We took over a Fintech client's paid media that was bleeding budget on Performance Max.
The problem wasn't visible from the outside. Impressions looked healthy. Spend was hitting the cap every month. On paper, the campaigns were "running."
But almost none of it was converting.
Here's what we found in the first audit:
→ Over 60% of the budget was being funneled into YouTube placements with near-zero purchase intent
→ Search campaigns — the highest-intent channel — were starved, using less than half their allocated budget
→ No clear separation between cold awareness traffic and high-intent search traffic
→ Conversion tracking was technically live, but misattributing nearly a third of actual sign-ups
None of this is unusual. It's what happens when automated bidding is left unsupervised for too long.
What we changed:
→ Restricted Performance Max to exclude low-intent placements and rebuilt audience signals from first-party data
→ Rebalanced budget toward Search, where buying intent was already present
→ Fixed the tracking gaps so every euro of spend could be attributed to a real outcome
→ Layered in retargeting for users who visited but didn't convert — a segment that had been completely ignored.
The result over the following 90 days:
- Cost per qualified lead dropped by 41%
- Search campaign budget utilisation went from 48% to 96%
- Total qualified leads increased by 2.3× on the same monthly spend
Same budget. Same market. Completely different outcome.
This is the part most companies miss: the issue is rarely "we need more budget." It's almost always "we need the budget we already have to work harder."
If your paid media feels like it's spending without producing — that's usually a structure problem, not a budget problem.
If you're spending $10K–$200K/month on ads and not seeing predictable ROI — let's talk.
📩 DM us or book a call: https://calendly.com/tomasmedeckis/30min