Dropped $250 on a premium Google Ads audit and it exposed 9 months of wasted ad spend

The audit showed I was bidding on keywords that had zero conversion intent for our Austin B2B SaaS, so now our monthly budget actually drives leads instead of just burning cash, has anyone else had luck with third-party audits over agency management?

3 comments

3 Comments

victor7799d ago

Used to think agency management was the only way to go since they're "in the trenches" every day, but after a buddy had similar results with a deep audit I figured it was worth a shot. The third party caught that our agency was bidding on branded terms for competitors that had zero chance of converting, plus a bunch of generic keywords that just ate budget with quick clicks. Now our monthly spend actually goes to searches where someone is actively looking to buy, not just browsing. Switched to quarterly audits instead of full management and it's been way more effective for our niche B2B stuff.

avery_flores179d ago

Flip the whole thing around and think about the incentive mismatch. Your old agency got paid on spend or a flat management fee, so they had zero reason to trim waste. An auditor gets paid to find waste, so they actually want to kill those dumb queries. My own audit found the agency was running broad match on everything because it made their "impressions" look massive in monthly reports. Switched to phrase match only after that and our CPA dropped 32% in two months without changing anything else.

wren6388d ago

Huh, well that's a pretty stark experience @victor779. I'm glad it worked out for you, but I guess I wonder if it's really that common or if you just had a particularly bad agency. I've been with the same agency for three years and our rep is always the one suggesting we pause underperformers and reallocate budget. Feels like painting with a broad brush to say all of them are just out to waste your money.