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Here's a question: when was the last time someone properly looked under the bonnet of your ad account?
Not just a quick glance at the dashboard. Not just checking if the numbers went up or down. A proper, thorough ppc audit that questions every assumption, tests every setting, and challenges the "we've always done it this way" mentality.
This is the story of how we helped a UK-based e-commerce business find an extra 30% ROI hiding in plain sight, without spending a single extra pound on their advertising budget.
The Client: An E-Commerce Brand Stuck in Neutral
Let's call them "Northern Outdoor Co." (not their real name, but you get the idea). They sold premium outdoor gear and had been running Google Ads campaigns for three years. They'd even hired a well-regarded agency 18 months prior.
On paper, everything looked decent:
- £15,000 monthly ad spend
- Consistent traffic to the site
- Regular sales coming through
- A 3.2x return on ad spend (ROAS)
But here's the thing, their ROAS had been declining steadily for six months. What started as a healthy 4.5x had eroded to 3.2x, and nobody could explain why. The agency kept saying "it's just market conditions" and "competition has increased."
Sound familiar?
The Brief: Find Out What's Actually Going On
Northern Outdoor Co. didn't want to increase their budget. They wanted to understand where their money was actually going and whether they were getting the best possible return. As one of the metrics that impact your bank balance, ROAS matters, a lot.
Our ppc audit wasn't about finding fault with the previous agency. It was about uncovering opportunities that get missed when you're inside the day-to-day management bubble.
What We Found: The Hidden Gaps
After two weeks of forensic analysis across their Google Ads and Meta Business Suite accounts, we identified three major issues:
1. The Broad Keyword Trap
Nearly 40% of their Google Ads budget was being spent on broad match keywords that were triggering irrelevant searches. We're talking searches like:
- "free outdoor gear" (newsflash: they don't sell free stuff)
- "outdoor gear rental" (they don't rent either)
- "cheap camping equipment" (their products are premium, not budget)
The previous agency had set these up with broad match to "capture more traffic," but hadn't implemented proper negative keyword lists or reviewed the search term reports in months.
The result? Thousands of pounds spent on clicks from people who were never going to convert.
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2. Landing Page Conversion Killers
Here's where it got interesting. We discovered that 60% of their ad traffic was being sent to category pages rather than specific product pages. Category pages converted at 1.2%, whilst product pages converted at 3.8%.
Why were they sending traffic to lower-converting pages? Nobody had questioned it. The campaigns had been set up that way three years ago, and they'd just kept running.
Additionally, their mobile landing page experience was sluggish. Load times averaged 4.2 seconds, and Google's own data shows that conversion rates drop by 12% for every additional second of load time.
3. The "Set It and Forget It" Campaign Structure
Their account had 47 active campaigns. Sounds impressive, right? Wrong.
Twenty-three of those campaigns had spent less than £50 in the previous three months. They were zombie campaigns, technically alive but contributing absolutely nothing. They were cluttering the account, making optimisation difficult, and (worst of all) preventing budget from flowing to the campaigns that were actually performing.
The account structure was so fragmented that meaningful performance data was being diluted across dozens of underperforming ad groups.
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
The Solutions: Strategic Restructuring, Not Just Tweaking
Armed with these insights, we presented a comprehensive action plan. This wasn't about making minor adjustments, it was about fundamental restructuring.
Phase 1: Keyword Surgery
We immediately:
- Paused all broad match keywords that couldn't justify their existence with conversion data
- Added 300+ negative keywords based on six months of search term data
- Shifted to phrase match and exact match for high-intent commercial terms
- Created dedicated campaigns for branded searches (which had been lumped in with generic terms)
Phase 2: Landing Page Optimisation
Working with their development team, we:
- Redirected all ad traffic to specific product pages with clear calls-to-action
- Implemented lazy loading for images to improve mobile load times
- Added trust signals (reviews, delivery information) above the fold
- Created dedicated landing pages for their three best-selling product categories
Phase 3: Campaign Consolidation
This was the big one. We:
- Archived the 23 zombie campaigns
- Consolidated related ad groups into focused, high-performing campaigns
- Restructured their account around customer intent (research phase vs. purchase-ready)
- Implemented a proper testing framework for ad copy and extensions
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The Results: 30% More ROI, Same Budget
Sixty days after implementing these changes, the numbers spoke for themselves:
- ROAS increased from 3.2x to 4.16x (a 30% improvement)
- Cost per acquisition dropped by 22%
- Conversion rate improved from 2.1% to 3.4%
- Wasted spend reduced by approximately £2,400 per month
Perhaps most importantly, the account became manageable. Instead of trying to optimise 47 campaigns with fragmented data, the team could focus on 12 high-performing campaigns with clear purposes and measurable results.
The monthly ad spend remained at £15,000. The results? Well, they jumped from £48,000 to £62,400 in monthly revenue from paid ads alone.
Key Takeaways: Why Regular PPC Audits Matter
This case study isn't unique. We see similar patterns repeatedly when conducting ppc audit work for clients:
1. Agencies get comfortable. What worked 18 months ago might not work today, but if nobody's challenging the status quo, decline becomes the new normal.
2. Data tells stories, but only if you listen. The search term reports were screaming "we're wasting money," but nobody was reviewing them systematically.
3. Small percentages compound. A 1% improvement in conversion rate doesn't sound exciting, but across thousands of visitors, it transforms your bottom line.
4. Structure matters as much as strategy. A cluttered, disorganised account makes optimisation nearly impossible, regardless of how good your ads are.
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What About Your Ad Account?
If you're running paid advertising: whether through an agency, in-house team, or doing it yourself: when was the last time someone conducted a thorough ppc audit?
Here are some warning signs that you might be leaving money on the table:
- Your ROAS has been declining month-on-month
- You haven't reviewed search terms in over a month
- You have campaigns running that you set up over a year ago and haven't touched
- Your mobile conversion rates are significantly lower than desktop
- You can't explain exactly where each pound of ad spend is going
The brilliant thing about digital marketing is that everything is measurable. The frustrating thing? That means there's no excuse for mediocrity.
If Northern Outdoor Co. had conducted a ppc audit six months earlier, they could have saved £14,400 in wasted spend and generated an additional £86,400 in revenue. That's not a typo: that's the compounding cost of letting optimisation opportunities slip by unnoticed.
Your Next Steps
A comprehensive ppc audit should examine:
- Keyword match types and negative keyword coverage
- Search term reports for the past 90 days minimum
- Landing page performance and mobile experience
- Campaign structure and budget allocation
- Ad copy testing methodology
- Conversion tracking accuracy
- Audience targeting and exclusions
Whether you're managing your own campaigns or working with an agency, these fundamentals deserve regular review. Markets change, competitors evolve, and consumer behaviour shifts. Your ad account strategy should shift with them.
Ready to uncover what's hiding in your own ad account? Our digital marketing assessment examines all aspects of your online presence: including paid advertising performance. Sometimes the best investments aren't about spending more; they're about spending smarter.
After all, finding an extra 30% ROI doesn't require magic. It just requires someone willing to ask the right questions.
