Let me tell you what I see in almost every Google Ads account I audit for the first time.
It's not a bidding problem. It's not a creative problem. It's not even a targeting problem. It's a structural problem - and it was baked in before the first pound was ever spent.
1. Does your account structure reflect how customers actually search?
Most accounts are built by people who know the business well. That sounds like a good thing. It isn't. When account structure mirrors internal org charts - product teams, departments, regions - rather than search intent, you end up with campaigns that fight each other for the same traffic at inflated costs.
The question to ask: if you showed your campaign structure to someone unfamiliar with your business, would it make sense? If not, the structure is probably costing you money.
The fix: build campaigns and ad groups around what people type into Google, not what your marketing deck calls your product lines.
2. Are your match types and negatives working as a system?
Keyword match types aren't a set-and-forget decision. Broad match without aggressive negative keyword sculpting isn't a reach strategy - it's a money tap left running in an empty room.
I regularly find accounts where broad match campaigns are burning budget on irrelevant traffic while exact match campaigns sit underperforming because the budget was already spent upstream.
Before any bid or budget change: audit your search term reports for the last 90 days. In most accounts, 20-30% of spend is going to searches that have nothing to do with what the business sells.
3. Is your bidding strategy aligned with what the algorithm needs to learn?
Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS work well. But they need data to function. Too many campaigns. Too few conversions per campaign. Conversion actions too high up the funnel to mean anything commercially.
A campaign running on Target CPA needs at least 30-50 conversions per month to optimise reliably. Below that threshold, the algorithm guesses - and its guesses aren't better than manual bidding at low data volumes.
The answer is almost never in the settings
The most useful thing I do in any account audit isn't change anything in the first session. It's understand the structure. Because once you see it clearly, you almost always see exactly where the money is going - and it's rarely where the client thinks it is.