Stopped the losses, then scaled search spend 10x

Situation

A Fortune 500 insurance brand, selling a full range of personal insurance products, primarily auto and home, to consumers across the United States. The Google Ads program ran on Search and Performance Max across eight campaigns, with close to half the budget going to Performance Max on a set-it-and-forget-it basis.

The search program lost its manager in late October 2025. Cover was needed during the transition, and it went to the operator already running the brand’s performance social. A first pass through the account showed a program that needed a full rebuild rather than a caretaker. The temporary cover became the engagement.

What was broken

On the surface the account looked fine. It was running, it was spending, and it was losing money on that spend, week after week. The damage was not one big mistake. It was a stack of small ones.

• UTM parameters inconsistent across ads. The company’s own reporting could not cleanly tie a paid session back to the campaign that drove it.
• Keywords sitting in the wrong campaigns. An auto campaign could be paying to show up on a home insurance search, against the wrong message and the wrong landing page.
• Thin keyword coverage and no match-type strategy. The account missed real demand, and broad, phrase, and exact were applied with no plan for how they should work together.
• Headlines and descriptions not fully populated on a large share of ads, capping Quality Score and click-through rate.
• Performance Max running with no brand exclusion and no dedicated brand campaign. It absorbed branded searches that would have converted anyway and reported them as its own wins.
• Conversion tracking spread across too many signals. The account was not consistently optimizing toward the events the company’s martech team had approved.

The work

The rebuild ran on a reduced budget through November 2025: one month to restructure the account before relaunch over Black Friday weekend. Every campaign was rebuilt from the ground up on a consistent naming convention. Conversion tracking was narrowed to the martech team’s approved events, UTMs were normalized, ad copy was fully populated, and keywords were moved into the campaigns that matched them.

The new structure was built around the account’s real drivers. A small set of high-volume head terms, searches like “auto insurance” and “home insurance,” carried a disproportionate share of conversions. Each major product was split into a core campaign and a dedicated exact-match campaign for those head terms, so the highest-value searches could be funded and watched on their own. A competitor campaign and a general insurance campaign were added, and the account went from eight campaigns to more than twenty. Performance Max finally had brand separated from non-brand.

The least obvious decision was splitting the match types at all. Google’s own team pushed back, since the standard advice is to consolidate and lean on broad match. In this category a handful of exact-match head terms are large and dependable enough to deserve their own campaigns and their own budgets. Kept separate, their impression share, click share, and spend could be managed directly instead of averaged into everything else.

Google’s own team pushed back on splitting the match types. In this category, a few exact-match head terms are too big to bury in broad match.

The result

The relaunched account performed from the first weeks after Black Friday. A program that had been losing money on every week of spend turned profitable.

That changed the question. A profitable account is one a company wants to feed, and this one asked for scale. Search spend has since grown to roughly ten times its pre-engagement level, and at that scale the program runs at break-even. The account went from losing money every week to absorbing ten times the budget without losing money.

The turnaround was not one move. The restructure around the high-value head terms, the match-type split, and the conversion-tracking cleanup all landed in the same rebuild, and all of them were needed. The clearest evidence it worked is the budget itself. A program does not get handed ten times its spend unless the people funding it trust what comes back.

A search program that was losing money every week now runs at ten times the spend, at break-even.

What’s still true

The engagement is ongoing. The search program still runs on the structure built that November, with the core and exact-match campaigns anchoring the account. The company is still asking for scale, and the account still has efficiency left to find.

The reporting stayed too. A daily paid media summary report was brought into the company and is now the performance team’s working report. Other teams have since asked for it, and parts of it, the daily tracker in particular, are used well outside the original program.