Advantage Air, Google Ads Budget Cut Analysis

Recommendation

Performance picture (last 60 days)

Account totals

The 1.57% account CTR is dragged down by the Spring Maintenance DemandGen campaign (5,421 impressions at 0.18% CTR is normal for DemandGen but cosmetically tanks the account number). Search‑only CTR on the two main campaigns is in the 6–7% range, which is healthy.

Spend by campaign

Spend by ad group (the part that matters most)

This is where the money actually goes. The two legacy "everything" ad groups absorb 81% of total spend. The new STAG ad groups (built March 26, gradually ramping) take a tiny slice today. Nine STAG ad groups have zero impressions, which means they exist but aren't winning auctions yet (likely keyword bid or quality issues).

A few things stand out:

• Water Heater Install | Same Day at $731 spend / $6.51 CPA is the largest STAG ad group winning real auctions. This is install demand and should be protected.
• AC Install at $58 / $3.73 CPA has the best CPA in the account on real install intent. Tiny spend, but efficient. Worth feeding more.
• Brand at 30.53% CTR / $1.09 CPA is doing exactly what brand search is supposed to do.
• Water Heater | Repair at $17.32 CPC / $11.54 CPA is the worst CPC in the account. Two clicks total, so small sample, but the keyword bid is rich for the result.
• 9 STAG ad groups won zero impressions. This is structural debt, not a budget‑cut item, but worth fixing because it means the granular targeting Joel/Sal built isn't yet earning its keep.

Search Impression Share by campaign

Both main campaigns are budget‑constrained, not rank‑constrained. Demand exists, the campaigns just can't afford to compete for it. This is the fact that makes the budget cut safer than it looks.

What we know about real lead value

We are not quoting ROAS from inside Google Ads in this brief. The conversion values in the account default to $1 per conversion, which makes the in-platform ROAS (currently reading 0.33x) meaningless. The real lead picture comes from WhatConverts via this month's Compass Pulse:

• April month‑to‑date: 16 paid leads at $158 per lead on $2,529 ad spend
• 80% of raw form/call submissions are flagged spam (401 of 500). Only 99 qualified leads landed in April across all channels
• Paid is roughly 16% of qualified lead mix. Google organic (49%) and Local Services Ads (24%) are doing the heavier lifting on lead volume

The $158 paid CPL versus the in‑platform $5–8 CPA is the single most important caveat in this analysis. Google Ads is contributing real but expensive leads, and a meaningful share of the in‑platform "conversions" are noise (spam form fills and short calls).

Cut candidates, with the math

Protect list

• Brand Search WI/MN ($24/mo). 30.53% CTR, $1.09 CPA. Cutting it invites competitors to bid on the brand name. Leave it.
• AC Install ad group ($58/60d, $3.73 CPA). Tiny spend, best CPA in the account on real install intent. Feed it more, don't cut it.
• Water Heater Install | Same Day ($731/60d, $6.51 CPA). Largest STAG ad group winning auctions today. Install demand at peak season.
• PMAX‑LOCAL (currently paused). Stays paused.
• The HVAC + Plumbing Search campaigns themselves. These ARE the install pipeline and should not be paused. The recommendation is to constrain budget, not retire the campaigns.

Reallocation summary

Structural flags worth knowing about

Not budget‑cut levers, but they affect how confident we should be in any of the numbers above:

What we are not recommending and why

• Do not pause either main Search campaign. Both still drive the bulk of paid lead flow.
• Do not cut by hour or day‑of‑week. Spend is even across the week and CPA stays in a tight $4.49–$6.52 range. No clearly underperforming time block to cut.
• Do not cut by device. Mobile is 68% of spend but 71% of clicks at lower CPC than desktop. Mobile is doing its job.
• Do not cut by geo. The geo report did not return resolvable city IDs for this account configuration, so we don't have a defensible geo cut to recommend.
• Do not cut Brand Search. Highest CTR and lowest CPA in the account; defensive value alone justifies the $24/mo.

What we want from Tim

Deep Dive

Seven additional questions Tim might want answers to. Some change the recommendation; most just sharpen the dollars.

1. Why are some STAG ad groups winning zero impressions?

Eight of the new STAG ad groups have $0 spend over 60 days. Pulled bids and Quality Score for each.

Finding: It's not a bid problem (the account uses Smart Bidding so manual bids are moot). It's a bootstrapping problem driven by Quality Score. Ad groups that have never served get null QS, and Smart Bidding deprioritizes them in favor of groups with QS history.

The fix is not a budget question. It's to either pause the ad groups that aren't earning QS (so Smart Bidding stops trying), OR to manually bid them up briefly to break the bootstrap. We should let Joel/Sal decide which path; this is structural debt that will follow us regardless of the budget cut.

2. Which keywords inside the two legacy ad groups carry install intent?

The two "everything" ad groups hold ~58 keywords with spend over 60 days. The blunt finding: most of the spend goes on broad service queries, not install queries.

HVAC Ad Group ($3,487 / 60d, 34 keywords)

Only one keyword in the top 15 reads as direct install intent (ac installers). The big spenders (heating and air conditioning, hvac near me) are the ones most likely to be matching to spam-flagged search terms.

Plumbing Ad Group ($2,795 / 60d, 24 keywords)

$540 going to home heating inside the Plumbing campaign is a service-line mismatch.

Implication: When budget tightens, Smart Bidding will keep funding the highest "conversion volume" keywords first, which are these generic broad-match ones. That means the cut will preferentially starve the install-intent keywords (which have lower conversion volume) unless we explicitly protect them by moving them into the STAG ad groups. The budget cut and the match-type migration need to happen together for the recommendation to actually preserve install pipeline.

No "$20+ spend with zero conversions" wasteful keywords in either legacy ad group. Smart Bidding has already pruned that long tail.

3. Search terms ranked by spend (sub-threshold waste)

The audit flagged $75 of search-term waste at its alert threshold. The full spend-ranked list shows a different pattern: competitor brand names are eating real money with poor conversion behavior.

Top zero-conversion search terms over 60 days:

Plus low-conversion competitor terms in the top 25:

Total competitor-brand search term spend over 60 days: ~$110 (~$55/mo). Adding these as exact-match negatives is small money but high cleanliness. Recommended negative list:

• integrity mechanical
• warwas heating and cooling
• carlson brothers plumbing
• hurlburt heating
• atk duluth
• excel plumbing and heating
• advance heating and cooling
• superior plumbing and heating
• comfort system (broad)
• cost of water heater repair (informational)

4. Quality Score distribution (this is bad)

Pulled QS for all 1,025 enabled keywords.

Spend-weighted QS for the two legacy mega ad groups:

• HVAC Ad Group: 2.89 (on $2,682 of spend; another $805 on null-QS keywords)
• Plumbing Ad Group: 2.36 (on $1,750; another $1,045 on null-QS keywords)

A spend-weighted QS in the 2–3 range means CPCs are inflated by roughly 30–60% compared to what a QS 6–7 keyword would pay for the same auction. The match-type cleanup we already recommended will help, but the deeper fix is ad-relevance and landing-page-relevance work, which is RSA copy + per-service landing pages. That's a SAGE/FORGE workstream, not a budget lever, but it is the single biggest CPC-reduction opportunity in the account.

5. STAG ramp curve (week over week)

ATLAS has weekly snapshots since the STAG rebuild on March 26.

The STAG share peaked at 35% in early April and has since dropped back toward 25%. That's the wrong direction. Two possible reads:

1. The STAG ad groups that earn QS are starting to cap (Smart Bidding pulls back as they optimize)
2. The legacy ad groups are being preferred again because their conversion volume is higher (even if those conversions are spam-flagged)

Either way, the STAG migration is not on autopilot. It needs ongoing intervention to keep the share growing. This is independent of the budget cut decision.

6. Auction Insights (limitation note + what we can see)

Per-competitor auction insights are not exposed via the standard Google Ads API in v23. That data lives in the UI under Campaigns > Auction Insights. If we want it, we pull it manually.

What we can see from standard metrics is rank-lost impression share by ad group, which is a proxy for competitor pressure:

Rank-lost-IS is consistently under 3%. Competitors are not the problem. When we show, we win our share of the rank battle.

The real story is in top-IS (10–29%) and absolute-top-IS (10–20%). When we show, we're rarely at the top of the page. That's a Quality Score consequence (per #4) and a budget consequence (Smart Bidding bids us into lower positions to stretch the budget). Improving QS would let us show higher without paying more.

7. Landing page conversion rate by URL

Pulled landing_page_view for all 25 unique LP URLs the account is sending traffic to.

Implication for the budget cut: the LP picture suggests another ~$200/mo of recoverable waste from URL hygiene (consolidate sewer-line URLs, fix the testimonials targeting, kill the YouTube LP). Doesn't change the headline recommendation but it's a clean cleanup pass.

Updated dollar picture after deep dive

The deep dive doesn't change the headline $1,587/mo recommendation, but it adds these secondary cleanups that compound the impact: