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The Cable Drawer Effect: Why Google Ads Success Comes From Doing Less, Not More
The counterintuitive truth about campaign complexity and why your organized chaos is killing your ROAS
You know that drawer in your house. The one where you throw spare cables from every electronic device you've ever owned. USB cables, HDMI cords, that weird proprietary charger from 2015 that you're certain you'll need someday.
When you first moved in, you had a system. Each cable went in its designated spot. But life happened. New gadgets arrived. Old cables got tossed in "temporarily." Years later, opening that drawer feels like defusing a bomb made of tangled wires and broken dreams.
Your Google Ads account looks exactly like that drawer.
I've been managing PPC campaigns for over a decade, and I can spot a "cable drawer account" from a mile away. Fifteen campaigns here, twenty-three there. Each one added for what seemed like a perfectly logical reason at the time. "Let's separate mobile traffic." "We need a campaign just for red products." "What if we target people who visited the pricing page on Tuesdays?"
The result? An insane complex Rubik's cube that would take days to untangle.
Here's what most marketers don't realize: Google's AI has evolved far beyond our ability to outsmart it with clever segmentation tricks. The platform that once rewarded micro-management now punishes it. Your pursuit of control is actively sabotaging your results.
The Campaign Consolidation Hierarchy
Think of successful Google Ads management as a three-stage progression. Most accounts get trapped in the first stage, mistaking activity for strategy.
What stage are you trapped in? The Cable Drawer Stage is where overcomplicated accounts accumulate 15-25+ campaigns over time. Each addition seemed logical in isolation, but collectively they create chaos. I see this everywhere – businesses running separate campaigns for every product variation, device type, and keyword match type because someone once told them "more control equals better performance."
That advice expired about five years ago.
The brutal math behind consolidation reveals why your fragmented approach is failing. Google states officially that you need at least 15 conversions in a 30-day period for smart bidding to work properly. Not 15 total across all campaigns – 15 per campaign. When you consolidate campaigns, instead of having a bit of budget scattered everywhere, you get more conversions in each remaining campaign.
Think about rolling dice. Roll six times and you might get all sixes or all ones – wild, meaningless volatility. Roll a million times and you'll approach the true probability. Your two-conversion campaigns? They're statistical noise. "I'm like, 'It's meaningless,'" I tell clients who obsess over these micro-samples. "Two conversions means absolutely nothing because you could get two more in the next 45 seconds and that completely changes the result."
Strategic separation is the final evolution – the disciplined art of knowing when complexity serves a purpose. Only separate campaigns when they serve fundamentally different business objectives: brand versus non-brand terms, different geographic locations, distinct product categories that require different messaging.
But here's the kicker: you don't separate for device types (Google handles that), keyword match types (outdated thinking), or product variations like red hats versus blue hats. Those distinctions that feel important to you? Google's AI optimizes around them automatically, better than you ever could manually.
The Reality Check
I know an agency owner who lights up whenever a new client walks in with 15-25 campaigns. Not because he's sadistic, but because he knows that consolidating them down to 2-4 campaigns will almost certainly improve their return on ad spend. It's like being handed a guaranteed win.
My own business? I practice what I preach. Four search campaigns total – two platforms times two service types, plus one branded campaign. That's it. No elaborate architecture, no clever segmentation schemes that would make other marketers nod approvingly at conferences.
The results speak louder than strategy slides.
Google is smarter than us. Maybe not you specifically (maybe you're the next Iron Man), but for us mere mortals, Google is going to be superior at all that delivery and optimization stuff. We should let Google handle it.
So if I were to give you one piece of advice, it would be this: stop trying to control everything and start focusing on what actually moves the needle. Audit your cable drawer. Count your campaigns. Identify which ones get fewer than 15 conversions per month. Consolidate ruthlessly.
And here's a secret that might sting: you don't need to advertise everything you sell. You can be very unbalanced with your budget allocation. Focus your ad spend on your best performers and use email marketing and upsells to move everything else.
The path to better Google Ads performance isn't through more sophisticated complexity. It's through strategic simplification.
Time to clean out that drawer.
