Lighting money on fire with Google Ads

I’ve spent the last couple weeks getting lost in a thicket of little to-dos, primarily related to operations that haven’t yet been automated. Some things like disabling SMS messages for a customer after they’ve opted out are probably better done manually at the moment because the time to automate this using Twilio web hooks is better spent elsewhere - others, like updating a user’s weather alert limit after they’ve paid for a subscription should be built out sooner than later. Eventually I’d like any task that requires querying a database to be automated and/or available in a UI, but for now I’m remaining biased toward observation rather than action - there’s no one who can save me from my own decisions and I don’t want to mess something up or waste time on things that don’t really matter.

One thing I have taken action on is Google Ads. The previous owner built out a campaign a few years ago so I turned it back on and increased the cost-per-click budget significantly to see how it’d go. Budgeting nearly $100/day without a real strategy is akin to sitting down at a poker table where they’re playing a game you’ve never heard of, but for now I’m treating this as tuition and am okay with making these bets knowing they have a negative expectation. Thus far roughly 7% of clicks have resulted in new trials but I’m not far enough along in the experiment to see if any new subscriptions materialize one the trials end. I plan to continue allocating resources to the campaign to determine the viability of PPC.