The client and the problem
The client was a niche insurance broker in the UK, specialising in hard-to-insure products across several specialist categories. Their Google Ads account was spending over £1 million per year, but the account had grown organically over several years without any structural oversight, and by the time I took it on, it had become a liability.
When I first logged into the account, my initial feeling was that the sheer volume of campaigns made it almost impossible to know where to look first. I've audited accounts of all sizes over 20 years, and this one was one of the most fragmented I'd seen. Complex accounts like this usually get that way not through negligence but through incremental growth: one campaign added here, a new product line there, each one made sense at the time. The pattern that emerges is one of the most expensive problems in paid search, campaigns quietly competing against each other for the same searches and driving up their own costs.
Most people assume that more campaigns means more coverage. In my experience, beyond a certain point it means less control, less data per campaign, and worse performance overall. Consolidation feels counterintuitive because it means actively removing things. But the results usually speak for themselves.
The core problem was campaign proliferation: more than 30 separate campaigns had accumulated, many targeting overlapping keywords and effectively competing against each other in auction. When campaigns from the same account compete for the same searches, you end up bidding against yourself, pushing CPCs higher and fragmenting conversion data across too many small campaign pools for Smart Bidding to function efficiently.
The in-house team responsible for day-to-day monitoring couldn't effectively manage the account at that complexity. Optimisation decisions that would have been straightforward in a well-structured account were buried under layers of overlapping campaigns, inconsistent naming conventions, and years of accumulated band-aid fixes.
The diagnosis
Before making any changes, I spent the first two weeks auditing the account in full. The search terms report was the starting point, and it was revealing. A significant volume of spend was going on searches that bore only a loose relationship to the products being advertised. With 30+ campaigns running, negative keyword management had been inconsistent: terms excluded in one campaign were triggering spend in another.
The bidding strategy across the account was also fragmented: different campaigns running different Smart Bidding strategies at different target CPAs, some with manually adjusted bids on top of automated bidding (which disrupts the algorithm's logic). The data required for Smart Bidding to work well was spread across too many campaigns to give any individual campaign sufficient signal.
The approach
The restructure had three components.
The first was simplification. I consolidated the 30+ campaigns into a much smaller number of tightly defined campaigns, each with a clear purpose, non-overlapping keyword targeting, and a single bidding strategy. The goal was fewer, stronger campaigns with cleaner data rather than many thin campaigns producing noise.
The second was Dynamic Search Ads and Responsive Search Ads. For a specialist insurance business with a range of products, Dynamic Search Ads offered an efficient way to cover the long-tail search landscape without manually building out hundreds of ad groups. Google crawls the product pages and matches ad content to relevant searches, with the advertiser writing descriptions and controlling exclusions. I built DSA campaigns alongside standard search campaigns and managed the overlap carefully with negative keywords, so the DSA campaigns were capturing only what the standard campaigns weren't explicitly covering. All static expanded text ads (which Google had deprecated) were replaced with Responsive Search Ads, providing multiple headline and description combinations for Google to test and serving the best-performing combinations for each query.
The third was negative keyword management. During the restructure and for the first three months after, this was the primary daily task. New campaigns always generate unexpected search terms as the algorithm explores. Each day, I reviewed what had triggered ads, added irrelevant terms as negatives, and refined the shared negative lists that applied across the account. This is the unglamorous part of the work, but in a high-spend account, a single day of irrelevant traffic is a meaningful budget loss.
The results
The results emerged over a three-month learning period, during which the client understandably had questions about why daily numbers were fluctuating. This is normal with Smart Bidding during major structural changes. The algorithm is recalibrating, and performance stabilises as it accumulates data under the new structure. Maintaining the approach through that period rather than reverting under pressure was key to the outcome.
After three months:
- Overall Google Ads spend decreased by 50%
- Monthly leads increased by 171%
- CPC and CPL both reduced significantly
Spending half as much and generating more than twice the leads is a substantial shift in return on investment. It was possible because the previous structure was generating a large volume of irrelevant spend, and because properly structured Smart Bidding campaigns in an account with sufficient conversion data perform substantially better than the fragmented, competing-against-itself setup they replaced.
What this means for similar businesses
An account that's grown without structural oversight is a common situation. The accumulation of campaigns, the inconsistent negative keyword management, and the overlapping targeting all develop gradually. Nobody notices until the account has become genuinely difficult to manage and the cost-per-lead has drifted upward over time.
The fix isn't usually a single dramatic intervention. It's a systematic audit, a structured rebuild, and then disciplined management through the learning period while the algorithm recalibrates. The temptation to keep changing things when daily numbers look volatile is the biggest risk to a restructure working.
If your Google Ads account has grown over time and you're not sure whether the structure is still fit for purpose, a proper audit is the place to start.
Google Ads management in North Wales. Get in touch if you'd like a free audit of your account structure.
*These results were obtained whilst working for a marketing agency.
