The right type of campaign, right conversions and connected platforms. Paid media has become genuinely complex. Google Ads alone now has campaign types, match types, bidding strategies, conversion windows and AI-powered automation. None of it is obvious or well-explained, so most accounts are bleeding budget.

So we looked for a fast way to audit your ad account to improve performance, and found…

Chantelle Bowyer founded Metis, a paid media agency managing campaigns across Google, Meta and LinkedIn for SA businesses. She was a Google trainer before in-person training existed, and she spends a significant portion of her time auditing accounts, which means she's seen the same mistakes repeat across hundreds of SA businesses. What she finds follows a predictable pattern. And most of it is fixable, once you know what to look for.

Metrics like cost per lead, click-through rate and ROAS are downstream. The key lies in your account structure: Campaign types, conversion tracking and targeting.

"When people first come to us and we audit their accounts, that’s where we see the most extreme amounts of wasted spend."

The ad account audit below works top-down: fix the structure first and the numbers sort themselves out.

The most common structural mistake: When brand and non-brand keywords live in the same campaign, the platform optimises for whichever is easiest to convert.

Brand keywords are people searching your company name, and they convert cheaply because those people already know you. Non-brand keywords cost more and take longer. 

"If I have all that grouped in one campaign, I'm telling Google, ‘get me the most conversions possible', and Google goes for the easiest conversion, the brand name, so you end up only marketing to people who already know you. So you can’t scale."

The fix: One brand campaign, one non-brand campaign. In the non-brand campaign, add your brand name as a negative keyword so the two don't compete. Check your Performance Max campaigns here, too. If you're running PMax without excluding your brand name, those conversions may just be people who were going to find you anyway.

Pull up your campaigns and write down what each one is optimising for. The platform optimises for primary conversions. If you've set newsletter signups, product views, add-to-carts and purchases all as primary, you're telling the platform they're equally valuable. It'll go after whichever is easiest. That's usually not the one that makes you money.

For lead generation, check whether click-to-call is set as a primary conversion. Chantelle found in a recent audit that only 26% of click-to-calls actually became calls hitting the switchboard. The platform was optimising for phantom leads.

At minimum, your Google My Business profile, YouTube channel and Search Console should all be linked to your Google Ads account. If they're not, the platform is working with incomplete data.

Beyond Google: if you're running Meta, LinkedIn or other campaigns, check whether those platforms are sharing data with your CRM or email list. Disconnected platforms learn in silos. A lead that converts through your email sequence teaches your Meta campaigns nothing unless you close the loop.

"Think of it like a Netflix account. The more you watch, the better the recommendations. Disconnected platforms are like starting a new account every few weeks and wondering why the recommendations are useless."

When campaigns generate leads, the platform knows a form was submitted. It doesn't know whether that lead was any good. If 7 out of 10 submissions are junk, the platform optimises to generate more junk. It only learns to find better leads when you tell it which ones were actually qualified.

"You need to send that data back into the system. Don't only send sale data back, the other qualified people who didn't go through to the sale were still qualified. The platform needs your data."

Some of Chantelle's clients use a Google Sheet to track lead quality and pull that data back into the campaign. The threshold to make this work is roughly 30 qualified conversions per 30 days, enough for the platform's machine learning to identify a pattern.

Too many campaigns, too little budget per campaign, means none of them ever exit learning mode. The platform needs data to optimise. Spread too thin, it never gets enough.

Chantelle's rule of thumb: 30 conversions per campaign per 30 days. If your total monthly budget, divided across your campaigns, can't hit that threshold in any of them, you have too many campaigns. Consolidate first, separate later. The benchmark she uses for impression volume is 300 impressions per ad group per week. Below that, the data is too thin to make decisions on.

For e-commerce, a campaign with less than R10k/month rarely generates enough volume to learn effectively.

A surprisingly common issue: Conversions being counted twice. It happens when someone sets up conversion tracking in Google Ads, also sets it up in GA4 and then imports the GA4 conversions back into Google Ads. The same purchase or lead is being reported as two separate conversions.

Chantelle's preference is to use Google Ads' own native tracking as the primary source, with GA4 as secondary and for analysis. GA4 works on sampled data and uses a different attribution model, useful as a cross-reference, not as the source of truth for optimisation.

SA accounts get less guidance from platforms than their overseas counterparts. Google's best practice recommendations are calibrated for accounts spending at scale in competitive markets. In SA, Chantelle consistently finds that tighter targeting and exact match keywords outperform the platform's recommendations.

Most SA accounts are also running with less budget than is needed to fuel machine learning effectively. That makes the structural decisions, separated campaigns, correct conversion tracking and data flowing back from the CRM, even more important. When you're working with R15k/month instead of R150k/month, every rand the platform wastes on mis-attributed conversions hits harder.

"The platforms do not think South Africa when putting best practices together."

This post covers one section from Chantelle Bowyer's masterclass, Paid Ads 101, available in full inside The Founder Collab. The full session goes much deeper. Here's what's inside:

The Founder Collab has 40+ masterclasses from SA's best operators across sales, UX, fundraising, paid media, automations, and more. Join The Founder Collab to access the full session.