Campaign Diagnostics & Optimization
When a campaign stops working, there are only a handful of usual causes. How to spot which one you have and what to do about it.
Articles in this collection
13 articlesDiwali CPMs doubled: is it the auction or your account?
Festive auctions push CPMs up fast. Split a ROAS drop into price, click, conversion and basket effects before you touch creative, bids or budgets.
Your 30 ads are really 3
Meta’s Andromeda system groups look-alike ads together. Count real concepts instead of uploads, and build a creative mix the auction can tell apart.
AI Max turned on: new demand or rerouted exact match?
AI Max expands Search past your keyword list. Split its queries into new demand and traffic rerouted from your keywords, then judge it on incremental CPA.
Where your PMax money actually goes
Performance Max now reports spend and conversions by channel. Compare Search, YouTube, Display and Discover side by side and find the channel eating budget.
Your winning ad might be a coin flip
Two identical ads can show a 20% gap by pure chance. How much data a creative test needs, why peeking creates fake winners, and when to call a result.
Advantage+ and PMax: The Black-Box Cannibalization Audit
Advantage+ and PMax post stunning ROAS by bidding on existing customers and brand terms. Audit customer mix, set brand exclusions, force prospecting.
The Learning Phase Myth: When to Edit and When to Wait
Buyers let money bleed for days fearing a learning-phase reset. What actually triggers it, when a reset is good, and a 5-point triage before editing.
Budget pacing mid-flight
Prorated expectations, partial-day honesty and the intraday trap: how to tell on the 12th whether you will overspend, underspend or land exactly on plan.
Creative fatigue vs audience saturation
Frequency plus reach plus CPM decompose every scaling stall into its true cause. New creative fixes one of them; only a wider audience fixes the other.
Search-term mining that pays for itself
The search terms report is customers telling you what they wanted. A 30-minute weekly routine that turns it into negatives and new keywords.
Impression-share autopsy
Two loss columns prescribe opposite fixes: one wants money, the other wants better bids, quality or creative. Reading the split before spending a rupee more.
Geo waste hides in your pincode map
Delivery failures, COD refusals and serviceability gaps make some pincodes structurally unprofitable. Overlay RTO on geo data to build the exclusion list.
What broke the campaign last Tuesday
Performance breaks have authors: edits, budget moves, auction shifts. Correlating the change log with the break before touching anything else.