Let's TalkLet's TalkSearch, Shopping, Performance Max and YouTube campaigns managed against revenue. For businesses whose buyers are already searching and are landing on a competitor instead.
Most accounts we open are paying for search terms the owner would never approve. We go through yours line by line, total up the spend going nowhere, and send you the list. You can hand it to your current agency and keep the savings - the audit is yours either way.
The failures we see repeatedly, and what each one actually costs.
Broad and phrase matching have widened repeatedly, and Performance Max reports search terms selectively at best. Most accounts we open are spending a meaningful share on queries with no commercial relationship to the business, and it persists because nobody is reading the search term report line by line every week.
Roughly half the accounts we audit are counting something other than what the business earns - page views as conversions, duplicates since a site migration, or form fills from people who were never going to buy. Every decision the platform then makes optimises toward that number, which means the account gets better at producing the wrong outcome.
PMax performs well with a strong feed and trustworthy conversion data, and quietly consumes budget when either is missing, while reporting on itself in a way that makes the contribution hard to isolate. The only reliable way to know what it is adding is to test against a controlled search campaign, which almost nobody does because it means pausing something that looks like it is working.
People searching your name were already yours. Counting those conversions in an account-level cost per acquisition makes demand generation look more efficient than it is, and hides the fact that the non-brand half may not be working at all. Splitting them is a reporting change that regularly changes the strategy.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
The wasted search term list in dollars, and a verification of what your conversions actually represent. There is no point optimising toward a number that is measuring the wrong event.
Separate campaigns and separate reporting, so demand you already had is never credited to demand generation. This is usually the moment the real performance becomes visible.
Campaigns grouped by what the searcher wants rather than by what the setup wizard suggested, with negatives applied properly and a weekly search term discipline rather than a quarterly one.
A controlled search campaign running alongside, so its contribution is measured rather than asserted by the platform reporting on its own performance.
Budget follows cost per acquisition against your real margin. Where the offer or the landing page is the constraint we say so, because more traffic to a page that does not convert is a more expensive version of the same problem.
A genuine Google Ads engagement rather than an adjacent one. A dealership group was competing in an expensive auction with generic targeting and blended reporting. We restructured around intent, separated brand from non-brand so the real performance was visible, and rebuilt conversion tracking onto the events that mattered. The account delivered 1.22M clicks at a 0.90% click-through rate - roughly three times the category average - and 627% return on ad spend.
Read the full case studyThe audit found eleven thousand dollars a year going to search terms that had nothing to do with our business. We had been running that account for three years.
Our conversion tracking had been double-counting since the site migration. Every decision we made for eight months was based on a number that was wrong.
They turned off Performance Max for a month to prove what it was actually contributing. No other agency would have suggested that.
For local service businesses, roughly $2,000 a month in media before the data is thick enough to optimise on. For ecommerce it depends entirely on your margin and average order value - we will tell you on the first call if the numbers do not support it yet.
Sometimes. It works well with a strong feed and clean conversion data, and it quietly absorbs budget when either is missing. We test it against a controlled search campaign rather than trusting the platform's own reporting on itself.
Possibly not at all, and if the audit shows they are doing a good job we will tell you that. The common failure we find is optimising toward conversions the platform counts rather than toward revenue the business banks.
Yes. Everything is built in your own Google Ads account with your own billing. You keep the history, the audiences and the learnings if we stop working together.
Separate them and look. Brand campaigns convert cheaply because those people were already looking for you, and blending them into an account-level cost per acquisition makes the whole account look better than the demand generation inside it. We split brand from non-brand in reporting on every account, and the difference is regularly the reason a previously good-looking account turns out to be flat.
Yours, in almost every case. An established account carries conversion history that smart bidding depends on, and discarding it restarts a learning period for no good reason. We restructure inside it. The exception is an account with badly corrupted conversion data, where the history is actively misleading the bidding rather than informing it - and we would show you the evidence before proposing that.
The same service, written for the way it actually runs in one industry.
Written for owners weighing this up, whether or not they work with us.
This is one part of a bigger service. Here is the whole of it, and the closest neighbours.
Tell us what you are running today and what is not working. We will tell you honestly whether google ads agency is the right thing to fix first - and if it is not, what is.