OTC healthcare brand: paid-media rescue
Case study · Analytics & Tracking Assurance
An OTC healthcare brand’s Google Ads spend suddenly collapsed by nearly two thirds on unchanged budgets, leaving the account running at roughly a quarter of its capacity. The team couldn’t tell whether it was the algorithm, competitors, or a policy problem.
What I did
I cross-referenced six months of campaign, auction-insights, change-history and search-term data against GA4 events and traffic acquisition, then triaged every candidate cause to a single root.
What the audit surfaced
- The collapse traced to account-level content-label exclusions added on one date that wiped out Display inventory. Lost impression share by budget fell from ~49% to ~1%, proving it ran out of places to serve, not budget.
- The most commercially relevant audience was permanently policy-blocked (healthcare-labelled ads can’t target health-condition audiences): a dead-end masquerading as a live ad group.
- Conversion tracking worked, but every conversion recorded zero value, so automated bidding weighted a phone tap the same as a high-intent retailer click-out.
- A multinational pharma competitor had quietly grown auction impression share from under 10% to ~30%, outranking on most shared auctions. Un-winnable on bids, solvable with messaging.
The recommendation
Two fixes restored the account within hours (remove the inventory-killing exclusions; reallocate stranded budget to the channel that converts). The rest: assign conversion values to unlock value-based bidding, rebuild the blocked audience through compliant targeting, and reposition against the pharma competitor on a claim it can’t make.