Paid search that survives a hard question.

The first thing I look at is your conversion actions

In most accounts I inherit, what everyone has been calling a bidding problem lives one level down, in what the account counts as a conversion.

Automated bidding optimizes toward whatever you tell it a conversion is. If your account counts a completed form, a click on a phone number, a newsletter signup and a PDF download all as the same event, then Target CPA is chasing a blended average of four things you value very differently. It will faithfully buy you more of the cheapest one. The algorithm is doing exactly what it was told by a measurement setup nobody has opened in two years.

So the first week is usually spent on conversion actions rather than campaigns. Which ones are primary and which are secondary. Which ones double count, because the tag fires on the thank-you page and the form plugin also fires its own event. Whether phone calls are counted once or twice. Whether the values attached to them are real numbers or a placeholder someone typed in during setup. Once bidding is pointed at something true, a lot of what looked like a strategy problem resolves on its own.

If your measurement turns out to be the whole problem, that is its own piece of work and I will tell you plainly that it comes first.

Performance Max is a distribution mechanism, not a strategy

PMax gets sold as an answer. It is closer to an amplifier. It takes the signal quality you give it and spends efficiently against that signal, wherever it can find inventory. Give it clean conversion data, a well-structured feed and honest exclusions, and it works. Give it a muddy conversion action and no brand exclusion, and it will spend a lot of money buying your own brand traffic back from you and reporting it as a win.

When I run PMax it comes with feed hygiene, asset groups split along segments that actually behave differently, brand terms excluded so the reporting means something, search themes used deliberately, and a channel-level read on where the spend went. If someone has sold you PMax as a replacement for thinking about your account structure, that is worth a second look.

What ongoing management covers

Every account is different, but a typical month includes:

• Search term review and negative keyword work, which is where most wasted spend hides
• Budget pacing against the month, so you do not underspend for three weeks and panic in the fourth
• Bid strategy targets adjusted deliberately and in steps, rather than yanked around every time a week looks bad
• Ad and asset testing with enough runway to actually read the result
• Landing page and offer feedback, because the click is only half of it
• Reporting that says what happened and what I am doing about it, in language you can forward to someone who does not work in ads

Microsoft Ads gets managed alongside Google rather than treated as an afterthought import. The audience skews differently and the cost per click is often lower, and for some businesses it quietly carries a real share of the pipeline.

What I need from you

Admin access to the ad accounts and to analytics, a clear answer on what a good lead or a good order looks like, and margin or lifetime value if you have it. That last one matters more than people expect. Without it we are optimizing toward volume and hoping it correlates with profit. With it, we can spend more on the segments that deserve it and stop pretending every conversion is worth the same.

You do not need a strategy document ready. Working out what we should be optimizing toward is part of the job.

How engagements usually work

Either a monthly arrangement where I own paid search as an ongoing function, or a scoped project such as an account audit, a rebuild or a migration. A lot of relationships start with an audit, because it is a low-commitment way for both of us to find out whether I am useful to you. If the audit says your account is in decent shape and you do not need me, I will say that.