Profile · Practising since January 2008
known professionally as Ckumar Mehta
18 years spent almost entirely inside Google Ads accounts, working out why paid search that is spending money is not producing customers — and then fixing it.
I am a paid advertising specialist. In practice that means Google Ads is the surface, but the job is broader than campaign management: it covers whether the conversion tracking measures anything real, whether the campaign structure matches how buyers actually search, and whether the page the click lands on deserves the click. An account can be perfectly managed and still fail on any one of those.
Work started on 17 January 2008 in general digital marketing and narrowed, over 18 years, into the thing I kept being handed: accounts where the spend was real and the return was not. That narrowing is deliberate. Paid search is the whole practice rather than one service line among many, which is why the number of concurrent accounts stays low — I do the work myself, and there is no account manager between a client and the person changing the bids.
Businesses across 9 countries have run campaigns with me, in twelve industries ranging from B2B software to marriage gardens. What those have in common is not size or sector: it is that their customers search for the thing before they buy it, which is the only precondition paid search really has.
How the work is done
Accounts fail in a predictable sequence, so they get fixed in the reverse of it. Skipping ahead to bid strategy is the single most common way a rescue engagement wastes its first month.
01
Every conversion action gets checked against a real business outcome before a single bid changes. If the account is optimising toward a number that is double-counted or not a sale, every decision after that is guesswork wearing a dashboard.
02
Campaigns get rebuilt around intent tiers rather than around whatever was convenient to set up. Someone researching, someone comparing and someone ready to buy are three different people typing three different things, and they should not share a budget.
03
The click is the cheap part. A dedicated page with one job and the specific proof a sceptical buyer needs will routinely beat a generic homepage at identical spend — so the landing page is treated as part of the campaign, not as somebody else's problem.
04
Only once the first three hold does bid strategy become the lever worth pulling. Automated bidding is very good at optimising toward whatever it is pointed at, which is precisely why pointing it correctly matters more than the strategy chosen.
Industries
Paid search behaves differently in each of these — a banquet hall and a SaaS company are both buying clicks, but almost nothing else about the two accounts is the same. What follows is what the problem actually looks like in each.
Long sales cycles and a handful of buyers per month, which means the account can look dead on conversion volume while working perfectly on pipeline. The fix is almost always measurement: import the CRM stages back into Google Ads so bidding optimises toward qualified opportunities rather than form fills.
Shopping and Performance Max live or die on feed quality — titles, attributes, availability, GTINs. Most accounts I take over are bidding aggressively on a feed that stops Google understanding half the catalogue, then blaming the bid strategy.
Webinar and lead-magnet funnels generate enormous conversion counts of very uneven quality. The work is separating the registration from the attendance from the sale, so the campaign optimises toward the step that actually correlates with revenue.
Admissions is a season, not a year. Budget has to front-load into the enquiry window, campaigns have to separate course intent from brand and location intent, and the counselling team's follow-up has to be visible in the account or the whole spend gets judged on raw enquiry counts.
Huge query volume, most of it browsing. Structure has to tier destination research away from package and booking intent, or the budget disappears into people who are eight weeks from spending anything. Seasonality means budgets need pacing, not a fixed monthly cap.
The competitor in the auction is usually the OTA taking 15–20% of the booking. Paid search here is a direct-booking argument: bid on your own brand deliberately, make the rate parity case on the landing page, and measure against commission saved rather than against ad spend alone.
Hyper-local, high-value and effectively one purchase per customer, so there is no second chance to convert and no repeat business to average the cost out over. Radius targeting, call tracking and a landing page that answers capacity, date availability and per-plate pricing do most of the work.
Accountants, lawyers, architects, agencies, IT and B2B service firms. Enquiries arrive by phone as often as by form, so an account measured only on form submissions is optimising against half its own results. Call tracking comes before bid strategy.
Appointment intent is tightly geographic and tightly timed — someone searching now wants to be seen this week. Tight radius targeting, hours-aware bidding and Google's healthcare advertising policies are the constraints the campaign has to be built inside, not around.
Expensive clicks and a lead file that is mostly unqualified unless the form does some filtering itself. Project launches need burst budgets; the rest of the year needs a much tighter keyword set. Lead quality, not lead volume, is the only metric worth reporting.
Interiors, renovation, repair, installation and maintenance businesses working a service area. Demand is immediate and call-led, so the account is built around service-area targeting, ad scheduling that matches when someone can actually answer the phone, and a negative list that keeps DIY searches out.
The most expensive clicks in the auction, sitting behind Google's financial services verification requirements. There is no room for a loose keyword set here — every rupee of wasted spend is visible immediately, and compliance constraints shape the ad copy before conversion rate does.
If your industry is not on this list, it is worth asking anyway. The precondition for paid search is not the sector — it is whether your customers search for what you sell before they buy it. If they do, the same four steps apply.
Who I work with
Engagements go better when whoever approves the budget is in the room, because most of the decisions that matter in a paid search account are commercial rather than technical.
“Is paid search a channel this business can actually grow on, or is it subsidising revenue that would have arrived anyway?”
“The marketing spend is approved every month. What is it returning, and who is accountable for the number?”
“How does this channel fit the growth plan for the next four quarters, and what does it need to scale without the cost per acquisition running away?”
“The team is running the campaigns. I need an outside read on whether the structure and measurement are sound before I commit more budget to them.”
“Volume is fine, quality is not. Where does the account start optimising toward pipeline instead of form fills?”
“Do the conversion numbers in Google Ads reconcile with the numbers in the CRM and the bank account? Usually they do not, and that gap is the first thing to fix.”
“Is the reported customer acquisition cost real and repeatable, or an artefact of double-counted conversions and last-click attribution?”
“I do not want a dashboard. I want to know whether the phone rings more, and what it costs each time it does.”
Businesses spending too little for paid search to generate meaningful learning data, and businesses looking for someone to run the account invisibly and report a green dashboard. If an account cannot succeed, I will say so before the engagement rather than after it.
Credentials
Six certifications, each published with its completion date and completion ID rather than as an undated badge — so they can be checked instead of taken on trust.
Google Ads Search Certification
2020 · ID 44584913
Google Ads Display Certification
2020 · ID 58946716
Google Ads Measurement Certification
2020 · ID 58954194
Google Ads Video Certification
2020 · ID 58955334
Shopping Ads Certification
2020 · ID 58956292
Google Analytics Individual Qualification
2020 · ID 59950902
Also
Same person, narrower focus. If one of these fits your business better than a direct engagement does, start there instead.
Questions
Chandan Kumar, known professionally as Ckumar Mehta, is a paid advertising and PPC specialist who has worked in digital marketing since 17 January 2008. He runs Google Ads, paid search and performance marketing programmes for businesses across India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Germany and the Netherlands, and is the founder of Global Info Edge and CK Mehta.
Four things, in this order: verify that conversion tracking measures a real business outcome, restructure campaigns around how buyers actually search, fix the landing page the ads point at, and only then manage bids and budgets. Most accounts that are underperforming fail at one of the first three, which is why bid tinkering alone rarely rescues them.
B2B and SaaS, D2C and ecommerce, online coaching and info products, schools, colleges and universities, tour and travel, hotels and hospitality, banquet halls, marriage gardens and wedding venues, professional and consulting services, healthcare and clinics, real estate, home and local services, and finance and insurance. The common factor is that people search for the thing before they buy it.
Whoever owns the growth number — founders, managing directors, CEOs and CXOs, CMOs and heads of growth, and finance directors or investors who want the reported acquisition cost independently checked. Engagements go better when the person approving the budget is in the room, because most of the meaningful decisions are commercial rather than technical.
Yes. Roughly half the work is outside India — the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Germany and the Netherlands. Everything runs over video calls and shared reporting, in whichever timezone the client keeps.
Yes. Six Google certifications are published on the credentials page with their completion dates and completion IDs — Search, Display, Video, Shopping and Measurement, plus the Google Analytics Individual Qualification. They are shown with dates rather than as undated badges so you can check them rather than take them on trust.
With me. There is no account manager between the client and the person changing the bids, which is the main reason only a limited number of accounts are taken on at any one time.
Send the website, the current monthly spend and what you expected to happen. If I can see the problem from the outside, I'll tell you what it is — whether or not you go on to hire me.
