Roshanak Kavian
Co-Founder and CEO of Indigo Mars, a Los Angeles marketing agency.
Looking across a genuinely wide range of documented Google Search campaigns — SaaS, e-commerce, HVAC, plumbing, and other local service businesses — the same handful of structural changes show up again and again in the campaigns that actually improve. The specific numbers each case reports vary widely and are worth treating with some skepticism, since most come from agencies describing their own work. The underlying pattern of what actually changed is far more consistently reliable, and it's the same pattern regardless of industry.
Pattern One: Negative Keywords and Search-Term Cleanup
This is the single most consistently recurring fix across genuinely different industries. A plumbing account wasting budget on searches for plumbing supplies rather than people hiring a plumber. An HVAC account burning spend on DIY repair searches and job listings. A SaaS account with no negative keyword list at all. In every case, budget was being spent showing ads to people who were never going to become customers, and building out a real negative keyword list was one of the first things that changed.
Pattern Two: Segmenting by Actual Intent, Not One Broad Campaign
A single campaign covering every service a business offers consistently underperforms compared to campaigns split by actual customer intent. An HVAC account running emergency repair, routine maintenance, and new installation searches all through one campaign forces genuinely different customer intents to compete for the same budget and the same generic ad copy. Splitting these into distinct campaigns, each with its own budget and message matched to that specific intent, is a pattern that recurs across nearly every case regardless of industry.
Pattern Three: The Landing Page Has to Match the Specific Ad
A generic landing page behind a specific ad consistently underperforms a landing page built to match what the ad actually promised. This shows up repeatedly: a plumbing landing page with no visible phone number and no service-specific messaging, a SaaS signup form asking for eight fields instead of three, an HVAC ad promising emergency service landing on a page with no urgency or response-time messaging at all. The pattern is consistent — the landing page needs to continue the exact promise the ad made, not redirect to a general homepage.
Pattern Four: Tracking the Right Thing, Not Just Clicks
Several documented cases specifically flagged treating a click as a conversion, with no actual call tracking or lead verification in place. This produces genuinely misleading data — a campaign can look like it's performing well on clicks alone while actually generating very few real, qualified leads. Real conversion tracking, tied to an actual booked call or submitted form rather than just a click, is a consistent prerequisite for knowing whether a campaign is actually working.
A Word on the Numbers Themselves
Worth being honest about directly: individual case studies reporting dramatic figures — a specific ROI percentage, a specific cost reduction — should be read with real skepticism, since most originate from an agency describing its own client work with no independent verification available. The four structural patterns above are what's genuinely consistent across many independent examples; the specific magnitude of improvement in any single case study is far less reliable than the underlying pattern itself.
Where to Go From Here
This connects directly to the broader channel-selection principle covered in How Indigo Mars Approaches Paid Advertising.
Not sure whether your own campaign is actually structured around these patterns? Get in touch and we'll take a look.
