Getting The Foundations Laid Correctly - A Case Study

Two years ago, I took over a Google Ads account; the business was achieving a monthly conversion rate of around 8%. Today, the same business is scoring a 17-20% conversion rate each month. Nothing in the current account is a result of drastic changes. I didn’t do any clever tricks or rely on AI shortcuts. The change is the result of fixing fundamentals, week by week, over 5 months.

Here is what the account looked like when I took it over, and what it looks like now.

What I found in week one

• Too many campaigns.

The account had dozens of active campaigns, many of which should have been merged or paused. Each campaign was competing with itself for budget and impression share. Smart Bidding works better with fewer, larger campaigns that have enough conversion data to actually learn from. Spreading data across that many campaigns starves them all.

• Display and Search partners were used by default.

These are automatically enabled during initial campaign setup, and most accounts leave them on. They almost always perform worse than Google Search alone, and they quietly consume a budget that should be going to higher-intent placements.

• Not nearly enough negative keywords.

The search terms report was full of irrelevant queries. No weekly process for reviewing and adding negatives meant the same wasted spend was repeating itself month after month.

• Brand overlap between Search and Performance Max.

The brand campaign in Search and a Performance Max campaign were both bidding on branded traffic, cannibalising each other and inflating the CPC on traffic that should have been close to free.

• No channel exclusions in Performance Max.

PMax was free to run on Display, Discover, Gmail, and YouTube with no set limits. For a business that converts primarily on Search, a meaningful chunk of PMax spend was going to channels with much weaker conversion intent. The first thing I did was exclude all mobile apps and kids' channels on YouTube.

• No specific landing pages

Paid traffic was being sent to the homepage. A homepage is designed for a brand visitor, not for someone who just clicked a specific service ad.

• No full-funnel strategy

Paid search was treated as the entire marketing function. No remarketing, no email program for the lead list, no social media activity feeding the top of the funnel.

• No email retention

The business was acquiring leads and then losing them when they didn't convert on the first visit. No nurture sequence, no re-engagement.

What the account looks like now

Two years later, here is the current state of each item:

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1. Fewer, more consolidated campaigns. Down to a handful of well-structured campaigns, each with enough volume to feed Smart Bidding properly. The account probably hasn't learned faster, and CPCs are more stable.

2. A dedicated brand campaign, branded keywords excluded everywhere else. In Performance Max and the non-brand Search campaigns, brand terms are blocked as negatives. The brand campaign protects that traffic at a much lower CPC. Non-brand campaigns are forced to compete on their actual merit.

3. Structured negative keyword lists, reviewed daily. Lists are organised by theme (jobs, “free” competitor names, irrelevant intent, etc.) and applied across the right campaigns. The daily review takes about thirty minutes and prevents a meaningful chunk of wasted ad spend every month.

4. Portfolio bidding with a target CPA. I applied bidding at the portfolio level so that the algorithm has a wider pool of data to optimise across campaigns, rather than each campaign learning in isolation.

5. Constant landing page experimentation. I have direct access to the client’s website, so I can freely test different landing page versions. New versions are tested almost every month. This involves hero changes, form length, and full copy rewrites. Most tests do not win. The ones that are compounded over 6 months.

6. Offline conversion tracking. Qualified leads from the client’s sales team are imported back into Google Ads. The bidding strategy now optimises for qualified leads, not just form fills. This one change shifted the kind of traffic the algorithm chases.

7. A complete funnel strategy. Together with the client’s marketing team, there is paid social, influencer campaigns, SEO content, and an email retention program, all contributing to the bottom-line result. Paid search no longer carries the entire growth target on its own.

The pace of this work

Most of what's on these lists is fundamentals. They are not exotic strategies or fast hacks. Fundamentals are slow but thorough tactics.

Server-side tracking takes developer time, and most clients do not have a developer sitting idle waiting for you.

Proper landing pages need content, design, and copywriting that take weeks per page. Getting offline conversions flowing means the sales team has to track leads in a way they probably haven't before. Negative keyword lists need a weekly habit, not a one-off cleanup. A real email program needs someone to own it.

None of this gets done overnight. That is okay. You roll up your sleeves and chip away at it. One item at a time.

Tracking, followed by landing pages, followed by structure, then bidding, followed by the funnel around the paid search core. Each fix unlocks the next one. Better tracking makes Smart Bidding actually work. Better landing pages make every click matter more. A real funnel means paid search is no longer the only horse pulling the cart.

Over six to 12 months, your account can look like the one described above. The end result, you may ask? A consistent conversion rate of 15% - 20%  per month, depending on your industry.

The takeaway

There is no shortcut version of this.

When you take over an account in poor shape, the temptation is to look for the one big lever that fixes it. There is no big lever. There is a list of fundamentals, and most of them need to be in place before any of them produce the full result.

A clever bidding hack did not transform the account I'm describing. It was transformed over six months of foundational work, one item at a time. The good news is, none of it required inventing anything new. The list of fundamentals

The pattern I follow is well known in the industry. The work is slow, and most accounts never get around to it.

The above can be technical and time-consuming. That is where I can come in to help you. Want to have a chat? Lets connect