Almost every underperforming ad account we audit has the same root cause, and it is never the bidding strategy. It is that the account is optimising towards a conversion event that does not represent a sale.
Fix the measurement before the campaigns
If your conversion fires on a thank-you page view, every refresh counts. If it fires on a form submit with no qualification, every spam entry counts. The algorithm then faithfully finds you more of exactly that. One client was reporting a healthy cost per lead while roughly 40% of those leads were duplicates and bots — the fix was tracking, not budget.
Then cut before you add
- Pull a 90-day search terms report and add negatives for everything that spent without converting. This is usually 20–35% of spend on an unmanaged account.
- Pause keywords with meaningful spend and zero conversions across a full sales cycle. Not 30 days — a full cycle for your business.
- Separate brand and non-brand campaigns. Brand traffic flatters every average and hides what acquisition actually costs.
Match the landing page to the promise
An ad for a specific service should not land on a homepage. The message the ad made should be the first thing on the page, and the page should load in under two seconds on mobile — because a third of paid clicks on a slow page never see it at all. You are paying for that click either way.
Let paid and organic feed each other
Paid search is the fastest keyword research that exists: within weeks it tells you which terms actually convert. Those are the terms worth building organic pages for. Once those pages rank, you can lower spend on them and move the budget somewhere organic cannot reach yet. Run in isolation, both cost more than they should.