CPC’s up, conversions down? Orchestrate data to find performance shifts

Your CPA just jumped. Was it you, or a competitor? Right now, can you actually tell?

For most paid search teams the honest answer is no. Not quickly, and not with confidence.

Every tool in your stack can see inside your account. Spend, impressions, clicks, CPC, conversion rate. What none of them can see is the market that account competes in. And that missing half is exactly where the answers live.

Here’s the problem with every dashboard you’ve ever used. It can tell you a number moved. It can’t tell you a competitor caused it, or that the whole market shifted and your position is actually fine, or what to do about either. So the work lands on you, by hand, under time pressure, working with half the picture.

This isn’t a reporting gap you can close with more charts. Another dashboard is still a dashboard. The fix is a different starting point: your account data, joined to what every other advertiser in your market is doing, then run through models that have seen this pattern before.

That’s what Decision Intelligence does. It joins your own Google Ads or ChatGPT Ads data, where Adthena has coverage, to Whole Market View™, our patented view of the market built on over 14 years of paid search data. Then it hands back the answer, an action rather than a chart: which terms to negate, which ad copy to fix, which budget to move, and why.

Four problems make the point.

Your quality score is sliding before your CPCs show it

Quality scores drop quietly, campaign by campaign, weeks before the CPC increase shows up on an invoice. By the time it’s visible in billing, the fix is already overdue.

Decision Intelligence checks a Google Ads account for quality score drops over the last 30 days and shows exactly where: which campaigns, how far the score fell, how many ads are affected, and whether the landing pages behind them are broken or outdated. At the same time it benchmarks your ad copy against what competitors are actually running, flags weak wording and stronger angles worth testing, and checks whether AI Overviews are already cutting into that ad’s visibility.

What comes back is a prioritized list of campaigns to fix first. Not a warning that arrives after the CPC has already moved.

The market moved, and nobody connected it to your account

A spend or revenue swing almost always gets one of two explanations: the market did something, or something changed internally. Rarely does anyone connect the two with any precision.

Decision Intelligence runs both diagnostics together. It researches market-wide developments for the topic, drawing on public sentiment, industry news, and corporate moves, while breaking your own performance across two comparable windows down into impressions, click-through rate, conversion rate, and average order value to isolate which one actually moved. Competitor activity in the relevant segment goes on top. So the answer isn’t “revenue dropped.” It’s which part of the funnel dropped, and which competitor move lines up with the timing.

There’s demand in your market you’re not bidding on

Growth stalls quietly when budget concentrates on brand terms while generic, non-brand demand goes to competitors. There’s rarely a systematic way to see it happening.

Decision Intelligence compares six months of market-wide demand from Whole Market View™ against your account’s actual non-brand coverage and spend, and returns a shortlist of the highest-value keyword gaps, filtered against a return on ad spend threshold so the list is grounded in what’s worth bidding on, not just what has volume. It also checks whether you already rank organically or appear in AI Overviews for those terms, so you can see where visibility is missing across every surface, not paid search alone.

Budget is leaking into clicks that never convert

Negative keyword hygiene is one of the most reliably neglected tasks in a paid search account, and the cost compounds across Search, Shopping, and Performance Max every month it goes undone.

Decision Intelligence compares your own search term footprint in Adthena against your Google Ads search terms report and flags two things at once: terms spending with zero conversions, and terms with real demand your account never picked up. The output isn’t a recommendation to review later. It’s an upload-ready file for Google Ads Editor with the negatives already built, and a projected saving over the next 30 days.

Four problems, one idea

None of those four are separate tools. They’re the same underlying idea applied four ways: your own account data, joined to what every other advertiser in your market is doing, run through models built on over 14 years of paid search history.

That data is the product. Decision Intelligence is one way to reach it, alongside the app, the API, the Adthena MCP server, and the agents your team is already building. Same data, every route in. And it’s the join most tools can’t make. A tool that only sees inside your account can tell you a number changed. It can’t tell you a competitor caused it, or that the whole market moved together and your position is fine. Decision Intelligence can, because it starts with your account and adds the market on top.

The order matters. You name the problem. Decision Intelligence runs the checks against your own Google Ads or ChatGPT Ads account first, on the campaigns that matter, so the answer is grounded in your actual spend, not a hunch. Only then does Adthena data go to work: the cause, the competitor context, and the action.

What’s live today

Decision Intelligence is in Alpha. Today, each of the four examples above ships as a shareable, editable report or an upload-ready file. The direction of travel is in-app delivery with one-click apply for the recommendations you agree with. Google Ads and ChatGPT Ads are the early platforms, with Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and others on the way.

See what it produces

We pointed Decision Intelligence at six verticals: retail, travel, finance, pharma, B2B SaaS, and agencies. One live account anchored each, benchmarked against its whole market. The result is one action per vertical, each grounded in real market data.

See how Decision Intelligence works and what it can do on your account.