Google Ads Expert

What a Google Ads expert actually does at scale

There are thousands of people who will log into your account, adjust a few bids, add some keywords, and send you a dashboard. That is bid management, and it is useful when the strategy underneath it is already right. The problem most founders have is different: cost per acquisition is climbing, the account is spending into search terms that never buy, Performance Max is eating budget with no visibility into where it goes, and it is not clear whether the last-click conversions are real or just the last touch before a sale that would have happened anyway. That is not a bidding question. It is a strategy question, and it is the one I answer first.

When I take on a Google Ads account, the first two weeks are diagnostic. I pull the search terms report and find the queries burning budget with no return. I map campaign structure against actual buyer intent instead of a keyword dump. I look at what Performance Max is really doing, where the Shopping feed is starving good products of impressions, and whether the conversion tracking is telling the truth. I turn the account, the funnel, and the numbers into one picture so we invest in the lever with the highest return instead of guessing. Only then do we scale.

Wasted spend and the search-term audit

The fastest money in most Google Ads accounts is not a new campaign. It is the spend you stop wasting. Broad match and loose phrase match quietly pull in queries that look adjacent but never convert: job seekers, competitors, people researching with no intent to buy, and the endless long tail of near-miss searches. Left alone, they can consume 20 to 40 percent of a budget while the reporting still shows a respectable blended number that hides the leak.

My first pass is a full search-term audit. I read what people actually typed to trigger your ads, build negative keyword lists that cut the noise, and tighten match types so the budget concentrates on queries that show real buying intent. This is unglamorous work that most percentage-of-spend managers avoid, because cutting waste lowers the spend their fee is calculated on. I do the opposite. Every dollar we reclaim from wasted clicks is a dollar that can fund the searches that convert, and that reclaimed budget usually funds the next phase of growth before you spend anything new.

Performance Max, controlled instead of blind

Performance Max is where Google asks you to hand over Search, Shopping, Display, and YouTube to one automated black box and trust the result. Used carelessly, it cannibalizes your best branded searches, claims credit it did not earn, and hides the placements and queries so you cannot tell what is working. Founders see a strong reported number and only later realize the machine was buying conversions that were already theirs.

I run Performance Max on a leash. That means feeding it clean conversion signals and real audience data, structuring asset groups deliberately, excluding brand terms so it cannot take credit for demand you already own, and using the account-level and script-based reporting that surfaces what PMax tries to hide. Automation is a tool, not a strategy. The strategy is deciding what the machine is allowed to buy, what it must stay out of, and how we hold it accountable to incremental revenue rather than a flattering dashboard.

Shopping feed strategy for retail and ecommerce

For any store, the Shopping feed is the campaign. Google decides which products to show for which searches based on your titles, attributes, and data quality, not on bids alone. A weak feed means your best-margin products never surface, your titles miss the words buyers search, and cheap items with thin margins soak up impressions that should go to the products that actually fund the business.

I treat the feed as a strategic asset. That means rewriting product titles around real search language, fixing the attributes that gate eligibility, segmenting campaigns so high-margin and hero products get their own budget and priority, and building feed rules that keep the whole thing accurate as the catalog changes. When the feed is right, Shopping and Performance Max both perform, because they are finally being fed products that match demand. When it is wrong, no amount of bidding fixes it.

Incrementality over last-click

Last-click attribution is the most expensive lie in paid search. It hands full credit to whichever ad the buyer touched last, which flatters branded search and retargeting while starving the campaigns that create demand in the first place. Optimize to last-click and you slowly defund everything that actually grows the business, because the true demand generators never get the credit.

I measure incrementality, not vanity credit. The question is not how many conversions an ad was near, but how many sales would not have happened without it. That means brand-versus-nonbrand separation, holdout thinking where the account allows it, and reading the whole funnel instead of the last touch. Getting this right often reveals that a chunk of reported paid revenue was never incremental at all, and that the honest number, once you can see it, is the foundation for every budget decision that follows.

Where Google Ads sits in the rest of your stack

Google Ads is one channel, but the platforms around it decide whether paid search scales profitably. The landing page that receives the click decides whether the spend converts or bounces. SEO decides how much of your demand you can win without paying for it, which lowers your blended cost over time. Your analytics decides whether you are measuring or guessing. Microsoft Ads often extends the same intent to cheaper clicks. I work across all of them, which means the strategy is coherent instead of a paid-search silo optimized in isolation from the pages and the data it depends on.

If the landing page is weak, I fix the page before I raise the budget, because scaling spend into a page that does not convert just loses money faster. If organic can carry a query, I would rather rank for it than rent it forever. The tools and platforms I trust for paid search, along with the ones I use to build owned infrastructure, are on my resources page. If you want to see the stack before we talk, start there.

See the tools and platforms I use

Build it in-house, so paid search becomes equity

Here is the part most agencies will not tell you. When an agency runs your Google Ads, you are renting their account structure, their scripts, their negative keyword libraries, and their reporting, and they keep the intellectual property. Every month you pay an invoice that leaves nothing behind. The day you stop paying, the campaigns, the learnings, and the optimizations leave with them, and you start over with the next vendor.

I work the other way. I run the account now, and I build the owned version of every system inside your company alongside your team: your campaign architecture, your negative keyword and audience libraries, your feed rules, your conversion tracking, and the custom reporting and scripts that a generic dashboard cannot do. To keep costs down and control up, we build these in-house rather than stacking third party subscriptions that own your data. The structure, the data, and the automations become assets on your side of the table. That is what raises the internal value of the business. When you eventually sell, raise, or hand off, you are handing off owned infrastructure, not a vendor relationship. For accounts ready for it, that owned layer becomes a real software build you control.

Freelancer, agency, or fractional CMO

Use a Google Ads freelancer when you have a defined task and you know it is the right one: a single campaign build, a conversion tracking fix, a one-time account cleanup. Expect $50 to $150 per hour and a clean handoff, and be careful with anyone who charges a percentage of spend, because that model quietly rewards spending more rather than spending well. Use an agency when you want to fully outsource execution and you are comfortable that they keep the account structure and the IP. Expect a retainer and a slower path to owning anything.

Use a fractional CMO when the problem is that paid search is stuck or unprofitable and you need someone to own the outcome, not just the output. You get senior strategy, a sequenced roadmap, and execution across the whole stack, at $5,000 to $40,000 per month instead of the $200,000-plus a full-time CMO costs loaded. And you get the in-house build, so the work compounds into your business rather than into a vendor invoice.

How we start

It begins with a short intake so I understand your account, your budget, your margins, and where paid search is actually stuck. From there I run the diagnostic, show you the two or three levers that move your number the most, usually wasted spend, Performance Max control, or measurement, and we agree on scope. You see results inside the first 30 days because we start with the highest-return work, cutting waste and fixing what is leaking, not a six month strategy deck. No phone tag and no pressure. Tell me about your account through the intake form and I will tell you honestly whether I can help.

Google Ads expert FAQ