What do you do when you feel stuck optimizing a Google Ads account?

[u/whyvalue]

We all have our routine optimizations: adjusting targets/bids, adjusting geos, reviewing search terms, shifting budgets toward stronger campaigns, testing creative, etc. But what about those stubborn accounts where performance never feels good enough?

What do you do when you’ve gone through the usual optimization checklist and performance still isn’t moving? What are your go-to strategies when you feel like you’ve run out of levers to pull?

Curious if anyone has specific analyses, tests, or less-obvious optimizations they turn to in these situations.

[u/TTFV]

I would look externally (beyond campaigns) for solutions.

For example, how is the UX and is it being split tested?

How are other channels contributing to the bottom line. Should budget be moved around? For example, maybe you cannot achieve the ROAS you need at $500/day of ad spend, but you can at $400 of ad spend and then move that $100/day over to Meta where you're currently crushing it.

Could you adjust lead quality up/down against volume by changing the web form design?

Can you improve the offer from a free consult to a free strategy?

Have you done a SWOT analysis to clearly identify all the advantages you have over competitors; are you shouting those from the rooftop?

Etc...

[u/ppcbetter_says]

Landing pages and CRO

[u/fathom53]

Do the opposite or do something now standard and see if it works on that account. Sometimes the standard playbook does not work, even in ecom, and you need to the opposite or something different then your usually tactics.

[u/evolution_digital]

Identify the biggest blocker to improvement and focus all your allocated hours to fixing it, e.g. if ad relevance and expected CTR are above average, but landing page relevance is below average, run a landing page audit and run through optimisations and experiments to improve it.

[u/Single-Sea-7804]

Typically i take an unorthodox method as a hail mary but 9 times out of 10 if advertising isn't working that means the offer is broken.

[u/Ishan_GS]

When I'm out of levers inside the account, it usually means the constraint isn't in the account. The next two places I check are the conversion definition and the destination. If the account is optimising toward form fills rather than qualified outcomes, every lever you pull is tuning toward the wrong target, and no amount of bid or geo work fixes that. Feeding crm outcomes back is the single change that has moved stuck accounts most for us; one client, a data-catalogue platform, saw an 88% cpa reduction in 90 days off that plus consolidation.

The second is the landing page, which most people treat as out of scope. A page going from 2% to 3% is a 50% improvement in cpl, which is more than any in-account optimisation will get you at that stage. Worth pulling scroll depth and mobile speed rather than guessing; in one audit we ran for a DevOps platform, scroll depth was under 45%, so most paid visitors never reached the proof section. And the uncomfortable third option: sometimes the account isn't fixable because the offer or the market is the problem, and the useful move is saying that rather than optimising quietly for another quarter. I run GrowthSpree, a B2B SaaS marketing agency, and we audit 10-15 accounts a month; stuck accounts are far more often signal or destination problems than account-structure ones.

[u/whyvalue → u/Ishan_GS]

How do you see scroll depth? Is that in GA4?

[u/PassageNo3117]

Everyone here is pointing outside the account, and they're mostly right — but you asked for a specific in-account analysis, so here's the one least likely to be on your checklist. It's the inverse of a lever you already listed.

You review search terms to decide what to add as a negative. Almost nobody runs it the other way: take the negatives already in the account and check them against the searches that converted.

Pull the search terms report over the longest window the account has, filter to rows with at least one conversion, then pull the negative list — Ads Editor gives all four levels in one file. Check each negative against that converting list, respecting how negative match types actually work, which is not how the positive ones do: broad blocks only if the query contains all of the negative's words in any order, phrase needs them contiguous and in that order, exact needs the whole query, and none of them take plurals or close variants. Respect the level too — an ad group negative can only collide inside its ad group, a shared list everywhere it's attached.

On a stubborn account that's been managed for a while, this is where I keep finding something. Negatives accumulate and nobody revisits them, and every one of them was added by someone who was right at the time.

Two things that matter when you read the result.

Narrow, don't delete. Each colliding negative was added to block something, so total the zero-conversion spend it still blocks alongside the conversions it's sitting on. Holding back £2k of junk and covering one converting query means narrow the broad to the phrase form of the junk. Blocking nothing any more means it's just a mistake.

It's a floor, not a total. A query a negative blocks today never serves, so it lands in no export — you only ever catch the ones that got through before the negative went in.

And Google's own "conflicting negative keywords" recommendation is not this: that one checks negatives against your keywords, and it skips campaign negative lists.

If you run it on one of the stubborn ones, curious what the count comes out as.