Article

Issue #172 | 5 Minutes In An Account Tells Me Everything

Management Marketing

June 14, 2026

Each year, our team does a lot of account audits (about 30-40) – across different industries, different platforms, different team setups, different spending levels. Despite all that diversity, the most predictive part of every one of them happens in the first 5 minutes, before we’ve analyzed the actual performance data or audited the conversion setup or completed any of the 107 tests and checks we run.

In those initial minutes, we investigate 3 big-picture things: (1) whether the team understands who they’re talking to, (2) whether the account is architected to prioritize what matters to the business, and (3) whether anyone is controlling where your money goes. That’s it. None of those 3 requires pulling a report. All of it is visible in how the account is designed – and all of it is invisible on the reports and dashboards the client sees/hears about during calls.

Before we go further, two caveats:

Caveat #1: these big-picture factors are a fundamentally different question from whether the people running the account understand the platform. Platform competence (especially in the blurry, AI-this-but-manual-that era we’re all operating in) is exceedingly rare. That’s not a knock on anyone – in fact, it’s the challenge we run into every day as we’re hiring: we review an average of 300 resumes for each hire made. We don’t do it because we enjoy reviewing hundreds of resumes and doing dozens of screening calls; we do it because finding people who actually understand how each major ad platform (Google, Meta, TikTok, The Trade Desk) works is insanely difficult. But platform skill is table stakes – it’s the expectation. These 3 questions sit above it. You can hire the rare platform expert and still fail all three.

Caveat #2: everything that follows admits of variation. There is no single “best” setup for an account. Precious little in an ad account is black-and-white, which is what makes these initial questions/assessments so helpful: they don’t prescribe any “best” settings or required structures. All they do is ask whether the account is built in a way that is likely to produce the desired results or just spend money and churn out nice-looking reports.

With that, let’s dive in.

4 Signs the Team Doesn’t Understand the Audience

I’ve written before – and I 100% still believe – that audience insight is the single-most-impactful factor in separating exceptional performance from the mediocre. It is still, years after I wrote that, chronically ignored by most marketers/PPCers/agencies/in-house teams, and it manifests everywhere in the account:

The ad copy reads like the client’s “About Us” page. “25 years experience.” “State-of-the-art facilities.” “Warm and welcoming.” “Safe and Reliable.” “#1 Local Plumber.” “Thousands of 5* Reviews.” All of that is what the business wants to say about itself…and very little to do with what the buyer needs to hear. No one dealing with a flooding toilet cares how many years you’ve been around. No one comparing 6 different communities for Mom is making a decision based on your claim that you’re “Safe and Reliable.” No one trying to find a local gym cares about your “state of the art” facilities (whatever that means). If you want to know whether your ad copy is worth something, Google a high-intent term. If every headline from the 4 ads at the top of the page could be your company, you’re not saying anything.

The targeting covers the obvious and stops there. Branded search. The “no, duh” high-intent keywords. The generic interest stacks. The 30D / 180D website custom audiences. What’s missing is the non-obvious stuff a level (or 2) deeper: competitors, problem-stage research queries, leading conditions, relevant lookalikes, non-obvious interest stacks (i.e. layering socio-economic indicators plus the in-market factors to pre-qualify), the life states (i.e. new job, recently moved, whatever) that tend to pre-empt in-market status. The only way you get to any of this is by actually researching, talking to and empathizing with the audience. When you log into a personal injury account and see a long-tail keyword like “replace car seats after an accident” – you know someone has done the research.

The landing pages are one-size-fits-nobody. Roughly 80% of the accounts we review have a plurality of ads/audiences running to the same lander. We’ve tested this dozens of times, and the result is the same: focused, single-audience landers out-perform generic ones (this is something I covered at SMX Advanced in Boston a few weeks back). A prospect whose roof is leaking is not persuaded by a generic page – they want to know you can fix it NOW. Conversely, a buyer considering a full roof replacement is often not in a rush. S/he wants to know about your process, materials, warranty, financing, you name it. This is a diligent buyer considering a major purchase, which means they’re going through every detail, in detail. If you send both to a generic page, neither leaves happy.

The creative / angles / messaging is the same thing over and over again. At worst, this looks like a single ad (or a few variants of the same ad) running in the account. More often, it looks like a single message, targeting one assumed buyer, in a couple different formats (i.e. a video with value props, a testimonial restating the value props, a couple statics with the same value props in big, bold type). There’s no variation by emotional state, no acknowledgment that 2 audience segments often reach the same purchase from opposite starting points, no creative that speaks to different intent levels or triggers (i.e. “clinically proven to lose weight” vs. “just one pill a day to look & feel healthier” vs. “the easiest way to get in swim suit shape” vs. “make your ‘goal’ jeans your ‘everyday’ jeans”). When every piece of creative (whether text or visual) hammers the same audience, your account systematically ignores the thousands (or millions) of other potential customers.

3 Signs the Structure Doesn’t Match the Strategy

These are about what the account prioritizes. The more an account treats everything the same, the less anyone has actually decided what matters. If everything is a priority, nothing is.

The architecture is a shanty-town. New campaigns get heaved in next to the old ones with no thought to what the interplay will be between them — resulting in audience/query overlap, intra-account competition for entry into the same auctions (even though most platforms have removed intra-account bidding, the larger issue — that the wrong ad is served to the wrong audience — still exists) and blurring the lines about which one is actually doing the work. An intentional architecture mirrors the business: logical divisions by product/service line, margin tier, audience value and/or funnel stage, so every campaign has a clear, defined job to do and can be assessed accordingly. That’s the polar opposite of the “every campaign can do everything!” approach we see in the majority of accounts.

Bidding strategies focus on “more” at the expense of “good for the business.” In more than 63% of accounts we audit, the majority of campaigns run on a “maximum” strategy (Max Conversions, Max Conversion Value or Highest Value/Highest Volume) — no tCPA, no tROAS, no target cost per result, no target ROAS. From a practical standpoint, that tells Google/Meta to spend all of your budget … and deliver the most volume it can of the easiest-to-get conversion. The deeper version of the same error is optimizing to the wrong event entirely: bidding for leads when the business needs SQLs from its ICP, or using the same ROAS target for every product while the margin or LTV profiles diverge wildly. Until you tell the system which outcome counts and what a good one is worth, it will optimize for exactly what you asked for — whether or not that’s actually what you wanted.

Every campaign has the same budget. In a recent audit, we found that a brand had 5 campaigns running, with 5 identical $1,000/day budgets. The reason we were given was that they had a $150k/mo budget, and wanted to make sure each division was “treated fairly.” While that sounds like a worthy goal, the reality is that the account has made no judgment about which audiences are worth pursuing more aggressively. Some customers are objectively more valuable than others. Some divisions were far more profitable than others. Uniform budgets under-fund growth into your best segments while funding, dollar for dollar, the growth of your least profitable (or worse – ones that lose money). The budget you allocate is the most honest statement of priority an account can make. An even split is (9 times out of 10) a cop-out born from an unwillingness to make a decision.

3 Signs Management Is Asleep At The Wheel

The first 7 items on the list ask about the conscious decisions being made by whoever is running the account – who you’re targeting, what’s important to them, how to differentiate your offering vs. everyone else, how best to allocate your resources. The final 3 are about attention to detail and attentiveness to the account. These are proxies, to be sure – but over 100s of audits, they correlate strongly to account health + performance. The overarching lesson I’ve learned is that the accounts that attend to the little things nail the big things.

Nobody manages the search terms report. Over the last ~5 years, search terms report management has become progressively more important, at the same time it’s become chronically ignored. The reality is that – thanks to Google’s match-type expansion – exact (“exact match”) no longer means exact. Phrase = quasi-functional match. Broad match = behavioral match. I’ve seen exact match brand queries match to competitor’s phone numbers. The keyword “Best social media management platform” triggered for the search “facebook ads agency” and the keyword “Memory Care near me” triggered for “Kisunla” (an Alzheimer’ s drug recently approved by the FDA – which is topically adjacent but commercially wrong. In many ways, it’s a more insidious failure vs. the just-plain-wrong matches).

Google’s incentives are to match as many search terms to as many keywords as possible – because that’s how you get rising CPCs in a saturated market. The search terms report is how you prevent your ads from showing for stuff that’s categorically irrelevant to what you’re actually looking for. Without disciplined, ongoing review and negation, the brand/organization pays more – either directly (via clicks on irrelevant KWs) or indirectly (via showing up for irrelevant terms, leading to lower ad relevance + eCTR, leading to higher CPCs). Put another way: search term management is the highest-ROI hour in paid search, yet (somehow) it’s the most commonly skipped because it’s tedious, annoying and often-infuriating.

The automated campaign types run without guardrails. Advantage+, Performance Max & AI Max get turned loose with no restrictions. Left to their own devices, they do exactly what they’re built to do: find the cheapest available conversions. Practically, that means they hoover up demand you already captured — branded queries already covered by CPC campaigns (you are running branded search on mCPC, right?), existing customers who were going to buy anyway, the known high-converting terms that actually convert better (higher CVR, lower CPA) in standard campaigns you’ve dialed in…but PMAX gets priority in the auction so all that hard work is for naught. The end result is that the “automated” campaign’s aggregate numbers look spectacular because the algorithm is hoovering up the volume you would have captured more efficiently elsewhere, not seeking out net-new audiences, keywords + searches those existing campaigns would have missed. Strip out the cannibalized volume and the incremental result is a fraction of what the report shows. Brand and customer-list exclusions, plus an account structure that reserves known winners for campaigns you steer, are the difference between genuine incremental scale and Google/Meta moving peas around the proverbial plate and claiming to have eaten a meal.

There are no notes. This one is unlike the rest, but I always include it: the best-run accounts often make extensive use of the “notes” and “labels” features to document changes, issues, shifts in priorities, experiments, performance, ad type, whatever. There’s nothing better than logging into an account and being able to review the entire history of the account through the notes tab, or seeing rules/scripts target specific labels. When you see that, the account is almost always in good shape.

Why This Keeps Happening

That last test is a perfect example of the overarching problem: we often audit accounts that post extraordinary top-line numbers…but when we dig into what’s really going on, precious little is truly incremental or efficient. There are searches routed to ad groups that convert them inefficiently. Audiences with ads that are “good enough” – but far from dialed in. Landers that are generic vs. specific. Nothing is horrible on its own – but the cumulative impact of each overlooked detail and missed opportunity is massive.

And the worst part is that (almost always) clients signed off on this. Someone moderately competent reviewed it. The reports were skimmed (let’s be honest, no one reads reports). Contracts were renewed.

Everyone thought things were fine, because what was done looks/sounds/seems like marketing.

90% of what we find in accounts isn’t a skill/competence problem. It’s a selection problem. Most clients focus on a small set of agreed-upon KPIs. The reporting obsesses about those things – and glosses over all of the little details and opportunities underneath those metrics that actually matter.

Things like the fact that flat budgets are starving wildly profitable campaigns. It doesn’t separate incremental conversions from harvested ones. It doesn’t surface that cheap leads close at 30% the rate that the slightly-more-expensive-but-markedly-better ones do. It says nothing about the fact that better, more relevant copy would boost already-solid CVRs by 35% or that more relevant LPs are likely to increase it another 27%-42% (based on our tests).

And since all of that is both (i) difficult to communicate and (ii) more likely to result in more work for the manager, the review + reporting process selects for the appearance of marketing, not the substance. Run that loop enough times and you get an account perfectly optimized for a smooth meeting….but barely optimized to grow the business.

Looking like marketing and doing marketing are different things that happen to look alike on a report or dashboard.

What A High-Performing Account Looks Like

Every once in a while, we audit an account that just gets it. The account passes every one of the 10 tests from above with flying colors:

The ad copy is differentiated and aligned to the exact pain points / challenges of the buyer. When you look at it vs. the competition, theirs is the one that stands out on the SERP.
Targeting is built from research, understanding + behavior, not platform suggestions — customer lists, purchase signals, lookalikes from segmented seed audiences, categories drawn around real differences in motivation rather than whatever Google/Meta recommend when you start typing.
Landing pages match the emotional/mental state of the targeted segment. The guy with a roofing emergency gets speed + peace of mind that it’ll be fixed that day. The researcher gets depth, specificity and risk reduction. The comparison shopper gets differentiation. Each page answers the burning question for one person at one moment.
Creative tests emotional angles, different formats, different levels of polish & different offers. Fear of the wrong decision. Relief at finding someone who gets it. Proof from a real customer who looks like the buyer and made the same call. The creative variety + variation aligns to states your target audience is likely to be in when the ad serves, vs. an aesthetic preference.
The account structure reflects conscious, intentional choices about what matters. The architecture mirrors the business, so each campaign has a job and none of them cannibalizes the others.
Bidding strategies are aligned to actual, defensible targets AND relevant goals – SQLs, contribution margin, discounted LTV – so the system optimizes for value, not just volume.
Budgets are weighted toward the products/services/audiences worth winning, not split evenly out of habit or some weird sense of fairness.
The account is actively managed – there are regular search terms cleanups. Under-performing ads are paused or revised. Campaign overlap is managed and mitigated, not allowed to continue unchecked.
Automated campaigns are given guardrails and forced to hunt for net-new demand, not allowed to pre-empt the other, more dialed-in campaigns.
The account is documented. Notes and labels track every change, test, issue & shift in priority, so anyone can reconstruct the account’s full history from the notes tab. Rules or scripts make use of those labels to enable easier, more streamlined management.

And – to be honest – we see a surprising number of accounts that meet those qualifications. It isn’t a fairy tale or a pipe dream to have an account that performs well…it just requires the right set of incentives AND a partner/manager/agency/whatever willing to do the work.

If you’re curious, open up your account and run it through the 10 questions above – you might be surprised at what you find.

That’s it until next week!

Cheers,

Sam

Related Insights