Golden Fields Catering

This pack answers the questions raised for FY26 forecasting: how the account is structured, where the budget has gone, what it has produced, and where the biggest growth opportunities sit. It draws on a full 90 day performance audit completed in July 2026 plus six months of reporting history.

All campaigns are currently paused. This is a deliberate strategic pause, not a stoppage.

Two things drove the decision:

1. Tracking quality. The current website platform (Flex Catering) limits how cleanly GA4 and Google Ads can track real enquiries. Micro actions have been feeding the bidding algorithm as primary conversions, which skews both the reporting and the way budget gets spent.

2. The website rebuild. A new site is in build on WordPress and WooCommerce. It brings faster pages, dedicated landing pages per menu category, a proper enquiry path, and clean end to end conversion tracking with enhanced conversions enabled.

Six campaigns exist in the account. Performance below covers the audited last 90 days of activity.

* Conversion counts and CPA use the account's current conversion settings, which include micro actions. See section 05 for what the numbers mean once those are stripped out.

Performance Max carried 54.5% of the budget on a $20/day cap and, notably, spent 98% of that budget on Google Search inventory. The generic "General / Services" search campaign is the weak spot: broad intent targeting with no dedicated landing pages produced a $103 cost per reported conversion. The June 2026 campaign was built with tighter exact and phrase match structure and is the intended backbone for relaunch.

Monthly totals from the December to May reporting cycles, before the pause.

Spend held steady at roughly $900 per month while click volume drifted down through autumn as CPCs rose and the same structure kept running. This plateau is a symptom of a structure that had reached its ceiling. It is a further reason a rebuild beats more of the same.

* Reported conversions across all months include micro actions and are not comparable to true enquiry counts. Section 05 explains the correction being applied.

Google Ads counts whatever it is told to count. Right now it is told that browsing actions are primary conversions.

The Performance Max campaign's headline $5.75 CPA is driven almost entirely by those micro actions. Once the account bids only on calls, quote forms, contact forms and purchases, reported CPAs will rise on paper while the actual quality of enquiries improves. That is the correct trade and the numbers above set the baseline for measuring it.

What people typed, what it cost, and what we are changing.

High intent keywords worth scaling

Where budget leaked

A full negative keyword build (competitor names, hire terms, consumer and recipe searches) is part of the relaunch scope, alongside search themes rebuilt around corporate, breakfast, and premium event catering intent.

The PMax campaign runs 4 active asset groups. Two clearly earn their budget.

Audience signals in place: remarketing lists (all visitors, converters, non-purchasers), custom intent segments built on searches like "breakfast foods", "catering platters" and "sandwich catering services", plus competitor URL signals (elizabethandrews.com.au, feedwell.com.au). This signal architecture is strong and carries over to relaunch. The change is pointing each asset group at a dedicated menu category page on the new site instead of generic category listings.

Current ad traffic lands on the homepage, /breakfast and /categories, with search ads mostly hitting the homepage.

On the current platform this is the practical ceiling: generic pages doing double duty for browsing and enquiry. The rebuild changes the equation. Every campaign and asset group will get a purpose-built destination: dedicated Melbourne service pages, per-category menu pages, and a dedicated enquiry page for search traffic, so a corporate catering search lands on a corporate catering page with a quote form above the fold.

A straight answer on why competitive impression share data is not in this pack.

Two structural reasons. First, 98% of recent spend ran through Performance Max, and Google provides only limited auction insight reporting for PMax compared with standard search. Second, with campaigns paused, the account is not currently entering auctions, so a report pulled today would not reflect a live competitive position.

What the data does show: the account has been competing in auctions against Elizabeth Andrews, Peter Rowland and similar Melbourne caterers (their names appear in the account's search term data, and their URLs are already used as audience signals). From the first month of reactivation, full auction insights (impression share, overlap rate, outranking share against named competitors) will be a standing section in monthly reporting, with the search campaigns structured to make that data meaningful.

The plan to turn the account from a browsing engine into a premium enquiry engine.