When No One Owns the Algorithm, the Algorithm Owns You

When no one owns the algorithm, the algorithm owns you…

I recently audited an account for a local manufacturer.

At first glance, it looked fine. Lead volume was very healthy, and nothing seemed obviously broken.

But one thing really stood out: A single PMax campaign represented more than half of the total lead volume. And nearly all of those “conversions” were call extension clicks.

That didn’t make sense, because this wasn’t a low-consideration purchase.
This was a business manufacturing custom parts, and required higher consideration, more research, and more nuance.

Yet this one campaign, optimizing toward all account-level conversions, was producing almost exclusively calls from ad extensions.

When the client and I looked at the call logs, the pattern became pretty obvious: A large portion of those calls were junk. Irrelevant to the business and not viable opportunities.

Nothing was technically “wrong.” The algorithm was doing exactly what it was told to do: optimize for conversion count.

The real issue was ownership.

The account hadn’t been meaningfully touched in over eight months.

Performance had been strong before that. So the manager assumed it would continue. And the client assumed the manager was on top of it.

No one was actively reviewing the composition of conversions or sanity-checking the lead quality.

And unfortunately, there was also no feedback loop from a CRM to tell the system which leads actually mattered.

So the algorithm kept optimizing. And without human oversight, it drifted… slowly, and quietly. And the longer no one owned it, the more confidently it moved in the wrong direction.