Skip to content
ThinkMedia

Services

Google Ads Management

For companies spending $5,000+/month who need to know which campaign actually made the revenue, not which one the platform says did.

Get a free auditOur results
more conversions
~7%
Clients served
60+
Ad spend managed
$20M+
Years operating
3

AI Max for Search campaigns using the full feature suite — search term matching, text customization, and final URL expansion together — versus search term matching alone, at a similar cost per acquisition.

Google internal data, 2026, non-Retail advertisers

Your Google Ads account is probably running Performance Max, Search, and Demand Gen at the same time right now, and if someone asked which one actually drove last month's revenue, most teams couldn't answer with confidence. That is not a sign you hired badly. It is what happens when a platform automates faster than the reporting built to explain it.

Most accounts we take over are not badly built. They are built for a version of Google Ads that stopped existing eighteen months ago, and nobody has gone back to check what changed underneath.

ThinkMedia provides Google Ads management for companies spending $5,000 or more a month. We rebuild the account structure, the bidding strategy, and the tracking underneath both, so every dollar traces back to a result you can check — not a platform-reported estimate you have to trust.

Five failures show up constantly:

  1. 01

    Conversion actions double-counted because a GA4 goal was imported alongside the native Google Ads tag, so every report has been overstating conversions for months without anyone noticing.

  2. 02

    Performance Max quietly cannibalizing branded search. No brand exclusions were set. PMax started serving on your own brand terms. Branded Search impression share drops 15–30 points. Your branded cost-per-acquisition roughly doubles. The blended account ROAS still looks fine, because PMax reports a high ROAS on conversions it stole from a campaign that would have converted anyway.

  3. 03

    A single ad group carries 80% of spend with no creative rotation for months. “It's working” became a reason to stop testing, instead of a reason to test harder around it.

  4. 04

    Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets, or campaign-level broad match settings sit untouched through Google's AI Max migration. Google began auto-upgrading automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match settings to AI Max in September 2026 (Google Ads product blog, April 15, 2026). The auto-upgrade re-enables settings that mirror the old configuration — rarely the configuration anyone would choose on purpose today.

  5. 05

    Call-only ads are still the primary lead-capture format for a local or service business, unreviewed since they were set up years ago. Google stopped allowing new call-only ads in February 2026, and every existing call-only ad stops receiving impressions in February 2027 (Google Ads Help Center). An account still depending on them for calls is running on a countdown nobody set a reminder for.

How this runs

What you get.

Reporting
a monthly written report that names what underperformed next to what worked, in the same document — a campaign that lost money or a test that failed gets a line, not a footnote. Alongside it, a live dashboard you can open any day of the month, not just when the report lands, showing spend, conversions, cost per acquisition, and the channel-level Performance Max breakdown.
Access
your Google Ads account, Analytics property, and tag container are created under your business identity from day one. We're added as a user. On exit, you keep everything — spend history, audiences, conversion data, Quality Score history — because none of it was ever ours to begin with, and there is nothing to negotiate for later.
Communication
a named strategist who runs your account directly, reachable by Slack, email, or scheduled call, with a response commitment of one business day. You are never routed through a coordinator relaying updates from someone you haven't met, and the person on your monthly call is the same person who made the changes it describes.
Terms
thirty days' notice, no annual minimum, no lock-in. We don't take a percentage of your ad spend — the fee is flat, so recommending you spend less costs us money, not you, and there is never an incentive on our side to grow your budget faster than your results justify.

What's included

The actual thing we do, and how often.

  • weekly

    Weekly search term review

    negatives added at both the ad group and campaign level, so a wasted query gets blocked everywhere it could reappear, not just where it was first spotted.

  • monthly

    Performance Max channel-level reporting

    a breakdown of spend and results across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps, pulled from the Channel Insights and “where ads showed” reports, so PMax stops being a black box on your invoice.

  • quarterly

    Brand exclusion audit

    own-brand and competitor-brand exclusions checked against a 90-day branded Search impression-share trend, to catch PMax cannibalization before it doubles your branded CPA.

  • onboarding, then monitored monthly

    Enhanced conversions and value-based bidding setup

    first-party match data connected so Smart Bidding optimizes against actual deal value from your CRM, not a flat conversion count.

  • as changes roll out

    AI Max and campaign migration management

    reviewing every auto-upgraded setting against your account's actual goals instead of letting the mirrored legacy configuration run unexamined — relevant now that ACA and campaign-level broad match auto-upgraded to AI Max starting September 2026, with the full Dynamic Search Ads transition following.

  • one-time project, then verified

    Call asset migration

    moving any remaining call-only ads onto responsive search ads with call assets before existing call-only ads stop serving entirely in February 2027.

  • monthly

    Quality Score and auction insights review

    checking landing page experience, ad relevance, and expected click-through rate against your closest auction competitors, since a falling Quality Score quietly raises every cost-per-click on the account before anyone notices the bidding strategy underperforming.

  • monthly

    RSA creative testing rotation

    structured headline and description testing inside responsive search ads, with underperforming assets paused and replaced rather than left to average down the whole ad group.

  • quarterly

    Demand Gen lookalike review

    checking whether lookalike segments are running as suggestions or hard boundaries — Google moved Demand Gen lookalikes from strict targeting to AI-driven suggestions in March 2026, and whether that's the right setting depends on how much audience drift your account can tolerate.

How we work

Four phases, always in this order.

  1. Account Teardown

    Days 1–14

    We pull 90 days of search terms, placement reports, and change history and find out what the account is actually doing, not what the campaign names say it's doing. This includes the branded-search impression-share check, a conversion-tracking audit for double-counting, and a spend concentration review. You get a written list of what's leaking money, ranked by size, before we touch a single setting.

  2. Structure Blueprint

    Days 10–21

    A campaign architecture built around your actual sales cycle and margin, not a generic template. This is where brand exclusions, negative keyword scaffolding, and the Search-versus-PMax-versus-Demand-Gen split get decided on paper, with your sign-off, before anything goes live.

  3. Build

    Days 18–35

    We implement the blueprint in a staged rollout, not a single overnight rebuild. New structure runs alongside the old one where possible, so Smart Bidding never loses the conversion history it needs to stay out of a fresh learning phase. What we deliberately do not do: rebuild your entire account in week one. An account that changes everything at once tells you nothing about which change worked.

  4. Compounding

    Ongoing

    Ongoing weekly and monthly optimization against the deliverables above, with quarterly structural reviews as Google changes what's possible — which, based on the last twelve months, happens more often than any static playbook could keep up with.

Honest scoping

Who this is for, and who it isn't.

You're a good fit if you're already spending $5,000 or more a month on Google Ads, with paying customers and a conversion path that works well enough to optimize. Most of our Google Ads clients are SaaS, e-commerce, or lead-generation businesses, across sales cycles from same-day purchase to multi-month B2B evaluation.

You're not a good fit yet, and we'll say so before taking the engagement, in three situations. Your monthly budget can't clear Smart Bidding's learning phase, which typically needs on the order of 30–50 conversions inside a rolling 30-day window before it stabilizes. Your landing page isn't built yet, so paid clicks would arrive with nowhere useful to land. Or you're pre-revenue and still validating what you're selling, in which case Google Ads will answer questions you haven't finished asking yet. In any of those cases, the honest answer is not yet, not never — we'll tell you plainly what needs to be true first.

Asked and answered

Common Questions

  • ThinkMedia charges a flat monthly fee, not a percentage of ad spend, starting for accounts spending $5,000 or more a month. The fee is quoted after an account audit, since a 12-campaign account and a 3-campaign account take different amounts of work regardless of budget size.

  • Early signal within the first two weeks, but Smart Bidding needs roughly 30–50 conversions in a rolling 30-day window to fully stabilize. The first 30 days focus on structure and tracking; months two and three are where cost-per-acquisition typically moves.

  • You keep full ownership of your Google Ads account at all times. It's created under your business identity from day one, with ThinkMedia added only as a user. If you leave, you leave with the account, the history, and the conversion data, because none of it was ever ours to transfer.

  • ThinkMedia has no minimum contract length. Thirty days' notice ends the engagement in either direction, with no annual minimum and no discount for signing longer, because the incentive should never be the contract instead of the results.

  • $5,000 a month in ad spend, as a rough floor. Below that, Smart Bidding rarely gets enough conversion volume to leave its learning phase, and the management fee stops being worth it relative to the media budget it's managing.

  • A named strategist assigned at kickoff, the same person on every call and every report. You will not be handed to a junior coordinator relaying updates from someone you've never spoken with.

  • Weeks one and two: account teardown and tracking audit, delivered as a written list of findings. Weeks two through four: structural rebuild, staged so Smart Bidding keeps its conversion history instead of restarting its learning phase from zero.

  • New DSA campaigns can no longer be created as of Google's phased rollout beginning in 2026, and existing legacy settings are being auto-upgraded to AI Max. If your account still runs DSA, ACA, or campaign-level broad match, it needs a reviewed migration, not an ignored auto-upgrade.

  • Often, yes, if brand exclusions were never set. The tell is a branded Search impression-share drop of 15–30 points with no budget cut, next to a suspiciously healthy blended ROAS. We check this in the first two weeks of every new account, before anything else.

  • Four things, stated as terms rather than promises: you own every account from day one, thirty days' notice ends the relationship in either direction, every report shows what underperformed next to what worked, and we'll tell you when your budget or funnel isn't ready yet instead of taking the retainer anyway.

Proof

Results.

Every case study

Get in touch

Tell us what you’re running.

  1. You share read access

    Google Ads, and Analytics if the two are linked.

  2. We audit the account

    Search terms, conversion double-counting, brand exclusions, and every setting the AI Max migration touched.

  3. You get the leak list

    What is losing money, ranked by size, on a 45-minute call. Yours whether we work together or not.

marks a required field.

Including https://

As much or as little as you like.

A person replies from a real address. We never sell or share your details.

Keep going

The rest of it.