Why Google's Recommendations Are Mostly Traps

Google's recommendations aren't there to help you. They're there to help Google.

Most paid media accounts I audit are a slow leak. Not catastrophic — just bleeding ten, twenty, thirty percent of spend on waste that nobody's looked at carefully in a year. Wrong match types. Unfiltered placements. Broad-targeting "recommendations" accepted because the rep said so. Performance Max campaigns optimizing for "anything that moves" because nobody set the signals correctly.

That's how you get to a point where the spend is up, the pipeline isn't, and nobody can tell you why.

That's the work I do — find what's leaking, fix it, and get the account competing again.

What I actually look at

Every paid media audit runs the same core checks, then goes deeper wherever the account needs it:

• Search campaigns. Match type discipline, negative keyword hygiene, query reports, quality score drivers, ad group structure. The fundamentals that most accounts drift away from over time.
• Performance Max. Audience signals, asset groups, brand exclusions, whether it's cannibalizing your other campaigns, whether you should be running it at all for your category.
• Google recommendations. Which ones to implement, which ones to quietly ignore, and which ones will silently tank your account if you accept them.
• Placement and location exclusions. Most accounts show ads on sites, apps, and geographies that cost money and convert nothing. Excluding them systematically is one of the highest-ROI moves in paid media — and most teams don't do it.
• Creative and landing page match. If your ad promises one thing and the landing page delivers another, your quality score and your conversion rate both pay the price.
• Tracking and attribution. If your conversion data is lying to you, every optimization decision afterward is wrong. I check this first, always.
• Budget allocation. Most accounts overspend on branded search and underspend on the campaigns that actually acquire new customers.

Channels I cover

• Google Ads — Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube, Performance Max
• Meta Ads — Facebook and Instagram, including B2B retargeting and ecommerce catalogs
• LinkedIn Ads — for B2B, where the targeting premium actually earns its keep
• Microsoft Ads — the most underused channel in B2B paid media, usually 20–30% cheaper than Google for the same search intent
• Amazon Ads — for D2C brands selling in both owned channels and marketplaces

Twenty years managing paid media across B2B and B2C, with over a million dollars a month of managed spend across my career. I know the difference between a campaign that looks healthy and a campaign that actually performs.

Who this is for

Companies spending real money on paid media who want to know where it's going:

• B2B SaaS and fintech running Google + LinkedIn
• D2C and ecommerce running Google Shopping + Meta
• Lead gen businesses running high-volume search
• Agencies that need a senior operator on the accounts they can't staff
• Private equity portfolio companies where the paid media budget needs adult supervision

If you're spending under $5K a month, you probably don't need me yet — your time is better spent on SEO or content until your paid media is scaled enough to matter. If you're running an in-house team of ten with a full Google partner relationship, you've got what you need. Everywhere in between — $10K to $1M+ monthly spend — I can help.

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Send me a screenshot of your biggest-spend paid media channel. I'll tell you the three things I'd change first. Free, five minutes, no pitch.