, they opened over two million fake bank accounts in customers' names without telling them. They hit the target, the stock went up, but they poisoned the business and ended up with billions in fines.
I suppose the fancy term for all this is Goodhart’s Law. The economist Charles Goodhart said it best: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
It’s simple, really. The moment you attach a reward to a specific number, people stop caring about the actual outcome and start obsessing over the metric.
To be honest, I don't blame the people involved. It’s human nature to find the path of least resistance. If you tell me my job depends on how many nails I produce, I’m going to make thousands of tiny nails.
The problem isn't the people; it's the target.
Now, you might be thinking, "What’s this got to do with my PPC accounts?" Well, everything, actually.
I look at Google Ads algorithms, and they remind me exactly of those rat catchers in Hanoi. They are ruthlessly efficient. If you tell Google's AI, "I want as many clicks as possible for £500," it will go out and find you the cheapest, easiest clicks on the internet.
This is where I see so many businesses getting it wrong. We confuse activity (clicks, impressions, views) with outcome (sales, profit, loyal customers). We’re celebrating the pile of rat tails on the desk while the plague is still spreading outside.
In my experience, there are a few specific metrics that are absolute killers if you blindly chase them. I see these mistakes made in accounts big and small, and it’s painful to watch.
Google is always pushing us to use "Broad Match" keywords combined with Smart Bidding. They say it helps you find more customers.
But if you judge success just by "Traffic Volume," you’re falling for the Rat Farm. I’ve seen accounts spending thousands on the keyword "luxury watches," only to find out that because they used Broad Match, Google was showing their ads to people searching for "cheap watch battery replacement."
You get the click. You get the traffic. But the intent is garbage. You’re paying premium prices for people who have no intention of buying what you sell. The algorithm hit the target—it got you the traffic—but it wasted your budget doing it.
This one is a classic. You’re running Display ads or YouTube ads, and the agency reports say, "Look, these ads generated 50 conversions!"
But when you dig into it, you see they are counting "View-Through Conversions." This means a user saw your ad (or it loaded in the background), didn't click it, but then later bought from your site via a Google Search or an email.
The Display ad is claiming credit for a sale it didn't really cause. It’s like a guy standing outside a shop waving at everyone who walks in, and then demanding a commission for every sale. If you optimise for this, you end up pouring money into ads that nobody is actually clicking.
If you’re doing social ads, you’ll see metrics like "3-Second Video Views." It sounds impressive to say "We had 10,000 views."
But let’s be honest—on a mobile feed, 3 seconds is just someone scrolling past your video while it auto-plays. They didn't watch it. They didn't hear it. They barely noticed it. Yet you’re paying for that "view," and the platform is patting itself on the back for delivering it. It’s the ultimate vanity metric—it feeds the ego, but it starves the bank account.
This is where things get really murky. When managers are under pressure to lower the "Cost Per Lead," they sometimes start gaming the system just like those Wells Fargo employees.
If they can't get you real sales for £20, they might change the settings to track "Time on Site" or "PDF Downloads" as a conversion. Suddenly the report says, "Great news! 500 conversions!"
It looks green on the dashboard. But those aren't real customers. They’re just window shoppers. It satisfies the spreadsheet, but it adds zero to your bottom line.
So, what do we do about it? It’s a toss up between trusting the machine and doing the hard work ourselves. I reckon we need to get back to basics.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is okay, but it can be misleading. I prefer looking at POAS—Profit on Ad Spend. After the cost of goods, shipping, agency fees, and returns, did we actually make any money? That’s the only number that pays the mortgage.
Don't trust the ad platform's data blindly. Link your Google Ads to your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.
Optimise for the 2 who bought, not the 100 who clicked. Tell the algorithm to hunt for revenue, not just registrations.
We need to ask the hard question: "Would this sale have happened without the ad?" That’s incrementality. Sometimes you have to turn the ads off for a bit—run a "holdout test"—to see the truth. It’s scary, I know, but sometimes you need to stop counting the tails to see if the rat population actually goes down.
Now, I need to be honest about something. Shifting your focus to these real metrics isn't a quick fix. In fact, it can be painful at the start.
When you stop optimising for cheap clicks and start hunting for profitable customers, your costs will look like they’re going up. Your "Cost Per Lead" might jump from £10 to £50.
Why? because you're filtering out the rubbish.
You also have to accept that in the beginning, you are paying for data. Google's algorithm doesn't know who your best customers are on day one. You have to spend money—sometimes losing money on tests—to feed it the data it needs to learn.
I think of it like tuition fees. You’re paying to educate the system. It takes time, and it takes an initial investment. But I’d rather spend £1,000 now to learn exactly what works, than spend £10,000 over the next year on cheap clicks that never convert.
If you’re managing a team, don’t just give them a number to hit. Give them a "North Star." Talk about business health and customer satisfaction. If you pressure them on "Volume of Leads" alone, don't be surprised when they turn on Broad Match just to hit the quota with junk traffic.
I believe you have to create an environment where someone can say, "This target isn't working." If people are afraid to miss a target, they’ll start smashing the dinosaur skulls just to give you the fragments you asked for.
At the end of the day, business is about solving problems for people and making a profit doing it. It’s not about having the prettiest dashboard.
I’d suggest you take a look at your reports this week. Ask yourself: "Am I paying for dead rats, or am I just collecting tails?"
If you're staring at a load of metrics that look green, but your satisfaction with the business is in the red, it might be time for a change. Because, to be honest, chasing the wrong numbers is a game you’re never going to win.
PPC Consultant Involved in online marketing for the last 25 years first with SEO , Web Development and now for the last 12 years focusing on PPC & Google Ads
