Google AdWords Expert.
One specialist. Your whole account. Nothing hidden.
I am Vijay Bhabhor. For 17 years I have run paid search personally — Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Display and YouTube — for businesses in India and across the US, UK, Australia, Canada and UAE. No account managers between us, no junior executives learning on your budget.
Every engagement produces a paper trail: a written audit before anything changes, a dated log of every optimisation after, and a live dashboard in between. If a change happened in your account, you can see who made it, when, and why.
Purchase tag firing on page load, not on purchase. Dashboard claimed 6.2x ROAS; real order data said 1.9x. Smart Bidding trained on the false signal for 7 months across 22 fragmented campaigns.
Tracking rebuilt in GTM. 22 campaigns consolidated to 4. Target ROAS set from category margin data, not habit. Six months of search term waste converted into a shared negative list.
Full file with two more accounts below.
Google AdWords and Google Ads are one platform — Google changed the name in July 2018 and nothing else. A Google AdWords expert, then, is the same hire as a Google Ads specialist: someone who designs your account structure, keeps conversion tracking honest, sets bid targets from your margins, and controls spend at the individual search term level, week after week.
Everything below shows how that work is actually done — where budgets leak, what a properly run account looks like on the inside, and what happens in the first 90 days after you hand one over.
The Four Places Google Ads Budgets Leak First
Seventeen years of account takeovers produce a pattern. When a business tells me their campaigns "used to work" or "never worked," the cause is almost always one of these four leaks — usually two of them together. Check your own account against this list before you pay anyone a management fee, including me.
Conversion data that lies to the algorithm
Smart Bidding spends your money toward whatever it is told a conversion is. Tell it wrong, and it diligently buys the wrong thing. One audited account reported 8,000 monthly conversions while the business received 60 actual leads — the tag fired on every page load. The dashboard glowed; the true cost per lead was about 130 times the reported figure, and seven months of bidding had been trained on fiction.
The test: compare Google Ads conversion counts against GA4 events and your real order or lead records for the same period. A gap beyond a few percent means the account is being optimised toward something other than your business. See how to fix conversion tracking for the common failure patterns.
Twenty campaigns starving one algorithm
Smart Bidding needs roughly 30 conversions per campaign every 30 days to leave its learning phase. An account split into 25 campaigns producing 2 or 3 conversions each never gets there — every campaign oscillates in permanent learning, and performance stays erratic no matter how good the keywords and ads are. Fragmentation is the single most expensive structural habit I see in Indian accounts.
The test: open each campaign's 30-day conversion count. If most sit below 30, the structure is fighting the bidding system. Consolidating to 3 to 5 campaigns by intent tier and margin category typically gets each one to 40 to 60 conversions monthly — enough signal to stabilise within 4 to 6 weeks.
Broad match with nobody watching the search terms
Broad match has been Google's default since 2021, and it earns its keep only under weekly supervision. In competitive Indian categories, unsupervised broad match can push 40 to 60 percent of spend toward queries with no relation to what you sell. Most agencies review search terms monthly while claiming weekly — which hands 3 to 4 weeks of budget to irrelevant traffic before anyone looks.
The test: pull your search terms report for the last 30 days and honestly mark each query as buyer, researcher or unrelated. Accounts doing this weekly, with a shared negative list built on day one, routinely recover 15 to 25 percent of spend inside two months.
ROAS targets borrowed from someone else's business
A 30 percent gross margin business breaks even at 3.33x ROAS; a 60 percent margin business is already profitable at 2x. A manager who sets 4x "because that is what ecommerce aims for" is either capping a high-margin business below its potential or running a thin-margin business at a loss — and both happen constantly when targets come from benchmarks instead of your P&L.
The test: ask whoever runs your account what your break-even ROAS is. If they cannot answer from your margin data within a minute, your targets are guesses. The working method is documented in how to improve ROAS.
How I Run an Account
Each leak above has a standing rule that closes it, applied to every account whether it spends ₹30,000 or ₹30 lakh a month. The fifth rule is the one no checklist teaches.
No optimisation touches a campaign until the tracking is proven
Week one is verification, not action. Every active conversion action gets cross-checked: Ads counts against GA4 events, purchase values against real order values for ecommerce, tag firing against actual form submission for lead gen. A campaign built on false conversion data cannot be improved — it can only burn money more efficiently — so the account earns changes only after the data earns trust.
Bid targets come out of your margin sheet, never a benchmark
Before any Smart Bidding target goes live, I compute break-even ROAS from your product margins and set the target 20 to 30 percent above it — profit with room for algorithm variance. Lead gen accounts get the mirror treatment: maximum allowable CPA derived from lifetime value and close rate. When your margins move, the targets move. Nothing on your account is inherited from "industry standard."
Structure serves the algorithm's appetite for data
Accounts are consolidated into the fewest campaigns that still separate meaningfully different intent and margin tiers — typically 3 to 5. An ecommerce build might run one branded Search campaign, one high-intent non-branded, and one Performance Max with asset groups per category. The point is concentration: enough conversions per campaign that Smart Bidding stops guessing and starts learning.
Search terms are read every single week, and every negative is dated
Each week the full search terms report gets pulled, wrong-intent queries get flagged, and negatives go in at the campaign or shared-list level. Every addition carries a date, so you can trace exactly what waste was flowing and the day it stopped. The shared list itself is built on day one from competitor names, research-intent phrases and category noise — the account never starts naked against broad match.
When something breaks, diagnosis starts from pattern memory
High impression share with a climbing CPA in an Indian B2B account is almost always a competitor raising budget in your auction, not a fault in your ad groups. A Shopping campaign whose conversion rate slides right after a Merchant Center feed update usually points to a changed product attribute altering query matching, not to bids. Recognising these signatures on sight — from having watched them repeat across a hundred accounts — is the difference between a two-day diagnosis and a three-week one, and it is the part of this work no course can transfer.
These rules apply from day one on every engagement. They are also the fastest way to interview any other specialist: ask how they handle each of the five.
From AdWords 2000 to Google Ads 2026 — and 17 Years Inside It
The AdWords name survived the July 2018 rebrand only in people's habits — the auction, Quality Score and account mechanics carried over untouched. What genuinely changed is scope. A platform that began in 2000 as keyword text ads in Search now runs nine campaign types, each with its own auction behaviour, targeting logic and bidding quirks. Hiring "an AdWords expert" today means hiring someone fluent in all of them.
My first accounts in 2009 belonged to the manual era: hand-set CPCs, Quality Score as king, and the satisfying reality that a tightly themed ad group with a relevant landing page could beat a competitor outspending it five to one. Working at that level of granularity before automation arrived is why I can read what Smart Bidding is trying to do today — and spot the moment it starts doing something else.
From 2012 to 2019 the work ran through Upwork: US, UK, Australian, Canadian and Hong Kong clients across fashion ecommerce, SaaS, clinics, law firms and industrial equipment. Managing those side by side taught an expensive lesson early — the playbook that wins a high-CPC UK legal auction loses money in an Indian product-catalogue account. Match types, budget logic and the margin math behind targets simply do not transfer between categories.
Since 2019 I have also run paid media for an ecommerce operation live in 80-plus countries with eight-figure annual Google Ads spend. Cross-market PMax cannibalisation, ROAS targets that shift by product line, conversion lag that varies by country — the judgement built at that scale comes home directly to a ₹2 lakh per month Indian account. All of it happens remotely; a client in Ahmedabad and a client in Toronto get the same access, the same dashboards, the same calls.
Certified: Google Ads (Search, Shopping, Display, Video, PMax, Measurement) · GA4 · Top Rated on Upwork, 10,000+ hrs, 100% JSS
The Working Rhythm: Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly
Management fees pay for a routine, and most advertisers never get to see theirs. This is mine — fixed cadence, every account, in writing. The distance between "we optimise continuously" and a schedule this specific is where underperforming accounts usually live.
Three Account Files
Each file records what the account looked like on arrival, the work performed, and the numbers at close — clients unnamed, figures real. The Indian ecommerce file from the top of this page closed at 6.4x ROAS on unchanged spend; these are the other two.
Broad match running against a narrow ICP had pushed 58 percent of spend to the wrong job titles, company sizes and industries. Worse, every lead counted twice — form-submit event and thank-you pageview were both primary conversions — so Smart Bidding believed acquisition cost half of what it truly did.
One primary conversion per lead. Keywords rebuilt on phrase and exact. 180 negatives mined from six months of waste. Ad groups re-cut by job-title intent, with custom intent audiences and RLSA layered on top.
₹80,000 monthly on Search with phone calls — the business's main conversion — completely unmeasured. Ads served through the night while the office slept, and broad match fed a heavy share of budget to DIY and research queries that would never become customers.
Call tracking wired through GTM with campaign-level attribution. Scheduling matched to business hours. 120 negatives against research and DIY intent. Local Service Ads launched beside Search, then postal-code bid adjustments once three months of clean data existed.
Every file above opened the same way: an audit that put the account's real numbers in writing. Yours would open the same way — free, and before any fee is discussed.
Open Your Account FileA Two-Minute Fit Check
I keep the client list short on purpose — the working rhythm above only holds if every account gets it. This filter saves us both a call.
Sitting between the columns? Write to me — you will get a straight answer before either of us commits to anything.
From First Call to Stable Numbers: The 90-Day Sequence
Hiring stalls on vagueness, so here is the sequence in full — identical whether your account is an agency takeover or a blank slate. If you first want to understand why your existing campaigns went quiet, why Google Ads campaigns stop working walks through the usual suspects.
You grant read-only Manager access. Conversions get verified against GA4 and real order or lead records, search-term waste is quantified, structure is mapped. Findings arrive in writing before a single live campaign changes.
Tracking corrections ship through Tag Manager. The shared negative list goes live. Campaigns consolidate or a new structure is built, and bid targets are computed from your margin sheet before any Smart Bidding switches on.
Clean conversion data accumulates through the learning window. Some volatility is normal here and is not the final performance — the weekly rhythm continues, and no panic changes are made that would reset what the algorithm has learned.
Budgets rise where impression share is lost to budget, targets tighten where the data allows, and Shopping, PMax or Local Service Ads get evaluated for expansion. Day 90 closes with a review against the day-7 baseline.
Deliverables by day 90: written baseline · dated change log for every optimisation · live Looker Studio dashboard. The account is never a black box.
Three Ways to Start
Whichever door you choose, it opens with the free audit — so the scope, the problems and the fee are all on paper before you agree to anything.
Your account, read cover to cover: tracking integrity, structural faults and the 5 to 10 changes worth the most money, delivered as a written summary within 3 to 5 business days. Costs nothing, obliges nothing.
For accounts that run but disappoint
DetailsThe full working rhythm above, applied to your account: build or restructure, weekly search-term discipline, bid and tracking stewardship, live dashboard, monthly strategy call. Flat fee from ₹15,000 per month, cancel on 30 days notice.
For ₹30,000+/month spenders who want a specialist, not an agency
DetailsSecond opinions, strategy sessions and structured training for teams who run their own campaigns but want expert eyes on structure, tracking or bidding. Booked hourly, half-day or full-day.
For businesses building the capability internally
DetailsOne Specialist vs an Agency Desk
| Factor | Working with me | A typical Indian agency |
|---|---|---|
| Hands on the account | Mine, every week — each change logged and dated | A junior executive juggling 30 to 50 accounts |
| Commitment | Month-to-month; 30 days notice ends it | Usually a 3 to 6 month minimum contract |
| Fee structure | Flat, sized to the work required | Frequently a percentage of your ad spend |
| Who owns the account | You, under your billing, start to finish | Sometimes created and held under the agency MCC |
| What you see | Live Looker Studio dashboard + weekly written note | A monthly PDF built around CTR and impressions |
| Where ad money flows | From you to Google, directly | Often routed through the agency first |
| Depth behind the work | 17 years, 80+ countries, 100+ account categories | The assigned executive is often 1 to 3 years in |
Hiring a Google Ads Expert: The Questions That Matter
The same questions arrive before nearly every engagement. Here are the answers in full, so the first call can be about your account instead.
Only the name. Google renamed AdWords to Google Ads in July 2018; the auction, the certifications and the day-to-day account work are identical. The rename marked the platform growing beyond keyword text ads into Shopping, Performance Max, Display, YouTube, Demand Gen and Local Service Ads. Plenty of Indian advertisers still say AdWords out of habit, so both terms appear on this page and mean the same thing.
Ask for the live link to their Google Skillshop certification profile — never accept a badge screenshot, because certifications are publicly verifiable. Then ask three working questions: how they check conversion tracking before optimising anything, how they arrive at a Target ROAS or Target CPA for a new client, and whether the account remains under your billing or moves under their MCC. A genuine specialist answers all three in specifics; vague answers are the tell.
Monthly management begins at ₹15,000 for ad spend up to ₹1 lakh per month, rising to ₹30,000 to ₹60,000 for larger or more complex accounts. A standalone audit runs ₹10,000 to ₹25,000 by account size, and consulting is available hourly or as half-day sessions. Everything is a flat fee — never a percentage of spend — and your ad budget goes straight from you to Google.
Weeks one to four are repair work: tracking accuracy, account structure, negative keyword lists and bid strategy selection. Clean conversion data starts flowing from week one, but Smart Bidding needs 4 to 8 weeks to leave its learning phase, so durable ROAS or CPA improvement usually shows at the 60 to 90 day mark. A promise of dependable results inside two weeks misrepresents how the platform works.
Yes, without exception. The account stays under your billing and I work through Google Ads Manager (MCC) access only. When we part ways you keep everything — the account, its full performance history, audience and Customer Match lists, conversion data and campaign structures. I never create accounts under my own MCC to hold client data.
Yes — most engagements begin exactly this way. Step one is a written audit of tracking accuracy, structure and search term waste before any live campaign is touched. Historical data has real value: wherever possible I preserve the existing account rather than rebuilding, because a rebuild resets the Smart Bidding learning history you have already paid for.
Yes. Clients come from across India — Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Pune — and internationally from the US, UK, Australia, Canada and UAE. All management runs remotely through Google Ads Manager access, live Looker Studio dashboards and video calls, so location makes no difference to the work.
No — and treat anyone who does with suspicion. Landing page conversion rate, offer pricing, seasonality, search volume and auction competition all sit partly outside campaign management. What I do guarantee is documented management: every change logged with a date and reason, and a written plan whenever something underperforms.
₹30,000 per month. Below that, Smart Bidding cannot gather enough conversions per campaign to work properly, and a management fee eats too large a share of what the budget can return. Smaller budgets are usually better served by SEO and organic channels until spend can grow.
Where to Go From Here
Every campaign type — Search, Shopping, PMax, Display, YouTube, Demand Gen — and when each is the right instrument.
ReadShopping and feed-driven Performance Max, product-intent Search, and ROAS targets set by margin tier.
ReadThe local version of this page — for Surat and Gujarat businesses in textiles, diamond, medical, dental and education.
ReadAgencies keep the brand and the client; I run the campaigns behind the curtain, with confidential reporting.
ReadLean structures that test acquisition-cost assumptions honestly, before product-market fit justifies more.
ReadGoogle Guaranteed placements for clinics, contractors and legal — priced per verified lead rather than per click.
ReadSend the Account. Get the Truth.
The free audit tells you what your campaigns are really doing — where the tracking lies, where the budget leaks, and what would change first. If the honest answer is that you do not need me, that goes in writing too.
Flat fee · month-to-month · your account stays yours