I Killed 100% of My Facebook Ads and 95% of My Google Ads, and My Numbers Are Up. Here's the Proof.

I turned the ads off on a Monday.

Not trimmed. Off. Every Facebook ad we ran, gone. Ninety five percent of the Google ads with it.

I run a marketing company. Ads are part of what I sell to other people. So this was either going to prove my own product or make me look like an idiot in front of my own team, and I knew that when I did it.

Tuesday morning the number was down. Wednesday it was down more.

I sat there and did nothing about it, which is the hardest thing I have ever done at a keyboard.

Then it turned.

Now here's the part most people would leave out of a post like this, so I'm putting it in the second paragraph instead of the last one. I hadn't only killed the ads. In that same window I moved 1,387 of my own pages off WordPress and rebuilt this whole site in JSX. Two things changed, not one, and that's most of what this post is about.

TL;DR (the short answer)

I cut 100% of my Facebook ads and 95% of my Google ads on my own site, and in the same window I moved 1,387 pages off WordPress onto JSX. Total sessions fell 4.63%, from 9,672 to 9,224. Organic search sessions rose 277.59%, from 241 to 910. Engaged sessions rose 117.48%, from 1,133 to 2,464. Two variables moved at once, so I can't tell you which one did it and I won't pretend otherwise. What I can tell you is that fewer people came and more than twice as many of them did something. Google Analytics on smallbusiness-seo.com, Jun 15 to Aug 13, 2026 measured against Apr 16 to Jun 14, 2026.

3 Things to Remember

My Traffic Dropped the Day I Pulled the Spend. That Part's Real.

Sessions went from 9,672 to 9,224. That's 448 fewer visits, down 4.63%.

I'm putting the bad number at the top because you'd find it anyway, and because every agency you have ever hired buried theirs somewhere around slide nine.

Here's what that drop actually is, and it isn't complicated. It's the ads, leaving. You pay for a click and you get a click, so when you stop paying, the click stops. There's no mystery in it and there's no lag either. The line moves the same afternoon.

What matters is what was happening underneath that number while it fell.

Ads Are a Rented Generator. I Wired the Building.

You've had a generator on a job site. It runs the whole time you feed it and it quits the minute you don't, and when it quits you own nothing you didn't own before.

That's paid ads. Good, loud, instant, rented.

Wiring the building is the other deal, and it's a worse deal right up until it isn't. It's slower, it's a pain in the ass while you're in it, and nobody claps for you in week three because there is nothing to look at yet. Then one day it's done, and the lights come on every morning whether you paid anybody that week or not.

In my case the wiring wasn't a figure of speech. It was 1,387 pages moved onto a stack that loads in about a second and that a search engine can read without guessing at anything. That's the same move I do for other people now, and it's why the site and the search work come as one thing here instead of two bills.

The mistake: you treat ad spend as your marketing.

The fix: treat ad spend as your generator, and get the wiring in behind it while it's still running.

The payoff: the day you shut the generator off, the lights stay on.

Organic Search Went From 241 Sessions to 910. Here's the Arithmetic.

Organic search sessions went from 241 to 910. That's 669 more visits, up 277.59%.

Do it yourself if you want. 910 minus 241 is 669, and 669 divided by 241 is 2.7759. That's your 277.59%.

Now put the two numbers next to each other, because this is the part I actually care about. Total sessions fell by 448 while organic search added 669. Take those 669 back out and the hole in the top line isn't 448 anymore, it's 1,117, which is an 11.55% drop instead of a 4.63% one.

That's arithmetic and not a cause. Nobody ran a controlled test on my site, and I'm not going to describe one that didn't happen. What the arithmetic says is that 669 visits I don't pay for showed up while I was busy not paying for anything.

Organic engaged sessions went from 141 to 568 over the same stretch. Up 302.84%.

Source: Google Analytics, smallbusiness-seo.com. Jun 15 to Aug 13, 2026 measured against Apr 16 to Jun 14, 2026. The screenshots are on our homepage, full size and unedited, and you can open them and read across the rows yourself.

Fewer People Came. More Than Twice as Many Stayed.

Engaged sessions went from 1,133 to 2,464. That's up 117.48%.

Engagement rate went from 11.71% to 26.71%, which is up 128.04%. Average engagement time per session went from 8 seconds to 12 seconds, and events per session went from 3.95 to 4.84.

Read those together and you get the shape of the thing. I lost 448 visits and I picked up 1,331 people who actually did something once they got here.

Two things could be doing that, and I think both of them are. The site got faster and clearer, so more of the people who landed on it stuck around. And the mix of who was landing changed, because a guy who typed his own problem into Google was always going to stay longer than a guy I interrupted mid scroll on his phone. I can't split those two apart either, and you should be suspicious of anybody who says they can.

The mistake: you judge your marketing by how many people showed up.

The fix: judge it by how many of them stayed and did something you can see.

The payoff: you stop paying to fill a room with people who were never going to call you.

I Changed Two Things at Once. Here's What I Can't Prove.

This is where my own argument gets weak, so let me take it apart myself before somebody else gets to.

I killed the ads and I rebuilt the site in the same window. WordPress to JSX, 1,387 pages, same URLs and same words on a new engine.

So I can't tell you the ad cut caused the lift, and I can't tell you the rebuild caused it either. Two variables moved together, and when two variables move together you don't get to pick the one you like and call it the reason. I have spent a year on this blog going after other people for doing exactly that, and I'm not going to turn around and do it on my own page.

Here's what I can prove. The numbers happened. They're Google Analytics, on my domain, and the unedited screenshots are sitting on the homepage where anybody can open them. 9,672 to 9,224 sessions. 241 to 910 organic. 1,133 to 2,464 engaged.

Here's what I can't. Which change did what, and in what proportion. My honest read is that the rebuild did the heavy lifting on the organic side and the ad cut mostly stopped the bleeding on the invoice, but that's a read. It isn't a measurement and I'm not going to dress it up as one.

And while I'm in here, the rest of the holes:

• It's one site. Mine. One business, one market, one set of decisions made by one guy. That's a story, not a study, and if you want a study this isn't one.
• It's sixty days against sixty days. Summer measured against spring. Seasonality is real and I am not controlling for it in any way.
• 910 organic sessions is a small base. The percentage is big because the starting number was low. A huge move on a small base is still a small base, and anybody waving a 277.59% at you owes you the raw numbers underneath it.
• I'm an SEO company. Of course my search numbers moved. This is what I do all day, and a plumber does not have me sitting in his office between jobs.

So why did I still pull the ads? Because by the time I pulled them the wiring was already in. The generator was sitting there idling next to a building that had its own power, and that is a completely different decision from switching it off and hoping.

The Ads Weren't the Problem. Where I Sent Them Was.

Here's the line I actually believe, and it took the confound above to get me to it.

I was paying good money to send people to a site that couldn't hold them. It was slow, it was bolted together out of thirty pieces of other people's software, and it was vague in exactly the places it needed to be sharp. The ads worked fine. The landing did not.

An engagement rate of 11.71% means almost nine out of every ten visits went nowhere at all. I was buying a pile of those. Every single one.

Once the site could hold a visitor, I stopped needing to rent the ones who showed up. That's the whole post in one sentence, and it took me a rebuild and sixty nervous days to be able to write it.

Which means the order matters more than the decision does. Fix the place they land, then go look at what you're paying to fill it. Do it backwards and all you've done is turn your traffic off.

If your pages are slow, that's the first thing costing you, and it costs you the same on paid traffic as it does on organic. Run your load time through the cost calculator and go look at the number it gives you.

Don't Pull the Plug the Way I Did. Do It in This Order.

I could afford a bad sixty days. You might not be able to, so here's the order I'd give you instead of the one I ran.

1. Fix the site first. Fast, clear, one question answered per page inside the first two sentences. Everything below this step is a waste of your money until this one is done, and I mean that literally.
2. Find the ads buying traffic you'd get anyway. The people searching your business by name were coming to you regardless, which means you're paying to stand first in line for your own name. Easiest cut there is and it usually goes unnoticed for years.
3. Keep the 5%. I didn't kill all of the Google ads. I kept the ones that book jobs, which is the emergency terms and the high intent searches where somebody is standing in water while they type. Those earn their keep and I'd be dumb to touch them.
4. Change one thing at a time if you want to know what worked. I didn't, which is why this post has an entire section admitting it. You have the advantage of not being in a hurry.
5. Give it ninety days. Mine turned inside sixty and that's faster than normal. Plan on ninety, and be pleasantly surprised if it comes early.
6. Write so an answer engine can quote you. Buyers ask AI before they ask anybody, and AI names one business instead of handing back ten links. That's what AEO is, in plain words.

And if you want to keep running paid the whole time the wiring goes in, do that. Here's how we run Google Ads. Both at once is fine and it's what I'd tell most people to do. Only ads, forever, at a price that climbs every year, is the trap.

Find the Ad Spend You're Paying for Traffic You'd Get Anyway.

The fastest money you're going to find this month is sitting in your own search terms report, and it takes about ten minutes to go get it. Here's the prompt I'd run.

I run a [TYPE OF BUSINESS] in [YOUR CITY]. My business is called
[YOUR BUSINESS NAME].

Here is my Google Ads search terms report. Each line is the search
somebody typed, then clicks, then cost, then conversions:
[PASTE YOUR SEARCH TERMS REPORT]

Do four things.

1. Put every search term into one of three piles. Pile one: people
   searching my business by name. Pile two: people with a real job
   to book right now. Pile three: people just looking around.

2. Add up what I spent on pile one. That is money I am spending to
   be first in line for my own name.

3. Tell me which terms in pile two I should never turn off, and why.

4. Tell me the three terms I should cut first, worst first, and what
   I would lose if I cut them.

Rules: write at a 5th grade reading level. Short sentences. Use only
the numbers I pasted. If a number is not in what I gave you, say you
do not have it. Do not guess and do not fill anything in.

I Moved 1,387 of My Own Pages. That's the Other Half of This Story.

I didn't write this from the cheap seats and I didn't test it on somebody else's business first.

My own site ran on WordPress for years. Thirty pieces of other people's software, any one of which could take it down or leave it open, and no way to fix that from inside WordPress. So I moved it. Every page, all 1,387 of them, same URLs, and nothing went dark on the way across.

There are no plugins on it now. It loads in about a second. Every page is written so a search engine and an answer engine can both read it without having to guess what I meant.

That's the half of this story that has nothing to do with ads at all. It's also the half I'd do first if I were sitting where you are.

Where the Ads Were Genuinely the Right Call.

I ran paid for years and I'd run it again tomorrow in a few spots, so weigh this before you take my side of it.

You're brand new. No domain age, no pages, no reviews, nobody linking to you. Search is going to take months you don't have, so buy the clicks and stay alive while the rest catches up.

You need it Tuesday. A slow week, a truck payment coming, a new tech sitting in the yard doing nothing. Ads turn on today and nothing else does. That's not a small thing when payroll is Friday.

You're testing an offer. Paid will tell you inside a week whether anybody wants the thing you're selling. That is cheap information and it's worth every dollar.

It's already profitable and you can prove it. If a term pays for itself and you can put a receipt next to it, leave it alone. I did, and that's the 95% instead of the 100%.

The trap was never ads. The trap is ads being the only thing holding the business up while the site underneath them can't close anybody, month after month, at a price that goes up every year.

The Lights Stay On When You Stop Paying.

I pulled 100% of my Facebook spend and 95% of my Google spend, rebuilt the site in the same window, watched sessions dip 4.63%, and watched organic search climb 277.59% while more than twice as many people did something once they got here.

I can't tell you which change did it. I can tell you I would never have dared pull the ads if the site underneath them still couldn't hold anybody.

What you actually want isn't more traffic. It's a month where the phone rings and you didn't buy a single one of those calls.

If you want to see what your site looks like built that way, take a test drive. I'll put your business on my code and you can drive it before you spend anything.

Take a Test Drive →

You get a real look at your own market. No obligation, and nothing to cancel.

Want the whole playbook first? Plan your attack. Balls Out Marketing.

FAQ

Read These In This Order

1. SEO Built For AI, Not Adapted For It
2. End Your WordPress Nightmare
3. What is AEO
4. Google Ads
5. The 100K AI Website