Series: Thinking in Systems for Digital Marketers | Article 2 of 6
This series applies the core concepts of Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer to the realities of digital marketing. Each article draws directly from the book and translates its frameworks into practical tools for mid-level marketers. If you haven’t read Article 1 yet, we recommend starting there.
“The least obvious part of a system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior.” — Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems
You’ve been there. Your Google Search campaign starts underdelivering. CPCs are climbing, impression share is dropping, and conversions have gone quiet. The natural instinct kicks in: refresh the headlines, write new ad copy, swap in different keywords. You spend a week on it. The campaign still doesn’t move.
The problem isn’t creative. It never was.
What you’re experiencing is a system behaving according to its rules — and no amount of creative refreshing changes the rules. To fix it, you have to go deeper than the elements you can see and get to the interconnections that are actually driving the behavior.
The hierarchy Meadows never explicitly draws — but implies throughout
In Article 1, we introduced the three components of any system: elements, interconnections, and purpose. Meadows is clear that these are not equal in their power to shape a system’s behavior.
Elements — the visible, tangible parts — are the easiest to change and the least impactful. Interconnections — the rules, signals, and information flows between elements — are harder to see but far more powerful. And purpose, the function the system is actually serving, is the most powerful and the most overlooked of all.
Meadows writes:
“The interconnections hold the system together and largely determine how it behaves.”
This is the insight that most campaign troubleshooting misses entirely. When a Google campaign underperforms, the default response is to touch the elements: the ad copy, the keywords, the extensions. But the interconnections — the Quality Score logic, the bidding strategy, the match type structure, the conversion tracking setup — are what’s actually holding the system together. And they’re what’s actually determining how it behaves.
What interconnections look like inside a Google campaign
To make this concrete, it helps to map the actual interconnections operating inside a Google Search campaign. They’re not mysterious — but most marketers never think of them as a system’s connective tissue.
Quality Score is a pure interconnection. It’s the signal Google uses to connect your ad’s relevance (an element) to your actual cost and delivery (outcomes). A high Quality Score means your ad wins auctions at a lower cost. A low one means you pay more for worse placement — regardless of how good the creative is. You don’t control Quality Score directly. You influence it by managing the relationships between your keyword, your ad copy, and your landing page.
Bidding strategy is another interconnection. It’s the rule that governs how your budget flows toward impressions and clicks. Switching from Manual CPC to Target CPA or Target ROAS doesn’t change your ads — it changes the logic the system uses to decide when and to whom your ads appear. Same creative, completely different system behavior.
Conversion tracking is perhaps the most critical interconnection of all — and the most commonly broken one. It’s the information flow that tells Google what a “good outcome” looks like for your campaign. If your conversion tracking is misconfigured, firing on the wrong event, or delayed, the algorithm is learning from bad data. It will optimize — intelligently, diligently — toward the wrong goal. Your elements can be flawless and it won’t matter.
Match types govern the relationship between a user’s search query and your keywords. Broad match, phrase match, and exact match aren’t just different keyword settings — they’re different rules for how the system connects user intent to your ads. Shift from exact to broad match and you haven’t changed a single ad. You’ve changed the interconnection, and the system’s behavior changes dramatically with it.
The Google Ads system is not neutral
Here is something Meadows would recognize immediately about Google’s ad platform: it is a system with its own purpose, and that purpose is not identical to yours.
“When a system’s interconnections carry information, the system can act as if it has a purpose of its own — one that may not match the stated goals of its participants.”
Google’s system is designed to maximize auction participation, ad relevance, and — ultimately — revenue for Google. Your campaign operates inside that system. When your goals align with Google’s (relevant ads, high-quality landing pages, engaged users), the system works with you. When they diverge — when you’re chasing cheap clicks, gaming match types, or optimizing for a metric Google can’t verify — the system works against you, often invisibly.
This is why Performance Max campaigns confuse so many marketers. You hand Google your assets and your conversion goal, and the system decides everything else: where to show your ads, to whom, on what placements, at what times. The elements you control are minimal. The interconnections are almost entirely Google’s. The system’s actual purpose — efficient conversion at Google’s scale — may or may not match your actual business goal.
Understanding this doesn’t mean avoiding Performance Max. It means going in with clear eyes about whose system you’re operating in, and designing your inputs accordingly.
The rules change everything — the creative changes almost nothing
Meadows makes a point in Thinking in Systems that is almost counterintuitive on first reading:
“Changing elements usually has the least effect on the system. Changing interconnections — the relationships and rules — produces far more significant change.”
Let’s test this against a real campaign scenario.
Imagine a Google Search campaign targeting high-intent keywords for a SaaS product. The campaign has been running for 90 days. Conversions are stagnating. The marketing team refreshes every ad variation — new headlines, new descriptions, stronger CTAs. Two weeks later, results are roughly the same.
Then a different intervention: the team audits the conversion tracking and discovers the “lead form submitted” event is firing on page load, not on actual form submission. Every session that lands on the thank-you page — regardless of whether a form was completed — is being counted as a conversion. The algorithm has been optimizing for traffic, not leads.
They fix the tracking. Switch the bidding strategy from Target CPA (now recalibrated with clean data) to Maximize Conversions for a two-week learning period. Restructure the match types to reduce irrelevant broad match traffic.
Nothing about the creative changed. The interconnections changed. And the system begins to behave differently.
This is not a hypothetical. Broken conversion tracking is one of the most common and most invisible problems in Google Ads — and it’s a pure interconnection failure.
How to audit your interconnections, not just your elements
The next time a Google campaign underperforms, resist the reflex to touch the creative first. Run through this interconnection audit instead.
Conversion tracking: Is the right event firing? Is it firing at the right moment? Is it de-duplicating correctly? Is the data reaching Google within the attribution window? This is the information flow the entire system learns from. If it’s wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong.
Bidding strategy: Is the strategy appropriate for the campaign’s data volume? Target CPA and Target ROAS need sufficient conversion history to function — typically 30–50 conversions per month at minimum. A smart bidding strategy running on thin data isn’t smart. It’s guessing.
Match type structure: Are your match types creating the right relationships between user intent and your keywords? Broad match in the hands of a well-fed algorithm with strong conversion signals can be powerful. Broad match with weak or dirty conversion data is a system out of control.
Quality Score components: Check the three sub-scores — expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Each one maps to an interconnection: the relationship between your ad and user expectation, the relationship between your keyword and your copy, and the relationship between your ad and your landing page.
Campaign and ad group structure: Structure determines how budget, data, and signals flow through your account. Over-segmented accounts starve individual campaigns of the data they need to learn. Under-segmented accounts blur signals that should be kept separate. Structure is an interconnection decision, not an organizational preference.
What Meadows would say about your next campaign review
Meadows spent her career arguing that we consistently misdiagnose problems because we focus on events — this quarter’s numbers, this week’s CPCs — rather than the underlying structure producing those events.
“We are surprised at the outcomes our systems produce because we think the system should produce what we want. We forget that the system will produce what it is designed to produce.”
Your Google campaign is producing exactly what its interconnections are designed to produce. If that’s not what you want, the answer is rarely better creative. It’s a structural question: which rule, which signal, which information flow is generating this behavior — and what needs to change?
That shift in thinking — from “what should I change?” to “what rule is producing this?” — is the difference between a marketer who optimizes and one who understands.
Before your next campaign audit
When performance drops, before touching a single element, ask:
- What information is my system learning from? Check conversion tracking first, always. Clean data is the foundation everything else is built on.
- What rules are governing my system’s behavior right now? Review bidding strategy, match types, and campaign structure. Are these rules aligned with the outcome you actually need?
- Whose purpose is this system serving? Understand where your goals align with the platform’s incentives — and where they diverge. Design your campaign accordingly.
The creative is the part of your campaign everyone sees. The interconnections are the part that determines whether it works.
Meadows spent her career trying to get people to see past the visible surface of systems — to the rules and relationships underneath that do the real work. In Google Ads, as in any complex system, that’s where the leverage is.
Not in the headline. In the structure.
Next in the series: Article 3 — The bathtub model of digital marketing: why your pipeline drains faster than it fills
This series is based on Donella Meadows’ book Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), interpreted through a digital marketing lens.
