Six recurring leaks we find in almost every account we audit — and the order in which to close them.
Before optimising for growth, stop the losses. In nearly every account we inherit, a meaningful share of monthly spend is buying clicks that could never convert.
The usual suspects: missing negative keywords, broad match without a tight conversion signal, display network inheritance on search campaigns, and location settings that include 'people interested in' your target region.
Add to that unfiltered Performance Max spend on brand terms you would have won organically, and shopping feeds with poor titles competing on irrelevant queries. Each leak is small alone; together they quietly drain a quarter of the budget.
Search term review is the highest-ROI hour in any account. Run it weekly for the first month after a takeover, then monthly. The savings compound, and the query data reshapes your negative and match-type strategy.
Bidding without value is gambling. If your conversions carry no revenue or lead score, smart bidding is optimising toward a number it cannot interpret. Feed it real value and the same budget buys better outcomes.
Landing page mismatch is the leak nobody tracks. The ad promises one thing, the page delivers another, and the bounce never shows up in the ad dashboard. Audit the journey from query to thank-you page as a single experience.
Close these in order of spend impact, document what you saved, and only then discuss scaling. Growth on top of waste just makes the waste bigger.
Revisit the account structure quarterly, not annually. What was a clean architecture in January is a tangle by July as campaigns are cloned and audiences are layered on. A short, regular pruning session keeps the structure legible and the algorithm's signals clean.
Keep a single source of truth for negatives. A shared, versioned list of negative keywords — built from every account you have ever managed — turns each new engagement into a faster, cheaper launch. The lessons you paid for once should never have to be relearned.
