Aviaries Account Overhaul — Critical Issues Flagged (2026-03-25)

Overview

During the ^[1], a live audit of the Aviaries Google Ads account revealed critical structural and tracking failures. The account was spending approximately $33/day with zero recorded conversions — a clear signal of broken infrastructure rather than a performance problem. A full account overhaul was flagged as required before any optimization work can be meaningful.

Audit Findings

1. Broken Conversion Tracking

The primary root cause of zero reported conversions was a misconfigured conversion action:

Submit Lead Form was set as a secondary conversion action, not primary.
Google's Smart Bidding and reporting only optimize toward primary conversion actions. With no primary conversion action firing, the account had no signal to optimize against and no conversions to report.
This means historical performance data in the account is unreliable — actual leads generated are unknown.

2. Poor Campaign Structure

Beyond tracking, the campaign structure itself was not set up for conversion performance:

Phrase match only — no broad match or exact match coverage to capture the full range of relevant queries or to lock down high-intent terms.
No conversion-based bid strategy — campaigns were not using Maximize Conversions or Target CPA, meaning Google had no instruction to optimize for leads.

These two structural issues compound the tracking problem: even if tracking were fixed, the bidding strategy would not have been able to act on conversion signals.

Impact Assessment

Metric	Status
Daily spend	~$33/day
Recorded conversions	0
Conversion tracking	Broken (Submit Lead Form = secondary)
Bid strategy	Not conversion-optimized
Campaign structure	Phrase match only

Required Actions

A full account overhaul is required. Piecemeal fixes are insufficient given the depth of the structural issues.

Immediate Fixes (Karly)

[ ] Fix GTM / conversion tracking setup — promote Submit Lead Form to a primary conversion action and verify it is firing correctly
[ ] Once tracking is confirmed, implement call-outs and snippets (currently missing)
[ ] Switch campaigns to a conversion-based bid strategy (Maximize Conversions or Target CPA)

Working Session

[ ] Karly to schedule a follow-up working session with Mark and Sebastian to complete the full account rebuild — campaign structure, match types, bid strategies, and ad extensions

Next Steps

Owner	Action
Karly	Complete GTM/conversion tracking fixes; add call-outs/snippets; switch to conversion bidding
Karly	Schedule Aviaries working session with Mark + Sebastian

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