Paid Media Lessons

When I first started running Google Ads for my screen-printing client, the plan sounded simple: go after bulk B2B orders. We built everything around that idea: keywords, messaging, even how we thought about the funnel. A few weeks in, the client decided they wanted to shift focus to one-off holiday gifts instead. It was the right move for their business, but it meant a lot of the early work suddenly didn’t fit the new goal. That was my first real lesson: if the offer and audience change, the entire ad strategy has to change with it.

At first I thought the fix would be as easy as swapping a few keywords and headlines, but that’s where I ran into the difference between a lead generation model and an e-commerce model. When we were targeting bulk orders, our goal was to attract other businesses that were ready to talk about bigger projects. This included things like uniforms, merch runs, or event shirts. For that, sending people to a quote or contact form made sense. We needed details about quantity, deadlines, logo files, and print type. The “conversion” was a lead with enough information for a real conversation, not a one-click purchase.

Switching to one-off gifts for the holidays forced me to rethink the whole journey. Instead of “tell us about your project,” the goal became “pick a shirt, upload a design, and check out.” That meant our old bulk-order landing page wouldn’t work anymore. Now we’re building a new page that’s much closer to an e-commerce experience: clear product options, simple pricing, rush-order messaging, and an easy path from the ad → to a keyword-aligned page → to checkout → to final sale. The page has to do more of the selling up front, because there’s no sales rep following up with a lead form.

The biggest takeaway for me is that good Google Ads aren’t just about finding “the right keywords.” They only work when the offer, landing page, and conversion type all match the intent behind those searches. Bulk B2B orders fit a lead-gen model; one-off holiday gifts fit an e-commerce model. Learning that difference (and having to pivot mid-campaign) taught me to ask way better questions at the start of a project and to design the full path, from search term to thank-you page, before I ever turn the ads on.