An audit of PaperTube's Google Ads account revealed significant structural inefficiency: 38 campaigns exist in the account, but only 4 are actively receiving traffic. The audit identified several high-priority fixes that, taken together, should improve spend efficiency and conversion volume without necessarily increasing budget.
This restructure was scoped during the [1] and is one component of the broader [2] growth plan.
Status: Scoped. Asymmetric not yet managing PaperTube's ads account at time of meeting — Parag confirmed intent to transition management.
| Issue | Detail |
|---|---|
| Campaign clutter | 38 campaigns total; only 4 receive traffic |
| Brand term leakage | Brand terms consuming ~30% of DSA budget |
| No remarketing | Site visitors are not being retargeted |
| GSC not connected | Google Search Console disconnected from Google Ads |
| Dormant campaigns | 8 campaigns active but receiving zero traffic |
| Landing page quality | Flagged as a problem area in audit |
| PMAX underinvestigated | Performance Max campaign needs deeper review |
Pause the 8 campaigns that are live but receiving no traffic. Reduces account noise and makes optimization easier.
Brand search terms are currently competing inside the DSA campaign and consuming ~30% of its budget. Isolating brand terms into a separate campaign:
- Lets the DSA focus on non-brand, discovery-oriented queries
- Gives brand terms their own budget and bidding logic
- Reduces wasted spend on queries PaperTube would likely win organically anyway
No remarketing audiences are currently active. PaperTube receives ~2,600 organic sessions/month (even discounting bot traffic). Re-engaging those visitors via display remarketing is low-cost brand reinforcement — display ads are impression-based and only cost on click.
"These are people that have been to your website. We should be reactivating them." — Mark Hope
GSC data (organic queries, impressions, CTR by keyword) is not flowing into Google Ads. Connecting the two surfaces organic keyword performance inside the Ads interface and enables smarter bidding decisions.
Keyword research identified "cardboard tubes" (2,400 searches/month, keyword difficulty: 2) as a high-opportunity term where PaperTube currently has no ranking. A dedicated search campaign targeting this term — paired with an SEO content push — would compound results across both channels.
See: [3]
Call extensions are not currently in use. Given PaperTube's custom order business relies on sales conversations, adding call extensions to relevant campaigns is a low-effort conversion path improvement.
This campaign was historically strong but was turned off. Revisit with revised creative and targeting.
The audit did not recommend increasing total ad spend — the primary opportunity is reallocation and structural cleanup. Key reallocation logic:
Mark noted a consistent pattern across clients: ad performance is correlated with SEO health. PaperTube's current SEO Health Score of 50 (vs. 98–100 for most managed accounts) is likely suppressing Quality Scores and landing page relevance signals.
"I've never seen anybody be successful with ads who had a bad SEO result. You've got to have the foundation built."
Fixing the Shopify crawl issues and targeting high-volume keywords (see [4]) should be pursued in parallel with the ads restructure.