Guides and checklists for advertisers who want to understand their accounts, not just stare at them.
Free with a Freak.Marketing account.
You trusted Keyword Planner, launched, and real CPCs came in double what it told you.
Google is optimizing for your cheapest leads, not your best ones.
Your offline conversion tracking is probably broken right now and you won’t know until Smart Bidding goes sideways.
Your landing page is why your Google Ads aren’t converting. Not your bids. Not your keywords. The page.
Your account structure is messy and smart bidding is learning from noise.
You launched PMax for lead gen and the dashboard showed conversions while the client’s phone barely rang.
Low-quality leads, weak conversion signals, campaigns that spend but don’t produce quotable opportunities.
Landing pages that don’t align offer, tracking, and campaign intent.
If you’d rather hand the account over than learn the method yourself, that’s a separate conversation. See management services →
We’ve seen a 131% increase in conversions this quarter, compared to last quarter, thanks to Steve’s Google Ad management services.Omir · CarsOfLA · Ads management client
Smart Bidding usually fails because the campaign structure underneath it was built for manual bidding. Device bid adjustments, match-type splits, and RLSA targeting all fragment conversion data into buckets too small to learn from.
Use native Google Ads conversion actions as your primary conversion, and import GA4 conversions as secondary. Importing GA4 as your primary means missing enhanced conversions, view-through conversions, and a weaker bidding signal.
Broad match isn't broken, it's just data-hungry. Here's the conversion volume threshold that actually matters, why campaign experiments give you bad data, and how to test broad match without touching your working campaigns.
Reverting to Max Conversions after a failed tCPA test doesn't restore your campaign's old performance. Every bid strategy change resets the learning phase. Here's how to actually recover.
If you add negative keywords every day and the irrelevant queries never stop, the problem usually isn't your negative keyword list. It's that your keywords are too broad to describe what you sell. Tighten match types, replace vague one and two-word keywords with descriptive buyer-language terms, then clean up the rest with an account-level negative list.