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A powerful PPC program isn’t built solely by adding new campaigns, keywords, and ad types. It’s forged by subtraction. A “stop doing” list brings discipline to growth, forcing you to cut the waste, quiet the noise, and protect your margin. If you want sharper results without endlessly inflating budgets, start by deciding what must end.

Stop Wasting Budget: Cut PPC Dead Weight Now

Every account accumulates financial barnacles: campaigns that spend without moving revenue, audiences that never convert, placements that attract tire-kickers. Identify and pause anything that exceeds your target CPA or fails to contribute to pipeline or profit—no exceptions. If a campaign can’t justify its seat at the budget table, it doesn’t get one.

Start with ruthless triage. Kill keywords and ad groups that have burned through 2–3x your target CPA with zero conversions, and freeze any placement or audience segment with persistently weak post-click engagement (bounce spikes, sub-10 second sessions, zero micro-conversions). Cap brand defense spend and trim overlapping campaigns that cannibalize the same demand.

Don’t ignore silent killers. Broad match bleeding irrelevant queries, Discovery and Display auto-placements farmed by bots, out-of-market geo targets, and over-frequent remarketing that erodes profit with diminishing returns—these siphon cash invisibly. Set hard rules: if it can’t prove incremental contribution, it goes dark until it can.

Ditch Set-It-and-Forget-It, Audit Weekly

PPC decay is real. Creative fatigues, auctions shift, competitors bid harder, and user intent morphs. A weekly audit is your antidote. Make it non-negotiable: your calendar owns it, your checklist drives it, and your spend depends on it.

Your checklist should include search term mining and negative curation, budget pacing against revenue targets, impression share lost to rank vs budget, device and geo efficiency splits, and RSA asset performance (retire low-scoring lines). Inspect conversion tracking integrity every week—broken tags or duplicate events turn your bidding into guesswork and your reports into fiction.

Automate the alerts, not the accountability. Set rules for pausing spend when CPA or ROAS thresholds are breached, flag creative with falling engagement, and surface campaigns with sudden CPC spikes. Then investigate root causes: auction insights, landing speed, competitor promos, seasonality. Act fast, test small, and revert decisively when a test underperforms.

Eliminate Vanity Metrics, Prioritize Outcomes

Clicks, CTR, QS, and view rates are inputs, not outcomes. They can guide optimizations, but they don’t pay the bills. Your stop-doing list starts with deprioritizing any metric that can’t be tied to qualified pipeline, revenue, or profit.

Elevate outcome metrics: qualified leads, opportunity creation rate, revenue, gross margin ROAS, CAC vs LTV, and blended MER across channels. Measure incrementality with holdouts or geo splits where possible; optimize to contribution, not illusion. If a campaign raises clicks but not revenue, it’s a distraction—stop optimizing for applause.

Tie ad performance to downstream quality in your CRM. Track stage progression, win rates, and sales cycle length by campaign, keyword, and audience. If a source delivers cheap leads that stall, cut it. If another produces fewer but faster-closing, higher-ACV deals, fund it. Make outcomes the scoreboard and demote everything else to diagnostics.

Kill Inefficient Keywords, Optimize Intent

Not all intent is created equal. Build clear tiers: transactional (buy, pricing, demo), commercial investigation (best, compare, reviews), and informational (how-to, what is). Stop paying transactional CPCs for informational queries; bid down or exclude low-commercial-intent terms unless you have a nurturing plan with proven LTV.

Run query mining and n-gram analysis weekly. Identify wasteful themes, add negatives at the right level, and consolidate redundant ad groups to improve signal density for Smart Bidding. Use exact and phrase to anchor known winners; deploy broad strategically where your negatives and conversion data are strong enough to guide the algorithm.

Align landing pages with intent. Transactional queries deserve frictionless conversion paths, social proof, and clear pricing or next steps. Research queries need value-first content with soft CTAs and remarketing follow-up. If a keyword can’t map cleanly to a page and a measurable outcome, it gets paused until it can.

Growth isn’t just a matter of doing more; it’s the discipline to stop doing what dilutes your results. A PPC “stop doing” list protects your margin, sharpens your signal, and accelerates what actually works. Cut the dead weight, audit relentlessly, measure what matters, and align to intent—then watch your performance compound.