Search campaigns
Intent-led structure, deliberate match types and a maintained negative list.
Google's automation genuinely helps once the inputs are right: accurate conversion data, a sane campaign structure, strong creative and clean audience signals. Fed bad inputs, the same automation confidently spends your budget on the wrong traffic, and the in-platform recommendations will encourage it.
We treat automation as a tool with a firm hand on the inputs. Conversions defined around revenue, Performance Max fed proper asset groups and exclusions, Search protected with intent-led structure and negatives, and every automated recommendation reviewed rather than auto-applied.
What Performance Max needs before you trust it
PMax reaches Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover from one campaign, and it reports on almost none of it in detail. Run without controls, it will find the cheapest conversions available, which are usually your own brand searches, traffic you already had.
The controls that make it work: brand exclusions, properly built asset groups rather than one generic set, audience signals that describe your actual buyer, a feed if you sell products, and supplementary reporting via scripts or the API to see what it is spending on. With those in place it performs; without them it flatters itself.
Search still needs a human
Broad match plus smart bidding is the platform's preferred configuration and it can work well, but only with a maintained negative list and enough conversion volume to learn from. Below that threshold it buys traffic that has nothing to do with your business.
We run exact and phrase where control matters, broad where signals are strong, and review search terms weekly. In most Indian accounts, the negative list is the highest-value asset in the account after the conversion tracking.
Conversion values, not just conversion counts
If every conversion is worth 1, the algorithm will optimise towards whichever is easiest to get. Assigning real values (a quote request is worth more than a brochure download, a wedding booking more than a day pass) changes what the automation chases.
Where you can send offline conversions back, better again: the account then optimises towards the leads that became customers, which is the closest a platform can get to optimising for revenue.
Creative is a performance variable
Responsive search ads pull from the headlines and descriptions you supply, so a set of fifteen near-identical headlines gives the system nothing to test. Distinct angles (price, speed, guarantee, specialism, objection) produce combinations that actually differ.
We write to that, review asset performance monthly, retire the weak ones and replace them, rather than writing an ad set once at launch and reporting on it for two years.