Professional services
B2B services firm — search recovery
A services firm paying an agency retainer for a search account nobody could explain. We rebuilt the weekly loop around falsifiable plans and the waste miner fenced off the spend that was never going to convert.
Illustrative scenario — an anonymized composite of the engagement pattern we typically see, published until the client-approved case study lands. No performance figures are claimed.
The situation
A professional-services firm was spending meaningfully on Google Ads search campaigns through a conventional agency retainer. Nothing was obviously broken — the account spent, the ads served, a report arrived monthly. What was missing was any causal story: which changes had been made, why, and what they had actually produced.
The search terms report was the tell. Under broad match the account was paying for queries that no reasonable buyer of their service would ever type — adjacent consumer intents, job-seeker queries, and lookalike phrasings of their own brand.
What we did
The free audit named the waste candidates first: irrelevant query families, decaying creatives, and a conversion signal thin enough that Smart Bidding was steering on noise. From the first managed week, every change entered the loop — a written, falsifiable plan; a validate-only preview of each API call; human approval; a guarded apply; and a grade recorded in the ledger.
- Negatives built out from the search terms report, family by family, with each exclusion documented in the ledger.
- Campaign structure rebuilt around how their buyers actually search, rather than the structure the account had inherited.
- Conversion tracking repaired and enhanced conversions wired, so the bidding system finally learned from real leads.
What changed
This is an illustrative narrative, so we deliberately make no performance claims. What the client valued was the mechanism: for the first time, every change to their account carried a prediction, an approval, and a grade. Weekly plans could be argued with on the evidence, and the spend that the waste miner fenced off was visible in the ledger by name.
The engagement continues on the same loop — because the loop, not any single change, is the product.