r/GoogleAdsDiscussion

Hey everyone, hoping someone can help me figure out what's going on.

For months, Google Ads conversions were tracking fine. We didn't change the website, the tracking code, the conversion action, or the campaign settings. Then suddenly, conversions stopped appearing in Google Ads.

What we know:

• The Google Ads tag is still firing (checked via Tag Assistant).
• Conversions are still happening on our end (payments are completed).
• GCLIDs are still being captured and stored.
• We send both GCLID and user_data (email) for Enhanced Conversions.
• We even tried a Google Ads offline conversion import using the exact same GCLIDs — and still nothing shows up.

No error messages, no disapproved landing pages, no billing issues. The account is active and campaigns are running.

Has anyone else experienced conversions just disappearing with no explanation? What else should we check?

Thanks in advance.

We are looking for an experienced Google Display Ads Expert to manage and optimize display advertising campaigns targeting the United States market.
Responsibilities:
Create and manage Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns
Optimize targeting, placements, and bidding strategies
Improve CTR, traffic quality, and campaign performance
Monitor and reduce invalid/bot traffic
Analyze campaign data and provide recommendations
Create and test ad creatives and ad groups
Manage budgets and maximize ROI
Requirements:
Proven experience with Google Display Ads
Strong understanding of audience targeting and placements
Experience with manual CPC and campaign optimization
Ability to analyze performance data and generate reports
Knowledge of conversion tracking and Google Analytics is a plus
Job Type: Freelance / Part-Time / Full-Time
To apply, please share:
Your Google Ads experience
Previous campaign results or case studies
Expected monthly salary or hourly rate

TG : @marlborolarry

Hi everyone,
I’m a stonemason from Germany, and I’m looking to improve my business through Google Ads.
My company is located west of Munich, and there are quite a few competitors in my area. Most of my work is related to gravestones.
I’m wondering which type of Google Ads campaign would be more effective for a local business like mine: Search or Performance Max? (budget: 20€ per day)
Also, do you have any general tips for running Google Ads successfully for a local business? For example, any advice on keywords, budget, targeting, or common mistakes to avoid would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you very much for your help!

Hey everyone,

My campaign was doing pretty well, so I decided to add a few new keywords to reach more people. After making those changes, performance dropped and conversions became much lower than before. Could adding new keywords really affect the whole campaign this much?

Hi everyone,

I’m completely new to Google Ads and could really use some honest advice from people who have actually been through this.

I own a local business and I’m thinking about starting Google Ads with a budget of around ₹10,000–₹15,000 per month. I’m not expecting miracles overnight—I mainly want to learn, generate some leads, and understand whether Google Ads can work for my business.

The thing is, one of my friends owns an IT agency, and he’s been telling me that Google Ads is extremely difficult to manage on your own, that beginners usually waste their money, and that I probably won’t get any results unless I hire an agency. While I understand he has experience, I also can’t tell whether he’s giving genuine advice or trying to convince me to become a client.

I’d actually like to try running the campaigns myself first so I can learn the basics before paying someone else. I know I’ll probably make mistakes, but that’s part of the learning process.

So I have a few questions:

Is ₹10k–₹15k/month a reasonable budget to start with for a local business?

Is it realistic for a beginner to learn Google Ads well enough to get decent results?

At what point does it make sense to hire an agency instead of managing it yourself?

If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do differently to avoid wasting money?

I’d really appreciate a reality check from people who have managed Google Ads themselves or worked with agencies. I’m looking for honest opinions rather than sales pitches.
Thanks in advance!

Hey guys, need some honest input.
I’m in a very competitive local service niche with one dominant competitor.
My current situation:
Quality Score: 2–3 (feels closer to 2 lately)
Expected CTR: Below average (main issue)
Ad relevance: Average (doesn’t seem to matter much here)
Landing page experience: Below average

CTR history:
Years ago: 8–10%
Last year: 4–5%
Last 3 months: 1–2% max on my main keyword

Context:
I don’t run ads constantly. I usually turn campaigns on/off and run them about 7–10 days per month, sometimes with aggressive bid spikes.
My main competitor has a Quality Score of ~8 and is almost always above me.
The problem is:
👉 To even compete for top position, I have to bid very high for longer periods
👉 That’s not profitable in my business model
So what happens:
He stays on top most of the time
I stay below
Some days I get 200–300 impressions with zero clicks

What I’m seeing now:
Impression share dropping
Ads not showing consistently anymore
Even when I bid high, results are weak

Question:
Did my low CTR over the last few months basically destroy my expected CTR and overall auction eligibility?
And realistically:
👉 Can you recover from QS 2–3 in this situation
👉 Or is this basically a downward spiral once Google loses trust?

Hey everyone, I have a question about conversion tracking in a B2B context.

I'm working on our conversions in Google Ads. Our primary conversion is "Request a Quote," and for the secondary conversion I'm still deciding between "Purchase" or "Call."

Here's my problem: on our website, the "Request a Quote" button is just an image of a printer.. nothing indicates that it's actually a "Request a Quote" button. During a sales meeting, a client actually asked where that button was, so I know for a fact that it's too hidden.

I already brought this up with my team lead, but I get the feeling he doesn't think it's that important or that it would change much. He's obviously more experienced than me, so now I'm second guessing myself.. does a clearer button actually make a meaningful difference for conversions, or am I overthinking this?

Curious what you all think.

The verdict most people land on: platform-side conversion tracking optimizes toward whoever fires the pixel, so if your conversion action is signup, Smart Bidding will keep buying you free trialers. The fix is feeding actual Stripe payments back as the conversion, not the signup. Three real paths:

Offline conversion import with gclid. Capture gclid at signup, store it against the user, then upload back to Google when Stripe fires a payment event. Free, native to Google Ads, works with Smart Bidding once you're feeding ~30+ conversions per campaign per month. Cons: engineering time (usually 2-3 days for a first version), gclid can drop if users clear cookies or come through iOS, and you're stuck writing your own reconciliation logic for delayed payments. Google's 90-day gclid window helps but doesn't save you if the click never got stored right

Enhanced Conversions for Leads with first-party data. Hash email at signup, pass it back via Google Ads API when the user pays. Better match rates than gclid (email survives cookies), free, but same engineering lift as gclid plus you need first-party consent handling. Best if you already have a solid backend event pipeline

Third-party tool between Stripe and Google. Attributely is the one I keep seeing come up for self-serve SaaS. Joins Stripe revenue to ad spend at campaign level, sends real payers back to Google (and Meta, LinkedIn) via Conversions API so bidding optimizes toward money not signups. Setup runs about an hour with no dev. Pricing scales with ad spend, roughly $99-$299/mo at typical SaaS spend, so cost climbs if you're pushing serious volume. Only covers paid channels, so organic attribution still lives elsewhere. Cometly does the same category but priced closer to $500+/mo and skews sales-team heavy for self-serve

What tipped it for me was the delayed-payment matching. Rolling gclid uploads myself meant a weekly cron job and constant reconciliation when trials converted 14+ days after click. Buying the pipe was cheaper than my time

If you're doing under $5k/mo in ad spend, gclid upload is fine. Above that, the tool math starts winning. Which side are you on?

I’m a garage door company owner in the Atlanta metro area, and I’m considering increasing my Google Ads budget.
For those of you running PPC for garage door repair and installation in Atlanta (or similarly competitive markets):
- What’s your average CPC (cost per click)?
- What’s your average cost per lead?
- How much are you spending per month?
- Are you running Search only or Performance Max too?
- Are you sending traffic to your website or a dedicated landing page?
If you’re comfortable sharing, roughly how many booked jobs are you getting each month from PPC?
I’m trying to figure out what’s realistic before scaling my budget. I’ve heard everything from $20–40 CPC and $80–200+ per lead, so I’d love to hear real-world numbers from other contractors.
Thanks in advance!

I am running google ads for the towing business everything is working well. I have worked by myself in my Google ads career and didn't have anyone to consult. I learned from YouTube and chatgpt. so now I want to know what is a good and best ROAS for towing business?

I’ve seen very different approaches.

Some people recommend almost one keyword (or one very tight theme) per campaign/ad group for maximum control.

Others recommend consolidating campaigns, using broad match with Smart Bidding, and letting Google optimize.

If you were building a search account from scratch today for a local service business (roofing, pest control, etc.), how would you structure it?

I’m interested in hearing what actually works in practice, not just Google’s recommendations.

Why do you prefer your approach?

I created Google search ads probably a month ago. Initially, I added phrase match and exact match keywords but the ads didn't serve. So, I moved all of the keywords match type to phrase match and some to broad match type. Still it didn't serve. I tried following;

1. Increasing daily budget

2. Checking for restrictions or policy violations

3. Changing the bid strategy to Max clicks from conversions

4. Duplicating the campaign

5. Increasing the geo targeting from certain locations to the entire country

6. No negative keywords are added to the account. I removed them

I tried everything I could. After multiple attempts to contact the Google support team, now I am posting this question here for help from any expert out there.

Any help or support or way out to fix this would be appreciated. Thanks!

P.S.

Thanks 🙏 to each one of you who responded and were helpful. I was finally able to resolve this issue. Eventually, the security check was stuck with Google.Which they attended today, unfortunately so late.

I have been given a task to find a way to send feedback to google ads so it can get us right customers, issue is my boss is paying a lot of money to google ads he is seeing good results but now he wants more better results and less spending on google ads is there any way to feed that data to google ads? To say this all the customers we got from running ads we have categorised them excellent, moderate, garbage excellent means the customers who are really beneficial, moderate means customers whi generated low amount tickets and garbage meant who called or clicked on ad but didn’t took any action

I'm hoping someone here has dealt with something similar because I'm running out of ideas.

I run Google Ads for my business and for the last few months I've been dealing with what I can only describe as targeted click fraud.

This isn't random bot traffic or competitors. I know who's doing it. It's one of my exes, and I have enough evidence outside of the click data to be confident about that. The problem isn't proving who it is, it's figuring out how to stop them from wasting my ad budget.

This person is actually pretty persistent. They'll use multiple devices, rotate IPs constantly using mobile data, and occasionally use VPNs. At one point I was able to identify one of the Android devices because it had a very distinctive browser fingerprint. Once I blocked that, the activity shifted to an iPhone. Obviously I can't just block every iPhone because that would block a huge portion of my legitimate customers too.

Over the last few weeks I've gone completely overboard trying to stop this.

I built my own visitor logger that records pretty much everything I can get from a website: IPs, user agents, timestamps, pages visited, referrers, GCLIDs, UTM parameters, and request details. I integrated FingerprintJS to identify repeat visitors when the IP changes. I set up Cloudflare WAF rules, rate limits, bot protection, and started maintaining my own blacklist of hundreds of IPs. I've tried .htaccess, Hostinger's IP blocking, WordPress security plugins—you name it.

Some of it definitely helps, but the biggest problem is that the IP address changes constantly. IP blocking alone just isn't enough when someone is determined and keeps switching networks and devices.

At this point I'm thinking the only realistic solution is dedicated click fraud software.

I'm currently looking at ClickGUARD, ClickCease, Clixtell, Lunio, ClickGuardian and TrafficGuard.

Has anyone here actually used any of these against a situation like this?

What I really care about is software that's good at recognising the same person even when they're changing IP addresses and switching between a couple of devices. I don't mind paying for it if it actually works—I just don't want to waste money on another tool that's basically just an IP blacklist with nicer reporting.

Would really appreciate any recommendations from people who've actually used these products.

I manage a service account (bathroom renovations). The account has a Pmax per location where it offers the service. Campaigns do not lose any impressions by budget, they lose by ranking. They have 40% more budget/day than they actually spend. How do you scale this account? In META you can work manual bids but here it doesn't work the same.

Hey Marketers , has anybody become successful with pmax campaigns for zero conversion accounts? Especially the b2b software industry? And what is your experience so far with video conversion ads on youtube, how effective is that?

I am asking everything for a brand new google ads account and the location is usa.

I have set up this conversion action for the first time with shopify.
These errors are showing, this is my first time setting up ads in google.
Can you please tell me what went wrong and how can I fix it?
Its showing miss Missconfigured and status is inactive. Kinda overwhelmed with the settings! Its been 24 hours since the set up.

https://preview.redd.it/e027ocep6dah1.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=f901cb1021eb23843d969874a7b1fea807e3cbca

https://preview.redd.it/e6n88gyr6dah1.png?width=1365&format=png&auto=webp&s=043e18d6eb2b67e7aaf4ddc775e68be4e4fbe704

https://preview.redd.it/vtmbv9mt6dah1.png?width=1363&format=png&auto=webp&s=a48be1b2538f71d0eccc7efc7eaf8bcd17056237

https://preview.redd.it/n22pj8tz6dah1.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=d55e56d694a3085af36e8d562d50c09ab8933e8b

Most merchants think Google Merchant Center reviews work in one simple way.

You submit your store, google checks it, then you either get approved or suspended.

But in reality, it’s much deeper than that.

From what we’ve seen after handling hundreds of suspension cases and our insiders contact, there are 3 layers behind GMC reviews, and understanding them changes how you think about approvals, suspensions, and appeals.

Layer 1 - Automated scanning

This is the first layer, and it happens constantly, not just when you submit.

Google systems continuously scan your feed, crawl your website, and look for patterns tied to known violations.

They check things like:

• feed data
• product pages
• pricing
• availability
• policies
• technical signals
• crawl paths

This layer doesn’t understand context. It only detects mismatches and suspicious patterns.

Examples:

• feed price doesn’t match website price
• broken product pages
• missing attributes
• weird redirects
• policy wording triggering trust issues.. etc

A lot of product disapprovals happen here without any human ever looking at the account.

Layer 2 - Semi-automated risk scoring

This is the layer almost nobody talks about.

And honestly, this is where a lot of misrepresentation cases actually live.

Once something gets flagged, Google runs the account through internal systems and tools that evaluate much more than just the visible issue.

Every part gets scanned:

• business details + setup
• policies
• address quality
• domain history
• account behavior
• digital footprint outside the store
• historical compliance.. etc

This layer builds a trust score and a risk score around your business.

Then the system decides what happens next.

Sometimes it gets auto-resolved.
Sometimes it gets escalated.
Sometimes it goes straight to suspension.

This is why two stores can have the exact same visible issue and get completely different outcomes.

Same trigger.
Different trust score.

That’s also why many merchants say:
“Everything looks fine but my GMC is still suspended.”

Usually the issue is deeper than what’s visible on the surface.

Layer 3 - Human review

This happens in fewer cases than people think.

Usually on:

• appeals
• high-risk accounts
• more complex suspensions

A human reviewer checks the account manually.

But they’re not spending hours reading every page.

They scan fast for:

• consistency
• trust signals
• red flags
• compliance issues

And important thing… they don’t only see your storefront.

They can also see:

• historical flags
• internal notes
• risk indicators with internal tools

This is one reason failed appeals can make things harder over time.

Most merchants think human review is the whole review process.

In reality, a lot of decisions are already heavily influenced before a human even touches the account.

That’s why random fixes and repeated appeals usually fail.

Fixing GMC properly means understanding which layer actually triggered the issue, not just changing random things on the store.

Hope this helps some of you understand the system a bit better.