What We Would Fix First If We Took Over Your Account in January

Five things, in this order, and they are the same five almost every time. None of them is exotic and all of them are findable in an afternoon by somebody who knows where to look.

We publish this because the checklist is not the hard part. Knowing what to do after you find something is.

One: Find Out What the Conversions Actually Count

Before touching a bid or a budget, open the conversion actions and read what each one is counting and which are set as primary.

What we find, routinely: a conversion action counting page views rather than form submissions. Two actions counting the same event, so every lead is recorded twice. A phone call conversion firing on a click of the number rather than on a connected call of any length. An action that stopped firing months ago, and nobody noticed because the number just drifted down.

Every downstream decision rests on these. A bidding strategy optimizing toward a broken conversion action is doing exactly what it was told, precisely and expensively.

Two: Turn Off Search Partners and Audit the Networks

On a local clinic or contractor account, Search Partners and the Display Network rarely belong in a search campaign, and they are on by default.

The tell is a campaign with a healthy click volume, a suspiciously low cost per click, and leads that go nowhere. Split the report by network and look at them separately. If the partner traffic converts at a fraction of the rate and costs a third of the budget, you have found real money in about four minutes.

Three: Read the Search Terms Report

Not the keyword report. The search terms report, which is what people actually typed.

Expect to find three categories: queries for services you do not offer, queries from places you do not serve, and job seekers. On accounts running broad match without a maintained negative list, this is frequently a double-digit share of spend.

The fix is a negative keyword list, and the discipline is that it is not a one-time job. It is fifteen minutes a month forever.

Four: Check Where the Leads Land and How Fast Anyone Sees Them

Submit your own form. Call your own number, from a phone nobody recognizes, outside business hours.

This finds more problems than any report. Forms routing to a departed employee's inbox. Notifications disabled. The tracked number on the ads ringing a line that nobody answers after five. Leads arriving in a system where they sit unread because the alert goes to email and the people who close work are not at desks.

A campaign cannot outperform the process that receives it, and this step is free.

Five: Connect Spend to Jobs, Not to Leads

The first four are repairs. This one is the change that moves the account.

Until outcomes flow back from your schedule to the ad platforms, every bidding decision is made on leads rather than on revenue, and the platform will happily optimize toward whichever channel produces the most inquiries regardless of whether any of them became work.

It takes a few weeks to build and it changes every decision made afterward. It is also the single most common thing missing on an account we inherit, including accounts that have been managed by somebody else for years.

What This Adds Up To

None of the five is clever. Together they are usually the difference between an account that looks busy and an account that produces jobs.

If you want somebody else to run the pass, it is what the free marketing audit is, and we do it whether or not you end up working with us.