u/Positive-Raise-2072

running a local service account at about $60/day. the first month of pmax was pretty uneventful, which was actually fine. leads came in steadily, nothing spectacular, but enough that i didn’t have a reason to mess with it. then about a week ago, it basically went dead. same budget. same targeting. same geography. nothing major changed in the account. i checked the asset groups, search terms and where the traffic was coming from, and nothing immediately looked broken. five straight days with zero conversions. then yesterday it suddenly started behaving like nothing had happened and pulled in three leads in one afternoon. that’s the part i’m struggling with. with a bigger budget, i can understand giving the system some room and waiting through a rough patch. at $60/day, five days with nothing is a pretty meaningful chunk of spend for a local business. i left it alone because i didn’t want to start changing things just because performance dipped, and now i’m glad i did. but if it had stayed dead for another few days, i honestly don’t know where i would have drawn the line

for people running smaller local accounts, what’s your cutoff?

do you let pmax ride through a stretch like this, or is there a point where you stop waiting and move the budget into search?

Between automation, broad match, smart bidding and campaigns with less visible data, it feels like the job has changed quite a bit

Google wants advertisers to give the system more freedom. Advertisers want to know exactly where their money is going

Do you think the platform is genuinely becoming easier to manage, or are we just being asked to trust the black box more?

got a buddy who does custom decks and patios outside charlotte, talked him into letting me run his ads on the side. he's been doing everything by word of mouth for years which is fine, but he wants to grow a little so here we are.

set up a search campaign, tight geo, decent negative keyword list, keeping it simple. problem is every time i adjust a bid strategy or mess with the target cpa the thing resets and we sit through another two weeks of garbage data before it figures itself out again. small budget too, so the learning period drags out longer than it should.

i'm not throwing money at it to speed things up. that's not the move for a guy who does maybe 8 jobs a year at a high ticket price. low volume conversions are just rough to optimize around and google doesn't make it easier.

curious if anybody has found a way to work with low volume accounts without constantly triggering relearning. i keep the changes minimal but even small stuff seems to set it off. wondering if i'm better off just parking it on manual for a while and leaving it alone.