What good looks like: our standards for a healthy paid-media account.

There is an enormous amount of tactical advice about paid media on the internet, and most of it is contradictory. Use broad match. Never use broad match. Trust Smart Bidding. Override Smart Bidding. The advice conflicts because it is context-free, offered without any reference to whether the underlying account is structurally sound.

Far more useful than another tactic is a clear standard for what a healthy account looks like. If you know what good looks like, you can measure any account against it and find the gaps. This is the standard we hold our own work to, written down.

Account architecture

• →Brand and non-brand search are in separate campaigns, always
• →Campaign structure maps to how the business thinks about its products, not to a platform template
• →Budgets are set at a level that lets each campaign exit the learning phase
• →Geographic and language targeting matches where the business can actually fulfil
• →There are no zombie campaigns quietly spending with no owner and no rationale

Conversion definitions

This is the layer almost everyone neglects and almost everyone should fix first. Smart Bidding optimizes toward whatever you tell it counts as a conversion. If the definition is wrong, every bidding decision in the account is optimizing toward the wrong thing.

• →Every active conversion action is documented and someone can explain what it counts
• →Confirmation-page reloads and duplicate fires are deduplicated
• →Micro-conversions are not silently weighted the same as purchases
• →Conversion values reflect margin or real economic value where possible, not a flat number
• →The definitions are reviewed on a schedule, not configured once and forgotten

Measurement and attribution

• →Server-side conversion tracking is live, not just the browser pixel
• →Platform-reported revenue is reconciled against a source of truth such as Shopify or the CRM
• →The gap between platform-claimed and actual revenue is monitored as a quality signal
• →Blended efficiency is tracked alongside per-channel ROAS

Exclusions and hygiene

• →Negative keyword lists are maintained on a cadence, not abandoned
• →Search term reports are reviewed and acted on weekly
• →Audience overlap is checked so campaigns are not bidding against each other
• →Placement exclusions remove the obvious junk from display and video

The point of a standard

None of these items is exotic. That is exactly the point. A structurally healthy account is mostly the sum of unglamorous disciplines applied consistently, and most accounts fail not because the team lacks clever tactics but because the basics drifted. The standard is what stops the drift.

Run any account you manage against this list. If you cannot tick every box, the highest-return work available to you is not a new bidding experiment. It is closing the gaps above, because everything tactical compounds far better on top of a clean foundation than on top of a broken one.