Why This Happens
Platforms report their own performance, and they are structurally incentivised to flatter themselves. Performance Max absorbs brand traffic and claims the conversions. Smart Bidding optimises perfectly towards whatever proxy it is given, even a bad one. Conversions that would have happened anyway get counted and charged for as wins.
The result: dashboards look healthy while blended results stall. The waste has not gone; it has moved somewhere the interface does not show you.
What We Diagnose
- Brand versus non-brand: separated in every report, so brand demand stops subsidising weak prospecting.
- Platform claims versus revenue: reported conversions reconciled against CRM and sales data.
- Black-box campaign behaviour: what Performance Max and AI Max actually spent on, versus what they reported.
- Query and placement waste: the classic leaks, still worth finding.
- Tracking integrity: whether the conversion data steering the bidding is even true.
The Operating Framework
Baseline first: no changes until current performance is measured against revenue. Then a prioritised fix list, ranked by profit impact, not by platform recommendation score. Each reallocation runs as a test with a hypothesis and a success metric. What proves out gets scaled; what does not gets cut and documented so the lesson is kept.
What You Get
- A wasted-spend number, in currency, with the evidence.
- Brand and non-brand performance, finally separated.
- A reallocation plan ranked by profit impact.
- Monthly reconciliation of platform claims against real revenue.