New post

inheriting a bad account is common. knowing what to do with it is less common.

the temptation: rebuild from scratch. new campaign structure, new creative, clean slate.

the problem: even a bad account has conversion history. smart bidding has been learning from that history for months or years. if you delete the campaigns and start fresh, you lose all of that signal. you're starting from zero in every auction.

the better approach: understand what's broken before deciding what to change.

some accounts look bad but are structurally fine. the campaign structure is messy but the conversion data is clean. in these cases, you can improve performance significantly by fixing the conversion setup and running cleaner search term hygiene, without rebuilding anything.

some accounts have bad conversion data built into every campaign. the smart bidding has been optimizing against inflated signals for 18 months. in these cases, the data is so corrupted that a rebuild with a clean tracking setup outperforms trying to fix the existing campaigns.

how to tell the difference: run a conversion audit. look at whether the conversions the campaigns are reporting roughly match what the client says they're actually getting in their CRM or backend. if they're close, the data is usable. if they're off by 2x or more, the existing smart bidding signal is too noisy to build on.

I've inherited accounts in both categories. the audit determines the path, not the intuition.

/conversion-audit before you make any structural decisions: https://paidmedialab.com/pack

if you want a second set of eyes before a major rebuild, the Revenue Forensics engagement exists for exactly this: https://paidmedialab.com/book

saku