Prepared for Kim Seeherman Brown · Hudson & Nine
We went in to learn what your customers actually type into Google, so we could sharpen the AI search work. We came out with something more useful than that. There is real demand you already rank for and are not advertising on, and there are a few places where the account is quietly working against you.
01
Everything on this page comes from your own account and your own Search Console data.
The account has five campaigns. Two are running, three are switched off. About seven of every ten dollars ever spent has gone through a single search campaign, and in the last month that concentration rose to 97 percent. A click on that campaign averages $7.70, against $4.24 across the account as a whole, so the traffic you are buying now is considerably more expensive than the traffic you bought earlier.
The campaigns are grouped by service line rather than by how people search. Most of the keywords use broad matching, which means Google decides what counts as a close enough match to your terms. In a category where a click costs eight or nine dollars, that decision is expensive to hand over.
The account ran from roughly February to May 2025, went quiet for about a year, then started again in mid 2026. Any trend line drawn across that gap is really two separate periods stitched together. It also means the account has never been running during your holiday party season, so we have no read at all on your busiest demand window.
02
You cannot currently see your own results.
Your account has nine enabled ways of recording an enquiry. Only one is fully working, the Contact Us Form, and it alone accounts for 42 of your 45 recorded leads. Seven of the other eight are flagged Misconfigured by Google.
The gaps that matter most are the phone and the calendar. All three phone tracking settings are misconfigured, and between them they have recorded one phone enquiry in eighteen months. Calendly booking tracking has recorded two. For an events business where a good share of enquiries arrive by phone, those numbers are not credible as a record of reality.
Which means your ads are very likely performing better than the numbers say. Every cost per lead figure on this page should be read as a worst case. We cannot say by how much until the tracking is repaired.
There is a second effect. Google uses those same signals to decide who to show your ads to. Both live campaigns bid to maximise conversions against this set of settings, so Google is optimising toward an incomplete picture of what a good customer looks like. This is not only a reporting problem. It is shaping who sees you.
One more thing worth correcting. Your leads carry a total recorded value of $1,500 across 42 form submissions, an average of about $36 each, and the values are applied inconsistently. Whatever an enquiry is genuinely worth to you, it is not $36, so the account is currently measuring its own return against a number that understates the business.
03
Worth protecting, and worth copying.
| Ad group | Spent | Leads | Cost per lead | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non Profit Event | $83 | 2 | $41.64 | Switched off |
| Brand Activation | $2,132 | 15 | $142.11 | Running |
| Corporate Events | $1,696 | 12 | $141.32 | Running |
| Corporate Gifting | $419 | 2 | $209.31 | Running |
| Event Production | $1,306 | 5 | $261.25 | Switched off |
Non Profit Event produced leads at roughly a third of the cost of anything else in the account. It sits inside a campaign that has been paused, so it is not running today. It only ever spent $83, so this is a small sample rather than a proven result, but it is the most promising number in the account and it points at exactly the demand your website already earns.
A Performance Max campaign produced 7 leads on $150.62, about $21.52 each. It never ran on more than a token budget, so it was never given a fair test. Clicks were cheaper in that earlier period, which explains part of it, so this is worth retesting rather than assuming.
Google rates ad strength as excellent on nearly every ad in the account. The creative is not the problem here, so nothing on this page is a criticism of the writing.
04
Stated plainly, and none of it is difficult to fix.
| Area | Spent | Leads |
|---|---|---|
| Automatically generated ads | $661 | 1 |
| Interior design ads | $355 | 0 |
That is about 14 percent of everything the account has ever spent, for a single lead. At the rate your running ads already achieve, the same money would be on track for about seven leads instead, and considerably more than that at the non profit rate. Both are estimates based on your own results rather than promises. Both of these ad groups are already paused, so the money is no longer going out, but it has not been redirected either.
Terms like "marketing agencies nyc" have been added as keywords. Hudson & Nine is not a marketing agency, and people searching that phrase are looking for something else. Broad matching then widens it further, pulling in searches for public relations firms, logo designers and branding studios. Those clicks cost the same eight or nine dollars as a real one.
Your own company name appears among the most visible search terms the account pays for. That traffic would very likely arrive anyway. Bidding on your own name can be a deliberate choice to protect it from competitors, but at the moment it looks accidental rather than decided.
Wedding related searches have been added as terms to exclude, so your ads never appear for them. At the same time, "wedding planners nyc" is the highest converting category in the entire account, turning roughly one in five clicks into an enquiry.
There may be a good reason for that decision that we are not aware of. We would rather ask than assume, but it is worth understanding before it carries on.
One interior design ad ran with an unfinished internal reminder visible in its description text. It has since been paused. Small thing, but it is the sort of detail that suggests the account has not had close attention recently.
05
This is the part we think is genuinely valuable. Each one is backed by data you already own.
Two non profit ad groups exist. One, Non Profit Event, delivered your cheapest leads in the account at about $42 each and then stopped when its campaign was paused. The other, Non-Profit Gala, is live but has spent $46 in total. Against that, your website earns more visibility here than anywhere else.
10,891 appearances in Google search results across 181 different fundraising and non profit queries in three months, and you already reach page one on several including "charity event planning company in nyc". Two leads at $41.64 is a small sample, but it is a small sample pointing the same way as the organic data. Because Google already considers your pages relevant here, these clicks should cost less than the general event terms the account buys today.
Proven visibility, existing pages, zero advertising presence.
3,216 appearances across 69 pop up queries, and you already reach page one on several including "corporate pop-up events". The pages are built and live. One first place ranking exists but sits on a narrow branded phrase, so we would not build the case on that one alone.
The strongest converting demand in the account is currently switched off. That is a decision to make deliberately rather than by default.
"Wedding planners nyc" converted at roughly 19 percent, the highest rate of any category in the account, though that rests on only three enquiries so treat it as a signal rather than a settled fact. The surrounding search volume is not in doubt: related wedding searches sit in the highest bracket Google reports. Your weddings page is live but does not yet name a single piece of work.
Both are true and the production positioning is your premium differentiator, so we would not drop it. But the words people actually type should appear somewhere on the page, or you are invisible to the search that matters most.
Two categories drew identical clicks, but "event planners nyc" needed half the search appearances to get them, at double the click rate of "event production companies nyc". At keyword level the same pattern holds, with planner language producing leads at about $106 against $159.
We compared every paid keyword against every search that produced a real click to your site over three months. There is no overlap at all.
Depending on how strictly you exclude searches for your own name, between 21 and 33 searches produced a real visit over three months. The account is buying a largely different vocabulary from the one your website is proving works. Closing that gap is the cheapest improvement available, because the evidence for what to buy already exists.
Three of your five campaigns are paused. Between them they produced 14 of the 45 leads the account has ever recorded, on about 27 percent of the money.
The paused campaigns averaged about $137 per lead against about $165 for the two that are running. Clicks were cheaper in that earlier period, which explains part of the difference. The point is not that the old setup was better, it is that the account has never been rebuilt around what actually worked in it.
06
Your paid ads and your natural search results are making the same mistake, independently of each other.
Both compete for broad category terms like "brand activation" and "event production", where you appear constantly and are almost never chosen. Your website was shown 16,568 times for brand activation searches over three months and received no clicks at all. The ads are doing the same thing, only with money attached.
Meanwhile the specific, commercial phrases that genuinely produce enquiries, fundraising, pop ups, planner language, weddings, are unclaimed in both channels.
That tells us this is a positioning problem rather than a channel problem. It also means the two channels should be run as one strategy. The words we prove in advertising can be fed straight into the AI search work, and the pages we build for AI visibility give the ads somewhere relevant to send people.
There is one more link between the two. People who already know your name find you easily. Searches for Hudson & Nine brought 112 visits from 315 appearances over three months, which is a strong result and shows the brand works when someone is looking for it. The difficulty is with people who do not know you yet. Across the same period your ads recorded barely a handful of appearances against your own name, and in AI answers your name rarely comes up unless it is already mentioned in the question. Paid search cannot solve that on its own, and neither can AI visibility work on its own.
07
If you would like us to take this on, this is the order we would work in.
Repair phone tracking, Calendly bookings and the enquiry form. Nothing else should change until you can see what is actually happening, and this is the cheapest fix on the list.
Switch off the automatic ads and the interior design ads. Tighten the broad matching so Google stops choosing your audience for you.
Fundraising and non profit first, pop up events second. Both point at pages that already exist and already rank.
Group the account by the language people use rather than by your internal service lines, and give every group its own relevant landing page. Your own data says that is worth roughly three times the results.
Use what advertising proves about customer language to direct the content and AI search work, and use those pages as the destinations for ads. One strategy, two channels, measured together.
Not before. Adding money to the current setup would mostly buy more of what is not working. Once the first five are done, budget starts to buy leads.
08
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| What a booking is worth | Your average booking value, roughly how many enquiries become bookings, and which service lines carry the best margin. Without these, no one can honestly say whether the advertising pays for itself. |
| Who owns the account | We could not determine whether the account sits inside an agency's management umbrella or your own. If it is the former, the entire search history could be lost when that relationship ends. This is worth confirming soon. |
| The reasoning on weddings | Wedding searches were deliberately excluded. If there is a good reason, we will work with it. We would just rather know it than reverse a decision that was made on purpose. |
| Access to make changes | Everything so far has been read only. Nothing has been altered in your account. |