u/Adventurous_Wear4815

Running search campaigns for about 6 weeks now for a small ecommerce store selling handmade home decor. Budget has been modest but consistent, and the CTR looks decent around 45%. Getting clicks every day, people are landing on the product pages, some even add to cart, but actual completed purchases are basically zero.

I have conversion tracking set up through Google Tag Manager and it appears to be firing correctly, at least from what I can tell in the preview tool. Using Max Clicks right now while trying to gather data before switching to a smarter bidding strategy.

I'm trying to figure out where the dropoff is actually happening. Is this typically a landing page problem, a traffic quality issue, or something wrong with how the campaign is structured? My keywords are mostly phrase match with a decent negative keyword list, but maybe I went too broad somewhere.

Attribution and tracking issues are common culprits, but I genuinely cannot tell if people are just not buying or if my tracking is broken and sales are happening without being recorded.

Has anyone been through this exact situation and figured out what the real issue was? What steps did you take to diagnose it, rather than just throwing more budget at the problem and hoping something sticks?

I've been noticing a pretty consistent pattern with the Google Ads recommendation tab and the new AIassisted advisor features. Almost every suggestion pushes me to raise budgets, expand targeting, or switch to broader match. Rarely does anything in there actually help me tighten up conversion quality or cut wasted spend.

I ran a small test over the past few weeks where I followed the AI recommendations closely on one account and ignored them on a similar account. The one where I followed the suggestions saw spend go up about 30% with no meaningful improvement in cost per lead. The control account stayed flat and actually improved slightly just from manual bid adjustments.

I get that Google is a business and their incentives don't perfectly align with ours, but the AI layer makes this disconnect a lot more obvious. It's dressed up as smart optimization but mostly just seems to want more of your money.

Curious whether anyone is doing systematic tracking of when you follow AI recommendations versus when you override them. Are you actually seeing genuine conversion improvements from these suggestions, or is it mostly budget expansion with a different label on it?

Would love to hear from people managing both small and large accounts since I imagine the experience differs a lot depending on scale.

Hey everyone, hoping to get some insight from people who've been through this.

I run a small online store selling handmade home goods. I set up a Search campaign about three weeks ago targeting what I thought were solid keywords. I've spent around $800 so far, getting decent clickthrough rates, and my analytics shows people landing on the product pages and even spending time there. But I've had exactly zero completed purchases.

I checked my conversion tracking and it seems to be firing correctly. My landing pages load fast enough and look clean on mobile. I'm using broad match modified keywords and have added some negatives to cut out irrelevant traffic.

Things I'm currently wondering about:

Is my bidding strategy the problem? I started with Maximize Clicks and was thinking of switching to something else, but I'm not sure what makes sense without conversion data yet.

Could my product pages still be the issue even if people are spending time on them?

Is $800 even enough data to draw conclusions, or should I keep pushing before making changes?

I know there's no magic answer, but I'd love to hear what you all checked first when you hit a wall like this. What would your next move be?

Been working remotely for a couple of years now and I keep going back and forth on this. Some months I love the freedom of being in Southeast Asia or South America while my clients are based in Europe or the US. Other months the late night calls and awkward scheduling genuinely wear me down more than any office job ever did.

I feel like nobody really talks about the mental load of constantly doing time zone math, rescheduling around overlap windows, and apologizing to clients when you miss a narrow availability slot because you miscalculated a daylight saving change somewhere.

For those of you who have been doing this for three or more years, how did you actually manage it sustainably? Did you end up gravitating toward a base that gave you better overlap with your main clients? Or did you just set firm availability hours and let clients adjust?

I'm also curious whether your answer changes depending on whether you work for an employer versus running your own clients. My gut says freelancers have more leverage to set boundaries here but I could be wrong.

Not looking for the usual productivity app recommendations. More interested in the real adjustments people made to their lifestyle or client roster to make the time zone thing actually work without burning out. Appreciate any honest takes.

Had another call with a Google Ads rep this week and the whole thing was basically a pitch to move my smaller clients onto Smart Campaigns and maximize automated bidding. Every time I push back with actual performance data showing manual or enhanced CPC working better for certain accounts, the rep just loops back to the same talking points about automation being the future. I get that Google has financial incentives here. More automation generally means higher spend, and that Gemini post from earlier this week pretty much confirmed what most of us already suspected about where their priorities actually lie.

So how are other practitioners handling this pressure, especially for smaller accounts where tight budget control actually matters? I have a few clients spending under $2k a month where Smart Campaigns have historically just burned through budget with garbage conversion quality. Also curious whether anyone has found a way to have a genuinely productive conversation with reps, or if most of you have just stopped engaging entirely. The rep relationship used to feel worthwhile a few years ago. Now it feels like a sales call every single time, no matter what you bring to the table.

Would love to hear how others are navigating this, particularly those managing a mix of small and midsize accounts.

I've been nomading for about eight months now, mostly bouncing between Southeast Asia and Southern Europe. For the first few months I defaulted to cafes for the social vibe and low cost, but lately I've been experimenting more with coworking spaces and noticing some real tradeoffs I didn't expect.

Coworking spaces give you better internet reliability, proper desks, and a more focused atmosphere. But the monthly costs add up fast, especially in pricier cities, and the social dynamic feels oddly corporate sometimes. You're surrounded by other remote workers but everyone has headphones on anyway.

Cafes feel more alive and integrated into wherever you're actually living, but the wifi lottery is real and the guilt of nursing a single coffee for four hours is not a great feeling.

I've started mixing both depending on the type of work I have that day. Deep focus tasks at coworking spaces, lighter async stuff at cafes. Curious if others have landed on a similar split or found a completely different setup that works better.

Do you have a strong preference one way or the other? Has your answer changed depending on which country or city you were in? Would love to hear what's actually working for people right now rather than the generic advice you find in travel blogs.