38 of the last 40 equipment suppliers we checked were running no Google Ads

All insights

17 August 2026 · Aston Gapes · about 6 minutes
Part of Get found

Somewhere in Australia this morning, a director of an equipment company typed his own product into Google for the first time in about three years. He was not really checking anything. He wanted to see which competitor was buying ads above him, because somebody at a trade show had said everyone was doing it now.

There were no ads. Not his, not theirs, not anybody's. Just the ordinary results, a marketplace, and a wholesaler in Melbourne.

He took that as reassurance. It is the opposite of reassurance, and the difference is worth a lot of money.

The number that made us start writing this down

Checking whether a business advertises is easier than most people think. Google publishes every advertiser running ads in Australia, in a public tool called the Ads Transparency Centre. Put in a domain and it shows you what that business is running, right now, for free, in about fifteen seconds.

We do it constantly, because researching Australian equipment suppliers by hand is most of what happens here before anybody gets written to. After consolidating several months of that research and running a fresh round of checks to confirm it, the number came out like this:

Of the last forty equipment suppliers we looked at — manufacturers, distributors and specialist suppliers, mostly between eleven and forty staff — thirty-eight were running no Google Ads at all. On most of the search terms we tested there was not one advertiser bidding. Not a competitor, not a marketplace, nobody.

We expected the number to be high. We did not expect thirty-eight.

Why an empty auction is not what it looks like

The instinct is the one the director had: nobody is advertising, so this category must not work that way. Our buyers are not on Google. It would be a waste.

Here is the thing about that. The price of a click is set by competition. It is an auction, and in an auction with one bidder, the bidder pays the floor. A category nobody is bidding on is the cheapest it will ever be, precisely because nobody has noticed it yet.

And it does not stay that way. The moment one company in a category starts, the others see the enquiries going somewhere else and follow, and within a year the price is whatever the most desperate participant will pay. The businesses that went first keep a permanent cost advantage over the ones that reacted, because they built their history and their quality scores while it was quiet.

There is a second thing, less obvious and probably worth more. A complex purchase gets researched for weeks or months before anybody rings anybody. Being present during that stretch is not really about catching a click. It is about being one of the two or three names that already feel familiar by the time somebody writes a shortlist.

Now do the arithmetic, in your numbers

This is where equipment is genuinely different from most of what an agency sees, and it is why we keep writing about this market instead of a broader one.

Your cost base does not move. The technical sales people, the demo stock, the showroom, the service engineers, the product line you have already tooled up for — all of that is paid for whether the phone rings today or not. Which means one more sale is very nearly all margin, and one more enquiry is worth far more to you than the same enquiry would be worth to a business that buys its stock per order.

So work it out. What is one order worth? How many enquiries does your team convert — one in three, one in five? Divide the first by the second, and you have what a single enquiry is actually worth to your business. For most of the companies we research that number has three or four figures in it.

Then set it against what a click costs in a category where nobody is bidding, which is frequently a couple of dollars, because there is nobody to outbid. The gap between those two numbers is the widest we see in any market we work in.

And if it does not work?

Then you stop, and you have spent a month of a small budget finding out something true about your own market. That is a cheap answer to a question most equipment businesses have been guessing at for a decade.

If it does work, you bought a position while it was empty, and every competitor who follows pays more than you do to stand beside you.

The thing that actually goes wrong is almost never the ads. It is that nobody set up tracking first. Three months in, the money has gone out, some enquiries have come in, and not one person in the building can say which of those enquiries came from the ads. So it gets judged on a feeling, and the feeling in a quiet month is always the same one. That is the failure in nearly every account we get asked to look at, and it is entirely avoidable: the tracking goes in before the spend, not after it.

Go and look at yours

You do not need us for this part, and you should not take our word for the number above. Put your own domain in below. Then do it for the two or three competitors you would name if somebody asked you right now.