White-label PPC

Almost every inherited ad account has broken tracking

When I take over a paid account the first job is auditing what it is actually counting. In the great majority of cases the conversion data is wrong in at least one material way, and every optimisation decision made on top of it has been wrong too.

The usual faults are familiar. Page views counted as conversions, so form abandonment looks like success. The same conversion counted by two tags. Different conversion actions with wildly different commercial value treated as equivalent, so the platform optimises toward the cheap worthless one. Offline outcomes never fed back, so the platform has no idea which clicks became revenue.

Fixing that is unglamorous and it is the single highest-return work available on most accounts, because it corrects not just your decisions but the platform’s automated ones.

Feed the machine properly

Modern paid platforms are largely automated. The lever that matters is the quality of the signal you give them. An account fed accurate, value-weighted conversions will outperform an account with clever manual bidding and bad data, every time.

That means passing conversion values rather than counts, feeding offline outcomes back where the sale completes off-site, and being honest about which conversion actions are worth optimising toward. A demo request and a newsletter signup are not the same event and should never share a target.

Account structure that a person can manage

Accounts I inherit tend to sit at one of two extremes. Either everything is in one campaign sharing a budget, so nothing can be controlled independently, or there are two hundred campaigns split so finely that none accumulates enough data to learn from.

The workable middle is structure by commercial intent and by budget control: separate what you need to budget separately, separate what has genuinely different economics, and consolidate everything else so the platform has enough volume to optimise. Simple enough that a person taking over could understand it in twenty minutes.

The unglamorous weekly work

Search term review and negative keyword maintenance. Placement exclusions on display. Checking that landing pages still load and still work, which fails more often than anyone expects. Budget pacing so a month does not end with a third of the budget unspent or spent in the first week.

None of this is clever. All of it is why accounts drift when nobody is doing it.

Reporting your account managers can present

A paid report should open with spend, revenue or leads, and the resulting cost per acquisition or return. Then what changed this month and why. Then what happens next month. Impressions, click-through rates and quality scores go in an appendix for the clients who ask.

Every report comes with a briefing note: the two or three things worth raising on the call, and the question the client is most likely to ask with the answer already drafted. An account manager who can answer confidently keeps the account; one who has to say “let me check with our specialist” erodes it.

Commercial terms

Per account per month, based on complexity rather than a percentage of spend. Percentage-of-spend pricing creates an incentive I would rather not have, and it makes the honest recommendation to reduce budget harder than it should be. You mark it up as you see fit.

Seasonality and budget planning

Most paid accounts are managed month to month, which means budget decisions get made reactively and the same surprises recur every year. A better pattern is a simple annual view built from the client’s own history: when their demand peaks, when it collapses, and when their competitors bid hardest.

That lets your account managers have a useful conversation in advance rather than an awkward one afterwards. Budget can be shifted toward the months that actually convert, campaigns can be paused during a genuinely dead period instead of quietly wasting spend, and a client who wants to increase budget in a weak month can be told plainly why that is a poor idea.

It takes an afternoon once a year and it prevents most of the difficult conversations that otherwise arrive in a monthly report.