Aashna Makin’s experience of when best practices backfire

On episode 326 of PPC Live The Podcast I sat down down with Aashna Makin, a senior paid ads specialist with more than eight years of experience, who has managed campaigns worth over $2 million a month across a wide range of industries.

She takes us through the story of how a best practice she put in place led to poor results and how looking back she should have taking more care in adding unnecessary negatives.

A costly keyword error

Aashna recalls one of her earliest career missteps: excluding the keyword “meet up” from a client’s dating events campaign. The impact was immediate and severe—leads dropped sharply, and performance tanked. Luckily, her client success manager spotted the issue quickly. Instead of deflecting blame, Aashna owned up, corrected the mistake by removing the negative keyword, and restored the campaign. The experience became a turning point in how she approached PPC.

Lessons learned from mistakes

The key lesson? Best practices aren’t always best. Aashna realized that blindly following industry norms without understanding the client’s unique context can do more harm than good. Now, she takes extra time to understand the industries she works in, ensuring her strategy aligns with client goals and customer behaviors. She also stresses the importance of owning mistakes—informing managers or clients right away, rather than hiding errors, builds trust and accelerates recovery.

Common pitfalls in PPC accounts

Looking beyond her own experience, Aashna points out common errors she sees across accounts, such as landing page mismatches, outdated promotions, and over-reliance on automation. While checklists, processes, and automated tools can be useful, she warns against giving platforms total control, especially when it comes to ad copy and campaign structures. True value, she believes, comes from careful monitoring, structured testing, and most importantly, caring deeply about the campaigns you manage as if the budget were your own.

Why talking about mistakes matters

Reflecting on the industry as a whole, Aashna highlights why talking about mistakes matters. PPC specialists often struggle in silence with similar challenges, and open conversations help the whole community grow. For her, mistakes are only damaging if they’re hidden; when shared, they become lessons for everyone.

A lighthearted ending

To wrap things up on a lighter note, Anu asks what Aashna would call the movie of her PPC career. Her answer? “Answer the Universe.” Because in PPC, she says, you’re always answering—to clients, to platforms, and to unexpected challenges along the way.

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Anu Adegbola has been Paid Media Editor of Search Engine Land since 2024. She covers paid search, paid social, retail media, video and more. In 2008, Anu’s career started with delivering digital marketing campaigns (mostly but not exclusively Paid Search) by building strategies, maximising ROI, automating repetitive processes and bringing efficiency from every part of marketing departments through inspiring leadership both on agency, client and marketing tech side. Outside editing Search Engine Land article she is the founder of PPC networking event – PPC Live and host of weekly podcast PPC Live The Podcast.
She is also an international speaker with some of the stages she has presented on being SMX (US, UK, Munich, Berlin), Friends of Search (Amsterdam, NL), brightonSEO, The Marketing Meetup, HeroConf (PPC Hero), SearchLove, BiddableWorld, SESLondon, PPC Chat Live, AdWorld Experience (Bologna, IT) and more.