144% More Conversions. 16% Less Spend.

The Challenge: Spending More, Getting Less

The account we inherited had a familiar story. Ad spend had crept upward year after year, but conversions hadn't followed. The previous approach to underperformance was the industry default: add budget, add campaigns, add keywords. More of everything, except results.

The client's instinct was that the answer might be a bigger budget still. Our audit found the opposite. The account didn't have a spend problem; it had three structural problems that no amount of budget could outrun.

First, conversion tracking was unreliable. Some conversions were counted twice, others not at all, and the bidding algorithms were optimising toward corrupted data. Second, a meaningful share of spend was going to search terms, placements and products with no realistic path to a sale, waste that had accumulated quietly for years. Third, the campaign structure had grown by accretion: overlapping campaigns competing against each other, budgets fragmented across dozens of underfunded ad groups, and no coherent logic connecting spend to margin.

The Approach

Phase 1: Fix the measurement

Nothing else matters if the data is wrong. We rebuilt conversion tracking from the ground up, auditing every conversion action, removing duplicates, ensuring purchase values passed accurately, and giving the account one clean definition of success. This is unglamorous work, and it's why most agencies skip it. But every bidding decision Google makes flows from this data. Fixing it changed the behaviour of the entire account within weeks.

Phase 2: Remove the waste

With trustworthy data, waste became visible. We went through the account line by line: search terms that spent without converting, products that consumed budget and returned nothing, audiences and placements that existed only because nobody had ever questioned them. Each cut freed budget without costing a single sale, which is what made a 16% spend reduction possible while conversions climbed.

Phase 3: Restructure around performance

Finally, we rebuilt the campaign architecture. Overlapping campaigns were consolidated so they stopped bidding against each other. Budgets were pooled where the algorithm could actually use them. Products and keywords were organised by commercial logic, margin, intent, conversion behaviour, instead of historical accident. The account became something the bidding algorithms could work with rather than around.

Ongoing discipline, not a one-off cleanup

Efficiency decays without maintenance. New search terms creep in, product catalogues change, and the waste you cut in month one quietly regrows by month six if nobody is watching. So the programme ran as a weekly rhythm rather than a single project: search term reviews, budget reallocation towards what the clean data said was working, and structured tests to confirm that each cut and consolidation actually held. Every change was logged, every result reported, the client could open the account at any point and see precisely what had been done and why.

The Result

144% more conversions on 16% less spend over the 12-month programme. The account didn't grow because more money went in; it grew because the money already going in finally started working. Cost efficiency improved on both sides of the equation simultaneously, more output, less input.

The Lesson

Before you increase your budget, ask a harder question: how much of your current budget is actually working? In most accounts we audit, the honest answer is "not all of it", sometimes not even most of it. Broken tracking, accumulated waste and tangled structure silently tax every pound you spend.

Our free PPC audit quantifies exactly that: where your spend is leaking, what your tracking is really recording, and what an efficiency-first rebuild would look like. It's the same process that produced this result, and it starts with a conversation, not a contract. See how we manage Google Ads and what it costs.