Three years ago, one of our clients called me directly not our team, me - becaus
By Michael Erickson Facchin · July 26, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Three years ago, one of our clients called me directly not our team, me - because their ad spend had ballooned overnight and nobody could tell them why. I remember sitting with their account open, scrolling through the search terms report, and feeling that specific kind of dread you get when you already suspect what you're about to find before you find it.
There it was. A search term field that hadn't been touched in four months. Not neglected out of laziness the account manager before us had set it up carefully, tested it, watched it perform beautifully for the first few weeks. Then they moved on to the next fire, the next client, the next urgent thing. And the account just... sat there. Running on autopilot. Bleeding money into search terms that had drifted completely away from what the business actually sold.
Here's what nobody tells you when you're new to this industry: PPC doesn't stay fixed. It's not a machine you build once and walk away from. It's closer to a garden. You can plant it perfectly, water it, watch it thrive and if you stop showing up, weeds don't ask permission. They just grow. Quietly. Invisibly. Until one day you look up and the thing you built doesn't look anything like what you planted.
That client lost roughly $40,000 over those four months to search terms that had nothing to do with their product anymore. Not because anyone was careless. Because everyone assumed "it's working" meant "it will keep working." Those are two very different sentences, and confusing them is one of the most expensive mistakes I've watched smart, careful people make.
I think about that call more than almost any other memory I have from building this agency. Not because it was our biggest number, or our worst month, or our hardest client conversation. Because it taught me something that reshaped how we operate to this day: the fundamentals aren't glamorous, and that's exactly why they get skipped.
Nobody builds their agency's reputation on "we rotate the search term field regularly." It doesn't sound impressive in a pitch meeting. It doesn't make for an exciting case study headline. It's not the kind of wisdom that gets you applause. But it is, without exaggeration, one of the quiet disciplines that separates accounts that compound in value over time from accounts that slowly, silently erode.
So here's what I want to say to every founder, every marketer, every person reading this who's managing an ad account right now, whether it's yours or a client's: go check your search terms today. Not next quarter. Today. Not because something is definitely wrong but because the accounts that stay healthy aren't the ones that never have problems. They're the ones where someone actually shows up to look, on a schedule, whether or not anything feels urgent that week.