The Hidden Cost of Complexity in Google Ads

I consulted on an underperforming Google Ads account for a service broker.

They find the clients, do the paperwork and take payment. A supplier provides the service. They make money by paying the supplier less than they charge the client.

They've been doing this for many years and, over time, their Google Ads account has become complex. Here's the current situation:

• 52 campaigns, each targeting a city where they have a supplier.
• Each campaign has a different budget. Some are within a dollar or two of each other.
• Each campaign has a different Target CPA (their target cost per lead). Again, in some cases the difference between campaigns is minimal.
• Each campaign has its own local phone number routed to a central switchboard.
• The landing pages do some merge-magic to show the local phone number.
• Some campaigns generate hundreds of leads a month. Some generate fewer than 10.

The owner explained that the structure evolved to meet the needs of the business:

• They wanted to show ads only in cities where they had a current supplier.
• They wanted to base their target cost per lead on the gross margin (the difference between what they charged a client and what the supplier charged them). Each supplier had a different rate, hence the different targets.
• They wanted more leads and assumed that a local phone number would get more than a nationwide toll-free number.

This makes sense. But there is no escaping that complexity comes at a cost.

Some of the costs are obvious:

• They're renting 52 phone numbers and the system for routing calls.
• They're renting the system that merges local numbers onto the landing pages.
• Managing 52 separate campaigns takes more work than, say, managing fewer campaigns generating the same number of leads.
• There is more work when making changes – even with tools like Google Ads Editor.

But there are also hidden costs.

There is the opportunity cost of inefficient bidding. The campaigns use the Maximise Conversions bidding strategy. This strategy needs at least 20–30 conversions a month to work well. Many of their campaigns were only getting 4 or 5, so the bidding was likely inefficient.

There is the cost of mistakes. Even a simple operation repeated 52 times is at risk of an error.

And, sometime, a good idea is going to be shelved because it's too much work to roll out to 52 individual campaigns.

And finally, there is both a cost and a risk because the only person who knows how the whole thing works is the current ad guy. That makes him hard to get rid of and hard to replace.

I'm not saying that complexity is bad, or that it's unjustified. After all, there were good reasons for it at the time it was set up.

But it makes sense to check if the complexity is still worth the costs.

• Do we have the same operational requirements?
• Are we still getting the expected conversion uplift from having a local number for each campaign? If not, could we replace 52 numbers and the system for handling them with one toll-free national number?
• Could we combine similar campaigns or use a portfolio bid strategy to make automated bidding better?
• Does it still make sense advertising in 52 cities when some only bring in 1 or 2 sales a month?

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