Paid $200 for a Google Ads audit and it actually hurt my numbers

I hired a digital marketing agency to review my Google Ads account last spring. They charged $200 for the audit and told me to pause all my exact match keywords in favor of broad match. Within two weeks my cost per lead jumped from $15 to $45 almost overnight. I ended up turning everything back to how it was and losing that money. Has anyone else had an agency give advice that made things worse instead of better?

2 comments

2 Comments

zara4471mo ago

Hold on a second here. You can't just blame the broad match switch without looking at how it was set up. Broad match needs proper negative keywords and smart bidding to work right, otherwise yeah it'll spend your budget on junk clicks. The agency should have told you that upfront and walked you through the transition over a few weeks, not just flip a switch and hope for the best. Did you ask them about the strategy behind the switch before you turned it all off?

hollym821mo ago

Flip a switch and hope for the best" is basically the agency motto at this point, right? Guess they figured broad match was a free pass to print money.