My Step-by-Step Process
To Uncover the Real Google Ads
Account Problems
(in Under 20 Mins)

Absolute non-negotiable. The very first place on the list.

For most advertisers, this is the fundamentals they should be running:

• Enhanced Conversions — for improved robustness (sending PII data from the sale)
• Consent Mode v2 — for modelling opted out users
• sGTM — to reduce client-side tracking dependency (weaker than server-side) — ad blockers, parameter stripping etc
• Google Ads conversion tag — usually ends up tracking more than GA4 does

Of course, there are advanced tracking alternatives i.e Synthetic conversions, Edge-tagging, first-party domain re-routing etc but for 90% you'd expect the above 4 things in place.

Primary conversion actions & repeat rate

• One primary conversion action (purchase!)
• Repeat rate between 1–1.1 (anything else means a tracking issue)

Quick easy wins here

• Brand separated out from Generic
• Search & display partners opted out
• "Presence" only location targeting
• Smart bidding on brand

The feedback loop you don't want

Having brand not separated out leads to over-inflation of your campaign's actual prospecting performance.

Brand will always convert much more efficiently and therefore give an inflated view of reality.

On top of this, this inflation then feeds smart bidding, causing a feedback loop where smart bidding finds more customers like the brand searchers — aka existing customers or users likely to convert anyway — resulting in a lack of fresh, new customer sales.

This can lead to excellent in-platform performance, but in reality your P&L starts to crumble as you just recycle demand for the same existing customer audience pool — paying again and again for brand searches — thinking they were non-brand, new customers.

Outright scams by Google. Turn off immediately.

Presence only is non-negotiable

Otherwise Google will spend in countries and continents you don't even sell in — and fast!

Switch to manual CPC and find 20–50%+ savings

Smart bidding on brand often leads to overpaying on branded terms vs manual CPC. Since the likelihood of conversion is so high, smart bidding will try and bid more than every other competitor to win the sale, causing CPC to increase over the odds and make your cost rise unnecessarily.

By switching to a manual CPC bid strategy on brand, you can expect to find savings anywhere from 20–50+%.

You can spot red flags without knowing a single margin

Even without knowing margins or how the business fully works, you can still identify red flags in the account due to their structure.

If campaigns are using smart bidding, we need to see at least 30–50 conversions a month from each segmented campaign. Otherwise, the smart bidding strategy is starved of learnings and tends to stagnate — leaving you away from your goals.

You can also be too consolidated — usually in PMax

Having all products grouped together to hit that conversion threshold will cause more harm than good as margins, return rates, CLTV are all ignored.

PMax will go after the easiest sale (warm & existing traffic), usually lower value products if multiple varied price ranges are in the same asset group, and cause misalignment with your business goals and the ads account.

The ads account will look great, but new customer growth and margin will suffer.

Structure should reflect the business — not cookie-cutter categories

This is why having a clear segmentation strategy based on the business offering is important — not just a cookie-cutter catch all or default category-structure.