Rescued an 8-Week-Stuck Healthcare Campaign

The problem

WonderHealth ran 3 Google Ads campaigns — orthopedic knee treatment, men's wellness (ED ESWT), and HIV / PEP testing. The orthopedic knee campaign had 0 impressions for 8 weeks despite being marked "Eligible." The other campaigns burned budget on irrelevant searches and conversion rate was near zero across the board. Initial diagnostics incorrectly blamed healthcare-advertiser certification (already active) and personalized-advertising restrictions (already removed) — neither explained the 8-week pattern.

Approach

Diagnosed the real blocker: a "Birth Control, Fertility, Testing" misclassification loop where Google's classifier was lumping orthopedic ads into a restricted healthcare category every 1–2 days, auto-resetting prior appeals. Domain-level overspill from HIV / PEP services was tainting unrelated knee ads.
Filed a 4th appeal for the knee campaign + reconfigured bidding for immediate serve upon policy resolution.
ED campaign: paused a budget-killing broad-match keyword, added 80 negative keywords targeting irrelevant intent, added 10 tightly-targeted new keywords.
HIV / PEP: added 87 negative keywords blocking competitor brands, geographic targeting, government clinics, and DIY seekers.
Switched all 3 campaigns from Maximize Conversions (running blind with zero conversion data) to Maximize Clicks with CPC caps.
Excluded 18–24 age + female demographics on the ED campaign (mismatched intent for the service).
Discovered a $5K+ / month conversion bug: WhatsApp pre-fill buttons on service pages were auto-filling the wrong service message, confusing users mid-conversion. Tracking was fine — the website was breaking the handoff.

Results

~30% wasted spend cut projected via negative-keyword strategy alone on the largest campaign's monthly spend.
8-week recovery in progress: knee appeal filed with bidding pre-configured — first impressions expected within 7 days of policy resolution.
$5K+ / month in lost lead value identified by the WhatsApp UX bug, recoverable once the dev fix ships.
170+ negative keywords implemented across the 3 campaigns.

When a campaign breaks, the obvious diagnoses are often wrong. This one took 4 hypotheses before the classifier loop. Same with conversion — tracking was working fine but the website was breaking the handoff. Honest diagnostic rigor beats pattern-matching to the most common explanation.

Tech stack

Google AdsGoogle Tag ManagerWhatsApp BusinessCampaign Diagnostics tool

Need this kind of work done?

Open to consulting and contract work in AI automation, ad operations, and GEO. Same approach, same metrics-driven rigor.

Work with me See other case studies