Rebuilt their Google Ads from scratch — cut CPA by half

Overview

Meridian is a personal finance comparison brand operating in one of the most competitive and expensive paid search markets in India. They were spending ₹8L/month on Google Ads with a CPA that made their unit economics barely viable.

Challenge

The existing account was a structural mess — broad match keywords bleeding budget, no meaningful audience segmentation, landing pages shared across wildly different intent signals, and conversion tracking that was counting form views as conversions. The reported CPA looked acceptable; the real CPA was almost double.

Solution

We paused everything, fixed tracking first, and rebuilt the account from zero. Tight exact and phrase match structure. Single keyword ad groups for the highest-value terms. Intent-segmented landing pages — one for each major product vertical. Aggressive negative keyword lists built from 3 months of search term data. Smart bidding re-introduced only after the conversion data was clean and sufficient.