2 steps to revive an unprofitable Google Ads account (fast)

At the end of January, this brand came to us for help with their Google Ads.

They’d just started running ads a couple of months earlier—but the results weren’t what they hoped for.

They couldn’t acquire customers at a profitable cost.

Even their branded Search campaigns—usually the easiest win—performed terribly.

The root of the problem?

Their old setup failed to do 2 things well: get attention and turn that attention into sales.

Which explained their high CPAs.

Now, there are 2 big needle movers to the Google Ads game:

1. Structure: How you segment your campaigns

2. Execution: What you do inside those campaigns

Think of structure as the route you take to reach your desired results.

Get it wrong, you can end up in places you don’t want to be like this brand.

Get it right, and the path to profit gets a whole lot simpler.

But structure alone isn’t enough.

Execution is what gets you there.

It’s the actual drive—where the day-to-day management, optimization, and experimentation happen.

If structure determines the potential, execution determines the actual.

As I mentioned earlier, this brand had no clear system to turn traffic into paying customers.

So we started there.

We rebuilt their campaign structure from the ground up:

• Branded Search and Shopping campaigns

• A Performance Max prospecting campaign

This let us separate warm traffic from cold—and match each group with the right approach.

Then we worked on execution.

Now, keep in mind—this brand hadn’t generated much profit before.

So we focused on low-risk, high-ROI branded campaigns.

We tightened targeting, adjusted the bids, and refreshed ad copy to better match branded queries.

This gave the brand positive cash flow — which we could reinvest into prospecting campaigns later on.

With the right structure and smart execution, this brand moved into a far better position 30 days later.

Their ROAS jumped from 1.4X to 2.4X and CPA dropped in half.

This is key because CPA is a measure of efficiency.

It tells you how well you're converting attention into revenue.

A lower CPA indicates that they’ve got a much more efficient system in place.

In Google Ads, there are different kinds of audiences to target:

People searching for your brand name

People searching for your product type

People searching for a solution to their problem

Each group behaves differently.

They have different levels of intent. They convert at different rates. They need different budgets and strategies.

The simplest way to lower your acquisition costs is to 1) split your traffic and 2) build a dedicated strategy for each.

Structure handles the first part.

Execution takes care of the second.

Jackson

Founder and CEO of Echelonn.

How we can help:

• Get a free Google ads audit: For brands spending more than $20k/mo. or making over 1 million annually, we’ll identify the key bottlenecks in your account, and turn it into a free 90-day scaling plan. Click here.

• Get our E-commerce Growth Toolkit: Get access to our free resources and tools including the Product Feed & GMC Optimization Checklist, YouTube Shorts Ads Playbook, and 12 Plug-and-Play Dashboards. Click here.

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