The starting point
Before touching a single bid, we ran a full account audit. The findings shaped everything that followed, and three priorities came out of it.
- The campaign structure was lumping high-intent and low-intent searches into the same ad groups. Someone typing “best annual travel insurance for over 65s” was being treated the same as someone typing “travel insurance” with no buying signal. That made bidding logic impossible. We restructured the campaigns around buyer-intent keyword groups rather than broad category terms, so budget could flow toward the searches most likely to convert.
- Conversion tracking was patchy. Some leads were being recorded against the wrong campaigns. Others weren’t being tracked at all. Without clean attribution, optimisation is guesswork. We rebuilt the tracking from scratch so every lead mapped back to its source campaign, keyword, and ad.
- Branded and non-branded keywords were running in the same campaigns. Branded searches (people typing the company name into Google) were inflating overall performance numbers and masking how the cold-traffic ads were actually doing. We split branded from non-branded into separate campaigns so we could see what the ads were really producing versus what was existing demand we were just buying back.
What worked
Once the foundations were in place, three levers drove the performance lift.
- Target CPA smart bidding, applied once we had enough conversion data to support it. Google’s models allocate budget more efficiently than manual bidding once they have a meaningful conversion volume to learn from, and the account hit that threshold inside the first phase of management.
- Aggressive negative keyword management on the non-branded campaign, stripping out low-intent traffic before it ate budget. The audit had surfaced a long tail of irrelevant search terms the account was paying to appear against. We built a working negative keyword list and kept it updated weekly.
- Weekly bid adjustments and continuous ad copy refinement based on search term performance. No autopilot. Every week the highest-converting copy got more weight, the weakest got swapped out, and bids on the strongest themes were nudged up.
The Result
Where we’re focused next
The foundation is in place. The next phase is about scale.
- Scaling the volume-driven non-branded campaign now that ad strength and structure are dialled in.
- Broad match keyword expansion with Smart Bidding, targeting a further 13% conversion lift at similar ROAS.
- Landing page experiments to lift conversion rate on colder traffic, where the click is cheaper but the buying intent is softer.
The takeaway
Most Google Ads accounts that “aren’t working” don’t have a budget problem. They have a structure and measurement problem. Spend more on a broken account and you just lose money faster. Fix the structure, fix the tracking, then let the data do the work.
If your account is producing clicks but you can’t tell where the revenue is coming from, that’s the symptom. Audit first, scale second.
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