5 Paid Search Mistakes Costing You

Written By Alex Seger

Google’s default campaign settings are designed to maximize their revenue, not yours. If you aren't actively dictating the terms of your account architecture, you are bleeding cash. Here is the Proven Axis hitlist for locking down your paid search campaigns today.

Sanity Check: Don't abandon your foundational paid search (brand and non-brand) just because AIO/Generative search is the new shiny object. You need to have your hands in all the pots.

1. Build the Brand Moat If you lack a brand moat, competitors will bid on your name and steal your highest-intent pipeline. Isolate your branded search into its own campaign using exact match only.

  • The Targets: Include your core brand name, common misspellings, and your raw URL (e.g., www provenaxis com). If you have product lines with strong standalone recognition, break them into separate ad groups.

  • The Goal: Set your target to 95% Top of Page Impression Share. You must own this real estate when people search for you, whatever the CPC.

2. Stop Non-Brand Siphoning Your non-brand campaigns will happily cannibalize your cheap branded traffic to artificially inflate their ROAS. Upload strict brand exclusion lists to all non-brand campaigns. Force your non-brand architecture to do its actual job: acquiring net-new traffic.

3. Tame the PMax Blackhole Performance Max campaigns can scale revenue, but they will run away with your budget overnight if left unchecked.

  • The Setup: Dial in your asset groups and use every available format.

  • The Cadence: Evaluate optimization trends Week-over-Week and Month-over-Month to let the algorithm learn, but monitor spend performance daily. It’s a black box; don't let it become a black hole.

4. Don't Strand Demand Gen Traffic Demand Gen is highly effective for cheap, top-of-funnel volume. But clicks don't pay payroll. Do not launch Demand Gen unless you have aggressive email/SMS capture mechanisms and active retargeting loops already running. If you aren't capturing and converting this traffic further down the funnel, you are just buying tourists.

5. Reject the "Auto-Apply" Trap Google’s Account Recommendations are a framework, never a mandate. Do not blindly accept them. Their algorithm doesn't know your margins or business context. Review the alerts to understand what the system wants, but only manually apply the changes that actually serve your unit economics.

If your campaigns are prioritizing Google's revenue over your own, it's time to look under the hood. I run fractional growth audits to pinpoint these exact leaks and hand you the execution hitlist. Let's fix the architecture. Connect

Alex Seger