Expertise notes
Performance Marketing Notes
Ad accounts rarely fail because of bidding. They fail on audience, creative and the landing page, in that order.
The pattern
What usually goes wrong here
The account gets blamed for a problem it did not create. The audience is wrong, the creative says nothing specific, the landing page asks for too much, and then the budget gets spread evenly across everything instead of concentrated on the two things that convert. Bid strategy is the last place I look, and it is almost never the answer.
What I look at
The things that actually move it
- Tracking accuracy before anything else — if the conversion data is wrong, every decision after it is wrong
- Audience definition specific enough to write an ad to one person
- Campaign architecture that keeps search, Performance Max, Meta and remarketing from cannibalising each other
- Creative testing with a structure, so a losing ad teaches you something
- Landing pages that keep the promise the ad made
- Cost per qualified lead as the number, not cost per click
- The search terms report, read weekly, which almost nobody does
FAQ
Performance Marketing — questions I get asked
Why is a Google Ads account spending money without converting?
In most accounts I have opened it is one of six settings: broad match with no negatives, Search Partners and Display expansion left on, location targeting set to presence-or-interest, automated bidding running on a conversion that is not real, one ad group covering five intents, or a landing page that does not match the ad. Check the settings before rebuilding the strategy.
How much ad budget is enough to learn anything?
Below roughly Rs 1,00,000 a month in media spend there is usually not enough conversion data to optimise properly, so decisions get made on noise. At that level, a smaller, tightly targeted account with one clear offer beats a spread-out one.
Should you pay someone a percentage of ad spend?
It is common and it is a structural conflict of interest, because it rewards whoever manages the account for spending more of your money. Flat fees scoped to the work are cleaner. That holds whether you are hiring an agency or an individual.
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