The Monday morning call

The email hit my inbox at 7:42 on a Monday morning. The subject line was one word: “Google?”

It was from Mark, the marketing director at a regional home services company we’d been working with for about eight months. Good client. Smart guy. Steady growth in booked jobs, cost per lead trending in the right direction, a sales team that was finally saying the leads were worth calling back.

The body of the email was one line: “I searched for us on Google, and our competitors are showing up above us. What are we doing about that?”

By 9:00, he’d forwarded it to his CEO. By 9:30, the CEO had replied all with a screenshot of Auction Insights someone on his team had pulled, showing a competitor with a higher impression share. By 10:00, we were on a call.

If you’ve worked in digital marketing long enough, you’ve lived some version of this morning. And if you’re the person who sent that email, I want you to know something up front: you weren’t wrong to ask.

How a good strategy gets questioned in under three hours

On the call, the questions came fast, and each one was reasonable on its face.

• Should we increase the budget?
• Should we bid more aggressively?
• Should we go after the keywords they’re showing up for?
• Should we rewrite our ads, because theirs look better?

Notice what happened. Eight months of results didn’t change. Nothing in the account broke over the weekend. What changed was that one person did one search and saw one result they didn’t like.

And just like that, we were questioning the strategy.

I get it. You’re responsible for the marketing budget. Your sales team is counting on a full pipeline. Your CEO wants to know the company is competitive. When you see another business sitting where you expected to see your own, it feels like proof that something is slipping.

So I asked Mark the question I ask every client in this moment: “Before we change anything, can we take a breath and look at what’s actually happening?”

What Mark actually saw

Here’s the first thing I walked Mark through: the search he did wasn’t the search his customers were doing.

Google doesn’t serve the same results to everyone. The ad auction runs fresh every single time someone searches, and the outcome shifts based on the exact query, the searcher’s location, their device, the time of day, who else is bidding, each advertiser’s budget and targeting, and a long list of other signals. Mark searched from his office, on his laptop, for his own company’s core service, probably for the fifth time that month. That’s not what a homeowner with a broken AC unit at 9 p.m. looks like to Google.

One search is a snapshot. It’s not a picture of your account’s performance.

Then we looked at the Auction Insights screenshot the CEO had sent. Yes, the competitor had a higher impression share. That’s real data, and it’s worth paying attention to. But Auction Insights tells you how often you and other advertisers showed up in the same auctions. It doesn’t tell you what anyone paid, how many leads they got, how many of those leads turned into jobs, or whether any of it was profitable.

Auction Insights is a useful competitive diagnostic. It is not a scoreboard.

Your competitor could be showing up more often and losing money on every click. They could be paying twice as much to land the same customer. They could have different margins, a different business model, or a goal this quarter that has nothing to do with yours.

Or they could genuinely be outperforming you.

The point is, you don’t know just because you saw their ad.

The part of the story you can’t see from a search bar

We spent the rest of that week doing the homework instead of reacting.

We looked at Mark’s own numbers first. Cost per booked job was down from where it started. Close rate on paid search leads was the highest of any channel his sales team worked. The searches that mattered most, the high-intent, ready-to-buy ones in his core service area, were where his ads were showing up most consistently.

Then we looked at where the competitor was showing up. A lot of their extra visibility was coming from broad, early-research searches and from zip codes on the edge of the market, places Mark’s team had deliberately pulled back from months earlier because those leads rarely closed.

In other words, the competitor was winning auctions Mark had decided not to fight for.

A few months later, we learned a little more. Through the kind of industry chatter that always gets around, word came back that the competitor had cut their ad budget hard after a rough couple of quarters. All that visibility had come with a cost that didn’t pay off for them.

If we had matched their bids, chased their keywords, and copied their ads that Monday, we would have been copying a strategy that wasn’t working. We just wouldn’t have known it yet.

The questions worth asking instead

When you see a competitor where you expected to see yourself, the instinct is to ask, “How do we beat them?” A better starting point is, “Is what we’re doing working?” Here are the questions we now walk every client through before touching a budget or a bid.

1. Are we hitting our own goals? Cost per lead, cost per acquisition, close rate, revenue from paid search. If those are healthy, a competitor’s visibility is context, not a crisis.
2. Are we showing up for the searches that actually turn into customers? Being everywhere is expensive. Being present for high-intent searches in the right markets is what drives revenue.
3. What is the sales team seeing? Lead quality, close rates, and the conversations reps are having tell you more than any screenshot.
4. What changed, if anything? Look at the trend, not the moment. A dip that shows up over weeks deserves attention. One search on a Monday morning does not.
5. Do we actually know what the competitor’s goals and economics are? If the answer is no, and it usually is, copying their tactics means copying decisions you don’t understand.
6. If we spend more, what do we expect to get, and how will we know? Any budget increase should come with a clear hypothesis and a way to measure it.

None of this means ignoring competitors. Watch them. Learn from them. Use Auction Insights to spot shifts in the market. Just don’t hand them the keys to your strategy.

How the story ended

We didn’t raise Mark’s budget that week. We didn’t chase the competitor’s keywords or rewrite the ads to look like theirs.

What we did do was build Mark a simple monthly view his CEO could read in two minutes: booked jobs, cost per booked job, close rate by channel, and a short note on any competitive shifts worth watching. The next time someone searched and saw a competitor first, they’d start the conversation with that report instead of a screenshot.

That’s the real lesson for marketing directors, CMOs, and sales leaders. Seeing your competitor on Google is not proof they’re outperforming you. Not seeing yourself in one search is not proof your marketing is failing. And a competitor’s visibility tells you nothing about their profitability.

There’s a difference between being competitive and letting your competitors dictate your strategy. The first keeps you sharp. The second has you spending money to copy decisions you can’t see the results of.

So the next time that Monday morning email shows up, take a breath. Ask what’s actually happening. Then decide.