r/PPC

I've been looking at this from the law firm side and it's a mess. Google Ads reports 47 conversions. Meta Ads claims 32. The call tracking vendor logged 61 calls. The attorneys signed 9 retainers. Every platform takes credit for the same leads and the numbers never reconcile.

When you line the dashboards up side by side, you realize you've been paying three vendors to fight over the same phone call. The client who actually signed came from one channel, but all three platforms counted it as their win.

For PPC specifically: how are you dealing with this? Do you trust Google's conversion count at face value, do you build a separate attribution model, or do you just accept the overlap and report something different to the client? Curious what actually works in practice, not what the platform docs say should work.

I have a relatively new ecommerce business that has started out with just a Shopping campaign.

There is plenty of work to be done I'm sure, not only with Shopping but Search/Meta/etc etc.

What I would like to do is hire someone to:

- Audit and strategise across all paid media

- Carry out any immediate work on the Shopping campaign and/or other channels

But the unconventional part:

- I'd like you to talk me through the decision making and processes, ideally live. I'm willing to potentially pay a premium if needed, to essentially be taught how to run the paid media to a serviceable standard myself.

- What this would look like exactly I would be led by you, how often, how long. Presumably zoom etc.

This would ideally be done (for both of us I imagine) over a relatively short space of time ie. less sessions but longer as opposed to shorter but more frequent sessions. But again, will to defer to you. I'm not necessarily against the idea of screen-recorded sessions but that'd be a conversation to have.

Edit with some context: It was started a couple of months ago. Shopping budget was 2.5k gbp p/m until this week, dropped it to 1.8k for the time being.

Thanks!

I've started getting some clients for my new Meta Ads service but the whole onboarding process is a nightmare - so many hoops to jump through. Is there a standard way of doing this? So much easier with Google Ads! I've just been told I can't even add a new ads account - I only have one on the portfolio.

The other issue I see with the Google switch is that advertisers will have a historic ROAS they have hit which is well above the new target they set due to Google maximizing their performance previously. Advertisers will now try to set their tROAS where they have been hitting in the past and that will create a vicious cycle of Google being more conservative and participating in less auctions, which then starves the account of the data it needs. Many people have seen this over the years when trying to increase tROAS closer toward actual results, only to see the performance drop.

I am managing a google ad campaign for a corporate event company. they gave me a list of their top 50 or so venues where people tend to book. My thought is we could add keywords for each venue. But would this hurt campaign performance?

I am thinking we phrase match things like "corporate event venue name" and "corporate conference venue name", etc.

This would lead to having hundreds of additional keywords. Is this a problem in Google ads? I seem to be seeing conflicting answers online.

I'm watching this video by Sabri Subi, and he's pushing to spend as much as possible on ads , however...he also owns an agency, so since he probably makes a commission on ad spend, maybe that's why he's pushing that?

He says that spending as much as possible puts you in "apex predator" position to outbuy all the competition.

I don't have much experience in PPC, to the guys out there who have been doing this since the early 2000's, what's your take on this?

One ad, video customized per placement group (Feeds, Stories, Reels, In-stream ads for videos and reels, Status, Search results, Right column) so the crops fit. Ads Manager copies primary text and headline into each group as separate fields.

Later we updated the ad copy. Edited the main text, saved. But every customized placement group silently kept the old text, so the outdated version kept showing. I had to edit every group individually.

Meta's AI support says: leave the text fields in the placement customizations empty and they fall back to the main text. I can't find that documented anywhere (in the API each placement text is its own asset, a fork with no merge back).

1. Has anyone verified the blank-field fallback actually works?
2. Can you customize media only per placement while text stays controlled in one place?
3. Or is the answer "duplicate the ad and never touch text fields in placement groups"?

(Advantage+ creative enhancements already checked.)

Thanks in advance!

How much do you spend on an ad set before turning it off during testing?

This week we went live with our app and we made a launch video which is performing well on IG, but on TikTok we have basically 0 clicks. So we tried to boost it with ad spend. However, the ad gets rejected.. but we don’t understand why..?

What are we doing wrong? I added the link of the video in the post.

I used to spend way more time looking at CPC and CTR in isolation.

Now I care a lot more about what happens after the click. Conversion quality, new customer rate, profitability, and whether the traffic is actually helping the business grow.

The platforms have also gotten much better at optimizing toward deeper conversion goals, which makes the quality of the data you feed them way more important.

What metric has become more important in how you manage PPC?

Looking at yesterday’s results and… hoo boy. LARGE spikes up YoY that break trends we’ve been seeing. We spend a fair bit (retail goods vertical) and had already prepped for this change by adjusting targets to actual performance etc. etc.

I had a pet theory that this would happen; Google suddenly making less “valuable” conversions worth as much as the more valuable ones would inherently bring more accounts into these auctions, raising CPCs. Seems like I may be right.

I usually hate the “curious if anyone else is blah blah” AI engagement bait, but I’m actually interested if we’re on an island or I’m right and Google just popped champagne at 8am in Mountain View.

I’ve noticed I’m making fewer small changes than I used to.

With automated bidding and broader targeting getting better, I spend more time setting the right goals, watching the bigger trends, and letting campaigns collect enough data before jumping in.

I still make manual adjustments, but usually when there’s a clear reason rather than just because I haven’t touched the account in a few days.

Curious how other PPC people are working now. Are you making fewer manual changes than a few years ago, or are you still pretty hands on?

I have a client running 4 Google Search campaigns that are all optimized for max conversions. My agency runs the Google Ads for only one division of their company, so sometimes soemthing will change with their website/GA4/GTM that messes things up for us and we have no control over it. Recently, something happened and every single one of their conversions is "misconfigured", even the ones that we don't use but other teams do. I tried what I could to troubleshoot, but my account only has so many permissions and I don't really know what broke or how long it'll take to fix.

I notified the client but their web team can sometimes take a long time to fix something and other times be very quick, so I have no idea how long our campaigns will be affected. In order to keep the campaigns running well and optimized, how should I proceed? I don't feel like I can keep them on Max Conversions since we know they won't record conversions, but if this gets fixed in the next day or two, changing the campaign goals multiple times would trigger multiple learning periods which also seems like a bad idea. Max Clicks seems like a good way to get trash traffic, especially because their in a niche B2B space.

ETA: I've gotten this comment a couple times so I will add, conversions are not being recorded at all, they are actually broken.

I'm more of a Google Ads person, so I'm not as experienced in Meta ads. When I think of Meta campaign management, I don't really see so much levers for optimizations.

Let's say the campaigns are all built and you have your tracking in place. Apart from that, is there really anything to optimize except uploading new ads and review the reports?

4 or 5 years ago when I was managing Facebook ads, we used to test ad sets (detailed audience targeting, Lookalike, etc.) as an optimization task which doesn't seem it's necessary anymore since the introduction of Advantage+.

On Google, there's really a lot that you need to keep an eye of. I just want to make sure that I'm not missing anything big in terms of optimization in Meta Ads.

We all have our routine optimizations: adjusting targets/bids, adjusting geos, reviewing search terms, shifting budgets toward stronger campaigns, testing creative, etc. But what about those stubborn accounts where performance never feels good enough?

What do you do when you’ve gone through the usual optimization checklist and performance still isn’t moving? What are your go-to strategies when you feel like you’ve run out of levers to pull?

Curious if anyone has specific analyses, tests, or less-obvious optimizations they turn to in these situations.

Running $30k+/month on Meta and making kill/scale decisions based on platform ROAS? You're probably cutting profitable campaigns.

Here's the problem: iOS14 attribution gaps mean Meta only captures 40-60% of actual conversions. In-platform ROAS will always look lower than reality.

The fix is blended MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio):

Total Shopify Revenue / Total Ad Spend = Blended MER

This accounts for ALL revenue against ALL spend, regardless of attribution windows or pixel gaps.

Quick toggle test to find your real Meta contribution:

1. Pause Meta for 7 days

2. Watch blended revenue drop

3. Restart Meta

4. Calculate the revenue gap

That gap is your actual Meta-driven revenue. Compare it to what Meta's dashboard reported — that's your attribution gap %.

Most brands running this find Meta contributes 1.5-2x what the platform claims. Campaigns that "aren't working" per ROAS are often your volume drivers.

Before you kill anything based on in-platform ROAS alone, run the blended MER check first.

Hey all - I manage ~100 campaigns and have been in this role for like 4 years now. I'm just wondering which platforms (if any) people are using the streamline basic account optimizations these days? Just looking to reduce time spent effectively.

I am running an experiment off my base campaign. The budget split is 50/50.

But, now after 2.5 weeks, the base is barely serving and the experiment is spending just fine.

The base campaign is a max conversjon with tCPA. The Experiment is a max conversions (no tCPA) and targets a conversion action lower down the funnel.

Has anyone run into this before? How can I get my base to actually serve impressions again.

Additonal Context:

- There is plenty of budget to spend. I can even increase the budget but none of my IS lost is due to budget (0%) for the base.

- I even increased my tCPA by 15% for a week on the base campaign to test and see if that gets it to serve. Nothing happened

- no other warnings, policy issues….etc

Any pros/cons? If you have a .eu domain you can run the subdomains in one google account and split by feed and its country? VS simply one account per separate country. Is one better than the other?

Hi members, any best practices for DemandGen? I am struggling with the audiences, the focus is to get more conversions.