The bottom line
The audits we run on inherited Google Ads accounts almost always surface the same patterns. Broad-match keywords are matching to irrelevant searches and consuming significant budget — the Search Terms report reveals £500-£3,000+ per month going to queries nobody should be paying for. Performance Max campaigns are running on autopilot with default asset groups and no audience signals — Google's algorithm is making spending decisions with no signal of what conversion actually means in your business. Smart Bidding is optimising against the wrong conversion event — perhaps a 'newsletter signup' worth £5 instead of a 'qualified enquiry' worth £500 — so the algorithm chases volume that doesn't translate to revenue. Conversion tracking degraded after the GA4 migration and nobody noticed. Landing pages haven't been touched in two years and look nothing like the ad creative driving traffic to them. Each of these is a known failure mode with a known fix, but they compound — and the longer they run, the more expensive they become to address while the wasted budget mounts. JW Digital fixes them in priority order based on the actual cost of each issue. We audit honestly during onboarding, document the gaps, and propose a sequenced remediation plan tied to expected ROAS impact rather than a generic optimisation checklist. The result is meaningful performance improvement within the first 30-60 days, not vague promises and quarterly reports padded with impressions. Google Ads also performs best when it's not run in isolation. Pairs naturally with our SEO agency service (where Google Ads and organic search compete and complement on the SERP), bespoke website design and conversion rate optimisation (where landing page quality directly determines ROAS), and marketing analytics and reporting (where attribution accuracy makes or breaks budget decisions). We coordinate across these so the channels work together rather than fighting each other.
