Ever heard of this one?
“Just increase your budget. Smart bidding needs more data.”
(Sigh.)
I recently landed a client who had been told exactly that. Not (!) by a Google rep, but by their previous agency.
“Spend more. Feed the machine. Let Google find better leads. Business will come.”
Sure.
The thing was, that “machine” was being fed garbage and configured the wrong way.
They were tracking form fills instead of SQLs and sales. They were running PMax with barely any signal quality. And the mobile landing page was leaking high-quality leads because the UX was clunky as hell.
So, the client did what clients do when advertising money just disappears:
they assumed Google Ads didn’t work for their business.
Luckily, word of mouth brought them my way.
The team and I took over.
First, we reduced budgets.
Then, we fixed the basics:
- We cleaned up conversion tracking by tracking SQLs and final sales instead of spammy form fills.
- Then, we improved the landing page and made sure the form was easy to use on iPhone and Android.
- We migrated spend away from PMax towards standard search ads with exact match keywords for the most promising converting search terms
- We started with a portfolio bid strategy (tCPA) with bid limits.
- For two weeks, we weeded out the junk search terms that were being matched to our exact match keywords while also increasing the bid limit every other day to get more relevant clicks.
- After two weeks and 30 SQLs, in the portfolio bid strategy, we removed the lower bid limit and set the upper bid limit to 50% of the tCPA.
Two weeks later, the client opened his CRM report and sent us an email:
“So Google does work after all!?”
He noticed 17 new clients were attributable to Google Ads. And, at a CPA that was below his target.
Now, increasing the budget makes sense.
Scaling a broken setup doesn’t fix things; it just makes the leak bigger.
The actionable takeaway: before raising budgets, audit your clicks and conversions and ask: “Would I happily pay more to get more of this?”
If the answer is no, don’t scale.
Fix the damn thing first.
Nail it before you scale it.
– Nils