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The CLOSE Audit: the 5-pass lead-quality walkthrough I run before I touch a service-business account (2026 edition)
Smart Bidding finds you more of whatever signal you feed it. Most service businesses feed it raw form-fills and wonder why the leads are junk. The named audit I run before any campaign change on a service-business account.
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Closed-won to Google Ads in 48 hours: the offline-conversion pipeline I run on every service-business account (2026 edition)
The exact webhook pipeline I wire from HubSpot to Google Ads + Meta CAPI so Smart Bidding optimizes against actual paying customers, not raw form-fills. Trigger, payload, code, and the failure modes.
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Your ROAS is inflated by shipping and discounts (Smart Bidding is optimizing for the wrong number)
Most Shopify Purchase events send gross revenue to Google Ads. Smart Bidding then bids harder on the orders with high shipping. Margin contribution drifts down for a year before anyone notices. The 4-step fix takes 10 minutes plus a 6-week rebalance.
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Why I Run Six Performance Max Campaigns Instead of One
One Performance Max campaign is the default. For a mixed-catalog account at scale with a hyperlocal pocket, the default leaves money on the table. The geo × value-band matrix I run instead.
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I ran AI Max for two weeks against a manual campaign. The lead-quality delta.
A two-week head-to-head test, one service-business account. AI Max returned 41% more form fills and 73% fewer qualified leads. Here's the full breakdown.
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The $32.99 order that reported as $148.95 (the Customer Lifecycle Value setting that inflates Google Ads revenue)
A Shopify client's $32.99 order showed up in Google Ads as $148.95. The dataLayer was clean. The cause was a Google Ads setting most agencies leave on by default.
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The STACK Audit: the 5-layer pass I run before I touch a single bid (2026 edition)
An inherited Shopify tracking stack, $40K/mo through Google Ads, six months in, and seven things broken. The named audit I run on every account before I move a budget dollar.
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1,247 'remarketing' clicks. 14 from actual past visitors. (The Optimized Targeting trap)
I audited a Google Display campaign labeled retargeting. 98.9% of the traffic was cold. The cause was one setting almost nobody checks before launch.
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Max Clicks, 0 conversions: the bot-traffic pattern I see in 7 of 10 audits
An account I audited had zero conversions and a Max Clicks bid strategy. Microsoft Clarity replayed 5-second sessions with no scrolls and no interaction. Bots. The pattern is everywhere.
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The five reasons Google Ads throws 'No recent enhanced conversions' (and the one that actually matters)
The yellow 'No recent enhanced conversions' alert in Google Ads has five common causes. Four are noise. One quietly costs you bidding signal for months.
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I switched a law firm off Max Clicks last quarter. Same spend, 72% qualified leads instead of 38%.
Smart Bidding optimizes against the signal you give it. Most service-business accounts give it the wrong one. The full rebuild that took qualified-lead share from 38% to 72% on the same $14K/mo media spend.
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Why Performance Max Gets Credit for Shopping Conversions (And What to Do About It)
If Performance Max is getting credit for conversions that started with your Shopping campaigns, your data is not broken. Here's what's actually happening.
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One strategy call. Direct. No account managers.
Thirty minutes on the phone. Bring the account, the goals, the story. Walk out with a clear set of next steps.