Paid search isn't broken. Your bid strategy is.

The diagnosis we hear most often when we take over a paid search account: “Google’s just gotten more expensive.”

It hasn’t, particularly. What’s changed is that automation has shifted where the leverage lives — and most accounts haven’t been rebuilt to match.

Here’s the framework we use to figure out whether your account is leaving money on the table.

The four-question diagnostic

When we audit an account, we ask four questions in this order. The order matters — getting the wrong answer to question one makes the rest meaningless.

1. Is the conversion signal trustworthy?

Before we touch a single bid, we look at the conversion stack. Is a “conversion” actually a qualified lead, or is it a form-fill from a competitor scraping your funnel? Are micro-conversions (newsletter signup, brochure download) being weighted as if they were sales-meeting conversions?

In half the accounts we audit, the conversion signal itself is the problem. The bid strategy is doing exactly what it was told to do; it just wasn’t told the right thing.

2. Are the bid strategies aligned to the business model?

There are roughly four bid strategies that matter — Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, Maximize Conversion Value, and Target ROAS — plus their portfolio variants. Choosing the wrong one for your business model will quietly cost you 20–40% of efficiency.

A B2B account with a long sales cycle and uneven lead value should not be on Target CPA — it should be on a Target ROAS strategy with offline conversion imports plugged into the LTV model.

A DTC account with predictable basket value and a short funnel probably should be on Target ROAS with a tight target — not Maximize Conversion Value, which will chase impression share at the expense of margin.

3. Is the account architecture actually serving the algorithm?

The old advice was “many tightly-themed ad groups”. The new reality is fewer, bigger, signal-rich campaigns — because the algorithm now needs conversion volume per campaign to learn properly. Splitting a campaign into ten ad groups starves each one of data.

If your account has more than ~15 active campaigns and you’re spending under €100k/month, you’re probably over-fragmented.

4. Are the negatives sabotaging the bid strategy?

Aggressive negative keyword lists were a great defence in the manual-bidding era. Under smart bidding, they can blind the algorithm to entire pockets of profitable demand it would have found and bid appropriately on.

We routinely strip negative lists by 60–80% on takeover. CPA usually drops.

The rebuild

Once the diagnostic is done, the rebuild is mechanical:

1. Fix conversion tracking. Server-side, deduplicated, value-weighted.
2. Choose the right bid strategy — and only one per campaign goal.
3. Consolidate the account to give each campaign enough conversion volume.
4. Re-baseline negatives with conversion-blocking ones only.
5. Rebuild creative for the new RSA / Performance Max landscape.
6. Set a learning period of 21–28 days before judging anything.

A typical takeover sees CPA fall 20–35% within the first quarter — not because we’re geniuses, but because the account was being asked to do an impossible thing and is now being asked to do a reasonable one.

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If your search account is showing the symptoms above — flat share, rising CPA, internal pressure to “cut Google” — the fix is almost never a budget cut. It’s a rebuild.

We can help. Start a conversation.