Google Ads judgedon search, not a blend.

Choose Google Ads when a customer types the service, the product, or your name. Home services, clinics, law, software, and stores with a known catalog all qualify if the landing page can take the click. Brand search is usually worth running so a competitor does not own your name uncontested. It is not proof that non-brand is healthy.

Hold off when you cannot name the conversion. A campaign optimized to page views, scroll, or every form including the newsletter will look busy and teach nothing. Hold off on Performance Max until the search terms you care about are visible in a search campaign. Shopping and video can join later. They are not a substitute for query control.

Non-brand campaigns group queries that share a landing page and a margin. Negatives are a weekly job, including queries that are research, jobs, or the wrong service. Match types are chosen so a broad term cannot spend the budget before the search terms report is read. Brand sits in its own campaign with its own cap.

Conversion actions are marked primary only when they are the thing sales or the store counts. Calls, qualified forms, and purchases can all be valid. A download and a demo request cannot share one goal if they are not worth the same. Location and schedule follow where you can actually respond, not a default of everywhere, all night.

The account we replace most often has a handful of ad groups, broad match, and a conversion goal that includes every click on a phone number plus every form. The recommendation tab has been accepted for months. Brand queries make the total look calm. Non-brand is unreadable because it was never separated.

The second failure is sending every query to the homepage, or to a page that does not offer the thing the ad named. We will not add budget to a campaign whose landing page cannot finish the click. A tracking gap is fixed before a bid strategy is trusted. Smart bidding on a broken conversion is how the account learns the wrong lesson.

We report brand and non-brand separately, with cost per qualified lead or cost per order on the non-brand side. The 3.1x median is a reference from Search accounts held at least six months. A new account is not graded against it in month one. Impression share on the brand term tells you if someone else is buying your name.

Search terms, landing page, and the conversion action are the weekly trio. A query with spend and no conversions gets a negative, a new ad group, or a landing page decision. It does not get a higher budget because the account total looked fine. Microsoft, video, and Performance Max are judged on their own pages, not rolled into this number.

Regional home services company. One search campaign held the brand name, the emergency service, and a pile of research queries. The dashboard ROAS looked acceptable because the brand term converted. The owner was about to raise the budget. Call tracking counted every tap, including people calling the wrong trade.

We split brand from non-brand, added negatives for the queries they do not serve, and made the qualified call the primary conversion. Brand stayed on with a cap. Non-brand had to justify itself without the brand term in the total. Across Google Search accounts we have held six months or more, median ROAS was 3.1x. That median is not this company's promise. It is why we refuse to grade a new split against a blended screenshot.