Google Ads Review — Campaign Fixes & Strategy

Overview

Internal team meeting (Mark, Gilbert, Sebastian, Karly) to audit Aviary's Google Ads account and implement immediate fixes. The account had spent ~$800 with zero recorded conversions. The session resulted in live campaign changes, a budget reallocation, and a set of follow-up action items.

Attendees: Mark Hope, Gilbert Barrongo, Sebastian Gant, Karly Oykhman

Key Decisions

1. Discovery Campaign Paused

The existing Discovery campaign was attracting consumer traffic (e.g., "voice AI generator," "Uber Duck AI") rather than the target B2B audience (banks, credit unions, insurance companies). Analysis showed zero B2B search terms in the campaign — 200 consumer queries, 231 ambiguous, and $169 wasted in the last 90 days. Decision: pause immediately.

2. Brand Campaign Created

A dedicated Brand campaign was launched to capture high-intent searches for "Aviary."
- Budget: $3/day
- Keywords: Exact and phrase match on brand terms; one RSA with brand name pinned
- Negatives: Brand terms added as negatives to all other campaigns to prevent overlap

3. Display Remarketing Campaign Launched

A new Display Remarketing campaign was created to re-engage the 680 existing website visitors.
- Budget: $5/day
- Audience: All website visitors, excluding purchasers
- Frequency cap: Max 4 impressions/user/day
- Bidding: Maximize Clicks (until conversion data is available)

4. Budget Reallocation

Active daily spend after changes: ~$35/day (~$1,050/month), fitting within the client's stated $1,000/month experimental budget. The paused Discovery campaign freed up room for the two new campaigns.

5. Conversion Tracking Must Be Verified

Two primary conversions are configured (Submit Lead Form, Demo Booked), but neither has ever recorded a conversion. The team cannot rule out a tracking failure. Sebastian will run manual tests before any bidding strategy changes are made.

6. LinkedIn Ads Proposal Approved in Principle

The team agreed that LinkedIn is the right channel to reach specific B2B roles (bank/credit union decision-makers). Karly will draft a proposal targeting ~$600/month ($20/day).

Immediate Action Items

Root Cause Analysis: Zero Conversions

Three likely contributors, in order of impact:

1. All traffic sent to homepage. The homepage is not conversion-oriented. Dedicated landing pages have been designed but not yet deployed. Until URLs are updated, ad traffic continues hitting the homepage.
2. Discovery campaign attracted wrong audience. Consumer-intent queries dominated. No B2B terms were found in the search term report.
3. Conversion tracking unconfirmed. GTM triggers for HubSpot form fills and Calendly bookings appear configured but have never been validated with a live test.

A secondary factor: optimization scores below 80 cause Google to throttle ad delivery. Adding site links and structured snippets should improve scores over time.

Account Admin Notes

• Advertiser Verification: Requires Blessing's government-issued ID (driver's license, front and back). Sebastian to request. Client can submit directly if preferred.
• Image Assets: Account had no usable display images. The session pulled and resized images from the Aviary website as a stopgap. Proper assets needed: converted logos (JPEG/PNG from Figma/Notion) + 5–6 stock photos.
• Site Link Issue: One site link pointing to /about was disapproved (destination not working). Needs to be fixed and resubmitted.
• Bidding Strategy: Currently "Maximize Clicks" on all campaigns. Cannot switch to conversion-based bidding until tracking is verified and conversion volume is established.

Future Growth Roadmap (Deferred)

These items were discussed but intentionally deferred until current campaigns are stable and conversion tracking is confirmed:

• Dedicated landing pages — critical; Sebastian to push client on approval and deployment
• Content / SEO — increase blog cadence to 1–2 posts/week; vertical pages recently approved by client
• Rebuild Discovery campaign — new version targeting B2B terms: "enterprise voice AI," "AI call center for banks," "credit union automation," etc.
• Competitor campaign — small budget to bid on 2–3 dominant competitor brand terms
• Bing Ads — mirror Google Ads account; Bing skews B2B and is likely used by credit unions on Microsoft devices
• LinkedIn Ads — $600/month proposal; target by job title/industry (banks, credit unions, insurance)
• LinkedIn Matched Audiences — revisit once ad account has run for a period and audience data is available

Transcript Highlights

Mark: "It really comes down to the fact we need to make sure that those two conversions are actually working. What we really probably should do is, Sebastian, just go in and create a couple of meetings and fill out a couple of forms… and then we should come back and see if those are hitting."

Mark: "All ads point to the homepage. This is terrible practice. We need to get landing pages. Jump up and down and scream and yell until we get landing pages, Sebastian, because we're just wasting everybody's money."

Mark: "We spent $169 on consumer or irrelevant brand terms… zero B2B terms."

Mark: "If you're sending somebody to a page that's not conversion-oriented, sometimes people go to the page and just say, there's nothing to do here."

Karly: "LinkedIn — it's an expensive outlet, but we can get specifically the people that they want."

Mark (on budget): "If they say your Google Ads budget is $1,000, we can go back to them and say, hey, we want another $600 for LinkedIn. These guys have money, and they just want to be sure we're using it effectively."

Related

• ^[1]
• ^[2]