Solved: Google Ads ROAS Tanked After Marketer Takeover

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I've had a look over the situation with your Google Ads account, and what you're describing is unfortunately quite common. Seeing a good initial ROAS followed by a sharp drop often points to some underlying structural issues. It's frustrating, I know, but it's definitely fixable.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on what you've shared. The short answer is that your account structure looks overly complicated, which is likely starving Google's algorithm of the data it needs to perform well. We'll need to simplify things quite a bit to get back on track.

The problem is your account structure, not your ads...

Right, let's get straight to it. The number one reason I see accounts go from hero to zero like this is almost always the structure. When a new marketer comes in, they often try to demonstrate value by building something that looks incredibly complex and granular. Lots of campaigns, different match types, specific targeting... it looks impressive on a screenshot, but in the age of machine learning, it's often the exact wrong thing to do. It's a classic case of the 'illusion of control'.

You've got five separate campaigns all trying to do a similar job: sell your products. Four of them are non-brand. By splitting your budget and your conversion data across a DSA campaign, a broad match campaign, a specific phrase match campaign, and a PMax campaign, you're not giving any single one of them enough data to learn effectively. Google's bidding algorithms, especially 'Maximize Conversion Value', thrive on data. They need a steady stream of conversions to understand who your best customers are and what signals predict a purchase. When you spread the data too thin, the algorithm is essentially flying blind. It can't spot trends, it can't optimise bids effectively, and your ROAS tanks as a result. It's like trying to feed five children with a single slice of bread – everyone ends up hungry and weak.

Think about it: if your total non-brand budget is, say, £3,000 a month, and you have 50 conversions, splitting that across four campaigns means some might only get 10-15 conversions each over 30 days. That's not enough data for the system to make smart decisions. It needs volume. The first month likely worked on historical data and a bit of luck, but as the algorithm tried to learn from the tiny data sets you were feeding it, it failed to find a consistent pattern, and performance fell off a cliff.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how modern Google Ads works. We're not in 2015 anymore, where manual bidding and granular ad groups were king. Today, the goal is to provide the machine with the clearest possible data stream and the fewest constraints, so it can do its job. Your current structure does the opposite. It's full of constraints and muddy, fragmented data streams. We need to fix that first before we even think about ad copy or landing pages.

Here's a visual breakdown of the problem. Your current structure creates data "silos," preventing the algorithm from seeing the full picture. A consolidated structure creates a large "lake" of data that the algorithm can use to learn much faster.

You'll need to pause your biggest budget wasters immediately...

Let's talk about two campaigns that are almost certainly causing you major headaches: `b-broad-match` and `b-dsa-search`. While they can have their uses in very specific situations, running them with a 'Maximize Conversion Value' strategy without extremely careful management is like leaving your wallet on a park bench. It's going to disappear fast.

The Broad Match campaign is the most obvious red flag. Unless it's supported by a huge list of negative keywords (and I mean thousands), you'll be paying for clicks from all sorts of irrelevant search queries. Someone searching for "how to remove stickers from wall" could trigger your ad for custom stickers. It's a recipe for burning cash. The fact that its performance has tanked suggests the initial "learning" phase has ended, and now Google is just spending your money on any remotely related search it can find, regardless of intent.

The Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaign is similarly problematic. DSA is a brilliant tool for *discovery*—for finding new keyword ideas and covering gaps in your existing campaigns. It is not, however, a great tool for consistent performance, especially for eCommerce. It works by crawling your site and matching pages to search queries. This means you have very little control over which landing page a user sees, or what the ad headline is. This can lead to a disjointed user experience and, you guessed it, a low conversion rate. Using it as a main, always-on campaign is risky. Its job is to find opportunities, which you should then move into your core search campaigns as proper keywords. It shouldn't be a permanent fixture competing for budget.

My strong recommendation is to pause both of these campaigns immediately. Right now. You are almost certainly haemorrhaging money through them. Once your account is stabilised, we can talk about using them strategically for short-term research, but they have no place in your core performance structure.

I'd say you need to tame your Performance Max campaign...

Performance Max (PMax) is Google's golden child, but it's a black box and can be a real bully within an account if you're not careful. It has access to every channel—Search, Display, YouTube, Shopping—and its primary goal is to find conversions wherever it can, as cheaply as it can.

Here's the problem: what's the easiest, cheapest conversion to find? A search for your own brand name. There's a very high chance your PMax campaign is bidding on your brand terms, stealing conversions that your dedicated `b-brand-search` campaign would have captured anyway (and for much cheaper). Because PMax often has a lower ROAS than a pure brand campaign, this cannibalisation can drag down your account-wide average ROAS significantly. It makes PMax look okay and your other campaigns look terrible, when in reality, PMax is just taking credit for their work.

You mentioned everything *except* your brand campaign has a ROAS under 1.1. This is a massive clue. It suggests that PMax is likely hoovering up all the easy non-brand conversions AND a chunk of your brand traffic, leaving only the most difficult and expensive traffic for your other campaigns. They are being set up to fail.

You can't add negative keywords to PMax yourself in the interface, but you *can* ask a Google Ads support representative to do it for you. You should get in touch with them and ask them to add your brand terms as negative keywords to your PMax campaign at the account level. This will force it to hunt for new customers, which is what it's supposed to be for. Secondly, you need to ensure your asset groups are tightly themed. Don't just dump all your products and creative into one group. Create distinct asset groups for each major product category (e.g., "Vinyl Stickers," "Paper Labels," "Bumper Stickers") with headlines, descriptions, and images that are highly relevant to that category. This gives the system better signals about who to target.

You probably should look beyond your ads account...

This is a bit of brutal honesty now. Sometimes, the problem isn't the ads account at all. A drop in ROAS is just a mathematical formula: (Revenue / Cost). We've talked a lot about the 'Cost' side of things, but what about the 'Revenue' side? Your revenue is a product of Clicks x Conversion Rate x Average Order Value. Has anything changed on your website in the last three weeks?

A tiny drop in your site's conversion rate can have a catastrophic effect on your ROAS. A new pop-up, a change to the checkout flow, a slower page load speed, a popular product going out of stock—any of these can cause your conversion rate to dip. If your conversion rate drops from, say, 2.5% to 2.0%, that's a 20% decrease in revenue from the same amount of traffic. Your ROAS would plummet, even if the ad campaigns didn't change at all. You need to dig into your Google Analytics and compare the last three weeks to the month before. Look at the sitewide conversion rate, cart abandonment rate, and page load times. The answer might be there, not in Google Ads.

Your ROAS is a business metric, not just an advertising metric. It's a reflection of your entire sales funnel, from the ad click to the thank you page. Blaming the ad platform is easy, but it's often not the whole story. I've built an interactive calculator for you below. Play around with the sliders. You'll see how even a small 0.2% drop in your website's conversion rate can be the difference between a profitable campaign and a failing one. This should demonstrate why you need to be looking at your website's performance just as closely as your ad campaigns.

You'll need to implement a simpler, more powerful structure...

So, what should you actualy do? You need to move from that fragmented, leaky structure to a consolidated, data-rich one. The goal is to create fewer, stronger campaigns that give Google's algorithm the fuel it needs to perform. This might feel like you're losing control, but you're not. You're giving control to a machine that is far better at processing billions of data points than any human could ever be.

Here's the structure I would implement if I were taking over your account tomorrow:

1. Pause Immediately: The `b-dsa-search` campaign, the `b-broad-match` campaign, and the `b-PRODUCT_TYPE-REGION` phrase match campaign. This stops the bleeding.
2. Keep: The `b-brand-search` campaign. This is your defence. Don't touch it, other than making sure its budget is sufficient to capture close to 100% of brand search impression share.
3. Consolidate & Relaunch: Create ONE new Standard Search campaign for all non-brand activity. Take the best-performing keywords (based on historical data) from your paused Phrase and Broad match campaigns and add them to this new campaign as Phrase and Exact match types. Group them into tightly-themed ad groups (e.g., 'custom vinyl stickers', 'die-cut stickers', 'business logo stickers'). This becomes your workhorse campaign. All your non-brand search budget goes here.
4. Reconfigure PMax: Keep the PMax campaign, but as discussed, get your brand terms excluded. Ensure your asset groups are tightly themed around your main product categories. Give it a healthy budget, as it will be your main engine for finding customers across all of Google's channels.

This leaves you with a clean, simple structure: one Brand campaign, one Non-Brand Search campaign, and one PMax campaign. That's it. This structure ensures that your data isn't fragmented. Your new Non-Brand Search campaign will quickly accumulate enough conversion data to allow 'Maximize Conversion Value' to work properly. Your PMax campaign, freed from the temptation of brand traffic, will be forced to find genuinely new customers. It's a structure built for performance in 2024, not 2014.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a clear action plan:

Look, restructuring an account like this can feel daunting, and it's easy to make a small mistake that has big consequences. You've already seen how the wrong strategy can turn a profitable account into a loss-making one in just a few weeks. The advice I've given you is a solid blueprint, but the execution requires careful attention to detail.

This is where getting expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced paid ads specialist can not only implement this new structure correctly but can also manage the transition, monitor the data closely as the campaigns re-enter their learning phases, and make the necessary adjustments to creative, bids, and budgets along the way. It removes the guesswork and speeds up the process of getting back to (and exceeding) your previous performance levels. For instance, I remember one client, a medical job matching platform, whose campaigns were struggling with a cost per user acquisition of around £100 on Google Ads. By implementing a similar process of simplification and strategic restructuring, we managed to bring that cost down to just £7 per user. This kind of turnaround is possible when you apply a data-driven structure that works with the platform's algorithm, not against it.

If you'd like to have a chat about this in more detail and see how we could help, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation. We would go through your account with you on a screen share, dive deeper into the data, and give you a more detailed, bespoke plan of action. It's a chance for you to get some more expert advice and for us to show you what we can do.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh