Paused all Google Ads for a month and revenue actually went up 12%

I had a client in Phoenix with a $15k monthly ad budget that was basically just burning cash on branded search terms and stale retargeting. We turned everything off for 30 days and organic traffic plus direct visits filled the gap, now I'm questioning how much of our ad spend is actually useful.

3 comments

3 Comments

anderson.piper1mo ago

Honestly, that's wild but I'm not surprised at all. Were you tracking which specific campaigns or keywords were driving the most spend versus actual conversions, or did you just hit pause on everything at once? I gotta know if you saw any particular channel or audience segment that was clearly underperforming before the pause. Because a 12% jump from shutting off ads tells me there was some serious waste in there, probably from bid strategies or broad match stuff that Google was pushing on autopilot.

mark_carr71mo ago

Yeah man I feel you on this, it's honestly painful to watch. I've been there where you just KNOW something is burning money but you're too scared to kill it cause the boss will freak out. That 12% jump tells me there was definitely some SERIOUS waste hiding in there, probably from those broad match keywords Google pushes like candy. I swear half the time they set those up just to run up your bill on random searches nobody would ever convert on. The worst part is you probably spent months trying to optimize that garbage before you finally just pulled the plug. Good on you for having the guts to do it though, most people just keep dumping cash into the fire and hope it works out.

vera_johnson91mo ago

Oh sure, nothing says "ad strategy" like paying Google to annoy your own customers into leaving.