When a new client's Google Ads account lands on our desk, the first thing we check isn't the creative, the keywords, or even the bidding strategy. It's the structure — how campaigns, ad groups and conversion actions are organised underneath the surface.
The most common problem: campaigns organised by sentiment, not signal
We regularly see accounts split by internal team preference — "Brand", "Generic", "Competitor" — without a clear rationale for how budget should move between them. The fix is usually to rebuild structure around commercial intent and available conversion signal, so Google's automated bidding has enough clean data per campaign to actually learn.
Consolidate for signal, segment for control
There's a genuine tension here: too many campaigns starve each one of conversion volume; too few remove your ability to control budget and messaging by intent. Our rule of thumb is to consolidate wherever conversion volume is thin, and only segment further once a campaign has enough data to justify the split.
Conversion actions deserve as much attention as campaigns
A structurally clean account can still mislead if the wrong actions are marked as "primary" conversions. We routinely find accounts optimising toward newsletter sign-ups with equal weight to purchases. Separating primary and secondary conversion actions is a five-minute fix with an outsized impact on where budget flows.
What we change in nearly every audit
- Consolidate near-duplicate campaigns competing for the same auctions.
- Separate primary revenue-driving conversions from secondary micro-conversions.
- Rebuild naming conventions so performance can be sliced by product, region and funnel stage.
- Remove legacy negative keyword lists that quietly block valid traffic.
None of this is exciting work, but it's the difference between automated bidding that compounds and automated bidding that quietly wastes budget for months.
