On PPC Live the Podcast, Ana Kostic shared the account restructure that still shapes how she manages paid media: successful PPC is not about building the perfect campaign structure, it's about protecting the business behind it.
Early in her career Kostic inherited a Google Ads account with a messy structure. Determined to apply best practices, she rebuilt it from the ground up, confident cleaner campaigns and better keyword organization would lift performance.
Instead, traffic and sales dropped by around 40%.
The new structure wasn't the problem. Wiping years of historical performance data that Google's systems had learned from was. The account recovered, but only after roughly two and a half months, with full benefits taking closer to six months.
Kostic's takeaway was that businesses cannot absorb major revenue dips while platforms relearn campaign performance. "You have to think about the business first," she said.
She now starts every onboarding by understanding the business rather than the account — cash flow, margins, growth goals, and how much short-term disruption the company can realistically absorb — before recommending structural change.
Rather than replacing campaigns overnight, she introduces changes gradually, letting new structures learn while existing campaigns keep delivering. Her philosophy: "We like it slow and boring."
Kostic credits her former manager with navigating the difficult conversations that followed. Instead of assigning blame, the agency focused on transparency, built a recovery plan, and supported both client and team until performance stabilized.
One of her strongest recommendations is to spend more time talking to sales teams. Those conversations surface the language customers actually use — better campaign input than platform data alone provides.
She applies the same posture to AI. A strong advocate for products like Performance Max, Kostic still argues AI shouldn't replace good decision-making: set guardrails, test gradually, and prioritize business stability over chasing every new feature.
For the organizational version of the same problem, see Sales Promises, Delivery Inherits: The Structural Problem in Selling SEO and AI Services.
Not the structure itself, but the loss of years of historical performance data Google's systems had learned from. Recovery took about two and a half months, with full benefit closer to six.
Cash flow, margins, growth goals, and how much short-term disruption the business can realistically absorb.
Gradual introduction rather than wholesale replacement, letting new structures learn while existing campaigns keep delivering.
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