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

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

Related

• ^[2]
• ^[3]
• ^[4]
• ^[5]