I'm running a campaign for a friend at the moment, the traffic is low, the site he built is fine, but is getting a 'below average' score on landing page performance.
The ads are also good, it's just not converting at all.
I’ve been running ads for over a week now, and I have 3 impressions and no clicks. I’ve maxed out the titles, descriptions, photos, added my facebook business profile, etc. and it still says my ad strength is average. I don’t have anything else I can add to the campaign.
I’m considering hiring an agency to manage my google ads and i wonder how does one work with an agency.
i mean do i give them my google ads account or would they use their own? what information would they require from me? would their be a signed contract involved? if so what would it look like?
How many times has that happened to you?
Went about aggressively expanding the audience by introducing more relevant keyword ad groups. One group was amazing, 2 days in and I for £4 CPA, when the average on account is £12. I got such amazing beginners luck and just ignored all the future results until it slapped me in the face... No further conversion until it spent £70 in total with just thoese two earlier conversion making final CPA £35. paused the ad group.
The early random conversion was blinding me from seeing the data and I just kept on rolling with it and spending money unnecessirly.
Next. I did a deep cleanse on the account, just digging through all the keyword data on the account and do negative keyword selections. Then for the next 2 days I spent more in adwords than I had turnover.. ads account was loss making.
Now with the passage of time the reality of these changes have born fruit. The negative keyword exection has improve ROI massively. ANd that ad group that gave false hopes in the beginning has shown it's true face.
The randomness of running ads should not be ignored, you have to give things a decent run before reassessing them.
---------Start of background about me------------
Hey everyone, I'm 24 I graduated a year ago with a degree in computer science, I worked the first 3 years to pay off college and expenses sadly my dad wasn't really in the picture to help and by the final year I managed to build a web development agency and I was making really good money until a few months ago everything was going well but clients mostly disappeared because they bought into the whole notion of "AI already replaced programmers" mostly because of what Elon and Sam Altman are saying there are 3 types of clients now.
1- Unaware of AI in coding
2- They think we use AI to finish faster so we deserve to get paid less
3- They think its over and we are already replaced and they can just use ChatGPT to build their websites and they do it and they get really bad results and they think its good.
I personally use AI a tiny amount because its not that good at coding anything else other than really basic websites, which is why you tend to see all websites looking the exact same now.
For a few months I got into marketing and design so I can at least have a good base to move into PPC and lead gen running ads but still, I need exp and I need mentorship.
---------End of background about me------------
I have a few ideas about a business that I can try next as I stay away from coding for now especially with all the layoffs and AI stuff, but every way leads to me needing to know about running ads and getting exp in PPC, but the thing is I need to run a campaign or at least observe someone running a campaign so I can understand more instead of spending my own money while trying and failing more and more again before I reach a good level of expertise.
I will do anything just to get an opportunity even if its a low paying job at like $500 a month (I have savings and I moved back with my parents) or an unpaid internship just so I can get more exp.
I'm moving to Canada by early 2027 so I'm hoping I can get something going on my own before then to sustain my life there by then, I'm not asking for money just a chance and a mentor and I will do whatever is required from me if I get that chance.
Need some sanity check on my strategy from the experts
Hey everyone, need a check on my ads strategy from people who’ve worked in the food/restaurant industry.
I am a marketer at a restaurant brand with 5 outlets in the city. Offline business is solid, and even online orders through third-party delivery apps are decent. The problem is the commission fees are getting too high, so we’re launching our own online ordering website for direct food delivery.
Our AOV is around ₹900, and the goal is to start generating consistent direct orders through our own platform. Since the site is brand new, there’s basically no historical conversion data/pixel learning yet.
The challenge is budget, we only have around ₹1000/day to work with initially.
My current thinking is:
- Start with Google search ads with sales objective
- Target brand keywords + high-intent local search queries around our outlet locations
- Keep targeting tight and intent-driven instead of trying broad awareness campaigns
I did consider Meta ads, but with this budget, getting ~50 conversions/week to properly stabilize conversion campaigns feels unrealistic. So I’m thinking of bringing Meta in later mainly for retargeting once we start getting some consistent traffic/orders.
Does this approach make sense for the early stage, or am I missing a better way to approach this with a limited budget?
I got a campaign for a barbershop, and in the last 30 days I have been getting around 650 conversions, and I want know if this is enough to make the switch and make it profitable?
I have read before about it but some people say that they prefer to keep their campaigns in Max Conversions and keep it constant and others say that tCPA its like day and night in performance
Context: I'm moving from Meta ads to learning Google ads. Been doing Meta for years and it seems like second nature by now:
- Who to target (but basically creative does that)
- What should the pixel do (where do they convert / home)
- What do you want them to see (video/image/text)
That's it.
Easy.
Can even get more advanced with specific angles on retargeting, criteria, LLA, customers, etc. really doesn't matter.
But WOW, going to Google ads feels like trying to navigate the DMV.
Any advice for someone going from Meta to Google ads that I can get a more 1:1 this is recommended if you know that type of translation? Or something that helped "make it click"?
So I am a Immigration attorney based in Canada starting Google ads at a modest budget of around $1500 per month looking to get paid consultation for my services(LMIA or Spousal)
I have taken some course on Google ads and know the basics. My biggest concern is hiring an agency for this budget makes the whole process extremely expensive for me and the ROI won't even makes sense for a while.
I have had agencies tell me that it requires daily work and possibly upto 10-12 hours per week of management in my budget but I find extremely unbelievable.
What's the point where I can retain a agency and what should I do until I don't have that resources.
I’m dealing with a few campaigns that were performing consistently for months, but recently results dropped hard without any major account changes.
No big edits to targeting, keywords, budgets, or creatives — yet:
I’m trying to understand what usually causes this before making random optimizations.
For those running Google Ads or Meta campaigns daily:
Would love to hear real experiences from other advertisers and agency owners.
We recently audited an account that had already spent heavily on acquisition and found over $60K in total wasted spend. The surprising part was that the campaigns did not even look bad at first glance. There was traffic coming in and some conversions were showing up in the dashboard. Also, the spend was pacing normally. But once we started auditing the account, the underlying setup had major issues.
Conversion events were duplicating inside the tracking setup, which meant the platform was optimizing against inflated data. Important funnel stages were either missing or tracked incorrectly, so there was no reliable view of what was actually turning into revenue.
On the targeting side, a significant amount of spend was going toward low household income segments and age ranges that had almost no buying intent for the product. We also found that optimized targeting was enabled inside retargeting campaigns, which meant the platform was expanding far beyond the actual retargeting audience. In one case alone, more than $15K of retargeting spend was not even reaching qualified returning users.
This is the kind of stuff that usually does not show up in high level reporting. From the outside, the account looked healthy enough to justify scaling.
So once the tracking and targeting issues were fixed, conversion rates increased by 166%, the account generated more than 1,500 trial signups and 900 installs, and the company attributed over $1M in ARR to the rebuild in a single quarter.
So here's the lesson: A pattern I see pretty often is teams trying to scale campaigns before validating what the platform is actually optimizing toward. Small measurement and targeting issues compound really fast once spend increases. A lot of the biggest gains do not come from launching new creatives or adding more budget. They come from fixing the data quality, tightening targeting, improving attribution, and making sure the platform is learning from the right signals in the first place.
Curious about lessons that sound obvious afterward, but only became clear once real spend was involved.
We are a small business that made the mistake of running some Google ads. We had a daily budget of $16.40 and a monthly spending limit of $499. Google completely ignored our daily limit and racked up $1700 in one month, with daily charges ranging between $45 and $93 for a month. ZERO leads but a bunch of people wasting our time. We immediately canceled the ads. We have tried disputing and there is no one to talk to. We keep getting emails every day about Google threatening to send us to collections in 10 days.
What gives? This is insane. What happens if we don't pay it? Will it eventually get written off or will it exist in Google forever?
Hi,
I am currently watching the Google Marketing Live, and it looks like AI Max and Pmax are going to be the future.
I am worried about branded campaigns, is it worth keeping the branded campaigns? Is it worth to have them still on or turn them off and let Pmax and AI Max take over the branded search terms?
What do you guys think?
In Google Ads, I created a conversion action, which is first_open, from Google Analytics events. And I set that as a goal for the campaign. The ads link to App Store downloads.
Now, I can see first_open events from Google Analytics, I can see ads clicks from Google Ads, and I can see app downloads from Apple Connect. But from Google Ads, the conversion is always zero for all the ad groups of the campaign. So I am wondering are the downloads from organic traffic, or are they from the ads (click->app store->downloads) but Google Ads could not track it.
Any help is really appreciated
This sub gets the assignment better than most so I'll be direct.
The no-code movement solved half the problem. You can build almost anything now without knowing how to code, which is genuinely incredible and wasn't true five years ago. But there's still a gap that nobody talks about. Even with the best no-code tools you still have to know which tools to pick, how to connect them, how to write copy that converts, how to set up ad accounts, how to source products, how to structure a funnel. The learning curve didn't disappear, it just moved.
Most people in this sub know exactly what I mean. You've spent a weekend deep in Zapier trying to get two things to talk to each other that should just work. You've rebuilt your Webflow site three times because the first two didn't convert. You've watched your Notion dashboard get more elaborate while the actual business stayed the same size.
That's the gap Locus Founder closes.
You describe what you want to build. The AI handles everything else. It sources products directly from AliExpress and Alibaba (or sell YOUR OWN digital services, products, or content), builds a real storefront around them, writes conversion-optimized copy, then autonomously creates and runs ads on Google, Facebook and Instagram. No Zapier. No Webflow. No piecing together eight tools that half work. Just a running business.
If you don't have an idea yet it interviews you and figures out what makes sense for your situation.
We got into YCombinator this year and we're opening 100 free beta spots this week before public launch. Free to use, you keep everything you make.
For the people in this sub specifically, this isn't a replacement for no-code tools for people who love building. It's for everyone who wanted the outcome but never wanted to become a tools expert to get there. Big difference.
Beta form: https://forms.gle/nW7CGN1PNBHgqrBb8
Happy to answer anything about how it works under the hood.
Is it common for Google to just add assets and modify campaigns while they are paused? I recently turned an ad back on after pausing for a week or two and I noticed the performance was no where near what it had been. When I started investigating I noticed two new assets had been added that were not the landing page and the bidding strategy had been changed. It was just burning through my budget not acquiring any real leads. I'm really frustrated about having to go fix what was not broken. Has anyone else experienced this?
I'm interested to know how everyone uses audience segments in Google Ads, or if they use them at all.
I'm responsible for running my business' Google Ads, I'm no PPC expert, but the campaigns do tick along nicely for the small budget we have.
As a marketing generalist, I'm expected to do everything, whether I know how to or not! And I feel like there's so much more that we could be doing in Google Ads. Like utilising audience segments.
How does everyone use audiences? Can you go indepth and split audiences out by intent (ToFu, MoFu)? What pages users visit? Etc.
Genuinely interested to understand how people use audience segments. Thanks!
so I want to get into running google ad campaigns but I have no idea how to get into it I mostly want to do online ecommerce and run ads for it but I have 0 exp with it and I've been only a webdev for almost 4 years
Need some advice from people who’ve worked on performance marketing for restaurant/bakery/food brands.
A brand that’s upgrading their static site to a site with own direct online ordering to reduce the orders on 3rd party platforms, and I’m currently planning the performance marketing strategy. The challenge is that the budget is fairly limited, and the product category includes bakery items, restaurant food and hampers.
The brand have 12 locations and 5 are restaurant + bakery and rest are only bakeries.
Their goal is to get sales through their own site.
From the research that I have carried:
• Local competitors aren’t really running strong direct-ordering performance campaigns and most only use the 3rd party platforms for delivery.
• The nation wide brands are mainly using Meta ads for awareness with few conversion focused ads and are running multiple PMax ads targeting branded keywords.
• Attribution also feels tricky since a lot of actual purchases still happen offline/repeat behaviour based.
I have a list of customers, so I am thinking of running a LAL sales campaign on Meta and then running low-budget search campaign on Google with branded and few query words focused on delivery.
Open to suggestions if there’s a better approach or something important I might be missing here, especially when working with smaller budgets and mixed online/offline purchase behaviour.