Made a campaign just for a 20 mile radius. Not nationwide or anything serious.
They are telling me the cheapest option is $95...PER DAY. $2,945/mo
$23 per conversion.
I can rent 3-4 billboards in my town for this.
My search terms report is showing searches where literally none of the words in the search match any of my keywords or even a misspelling/variation of the keywords. Is phrase match just broad match-lite now?
Signed up for Google Ads, saw the offer "spend $800 in 60 days, get $1,600 in credit". Took it, built 2 campaigns.
I spent way more than $800, hit the requirements, kept spending for another 35 days while they were "verifying" only to have the status flipped to "Invalidated."
Their reason: I'm not a "new advertiser" because their system detected a "prior association" - some shared billing profile or domain.
I've never had a Google Ads account. They claim an association, won't say what it is, won't review it.
But here's the part that actually pisses me off: if the check is "fully automated and hardcoded," it runs instantly. It could run at signup and never let you even sign for the promotion. Instead it runs after you spend and it takes another 35 days (of your spending) to verify. They showed me the offer, let me select it, tracked my progress toward it for two months, and only mentioned I was ineligible once the $800 was gone.
Sounds a lot like a scam to me.
Picked up a new client this month. Previous agency had the account for almost two years, and the first real look inside was rough. Six campaigns, half of them overlapping on the same keywords. One's still running a Smart Shopping campaign nobody's touched since it got deprecated. Broad match everywhere with basically no negative list, and conversion tracking that's firing but pointed at the wrong goal about half the time.
Normal instinct is to just rebuild it clean. But there's two years of auction data and Smart Bidding history sitting in there, and ripping everything out resets all of that. Patch it instead and I'm stuck living with structural decisions I never made, which gets awkward the first time performance swings and I have to explain why.
Curious how people actually draw the line here. Is it a specific broken thing that makes the call for you, how much real history is actually in there, or just gut feel once you've poked around for an hour?
To be honest I was getting around 4 sign ups a day on my web site no sales but they were all foreign names is that normal ?
I’ve been deep‑diving into Google Ads optimisation lately and I’m trying to improve performance without increasing spend. I keep seeing advice about “natural ways to improve Google Ads results” — meaning changes you can make inside the account that don’t rely on bigger budgets, expensive tools, or agency support.
For anyone experienced with Google Ads, what natural, practical changes have actually moved the needle for you?
I’ve been running a campaign for years. It has a daily budget that typically leaves a little headroom, with around 5% of impressions lost due to budget. It uses Target CPA bidding.
Until today, the average CPC was around $2, and the highest bid it had ever placed was $5.
This morning, it's paying up to $20 per click, which is above the target CPA. Across six clicks, the average CPC is $6.27, higher than the previous highest bid.
Nothing in the account has changed.
The new algorithm is bidding ridiculous amounts, and I don’t know how to stop it short of pausing the campaign. How can it bid more than 100% of the target CPA when it knows the conversion rate for that keyword may only be 10–20%.
Is there any way to cap the bids or bring them under control?
Hi,
We own a toy store with over 1000+ items in stock
We recently opened an ecom store with this stock and began promoting on google ads, specifically a shopping campaign.
I recently excluded all items below 20$ as it wasn’t worth it as my breakeven ROAs sits at 2.7 (pretty high due to shipping costs).
My current major issue is i cannot seem to understand the difference between campaign strategies (Target ROAs vs Maximize conversion count/value).
What could be considered a proper strategy for a business like mine with a breakeven ROAs of 2.7
Any help would be appreciated
I have a bestsellers category spanning multiple product types at different price points (e.g. chocolates, salsas, gift boxes). Currently running one big asset group with all bestsellers combined, and it's been performing well at 4x non branded ROAS.
Would it make sense to segment these into separate asset groups by product type to scale further, or is combining everything actually helping performance here? Not sure if splitting would just cannibalize what's already working, or if there is upside I'm leaving on the table.
Curious what's worked best for others, especially around scaling a strong performing asset group without disrupting it.
google search campaign, max clicks strategy, advertising health service for a certain insurance provider. A niche that returns a pretty high CTR at about 17% on average. This was a new account that I didnt bother setting up conversions because the calls/emails were flowing at a PPC that I was happy with. That was until I added conversions to take advantage of a $600 credit offered. I added conversions tracking based on direct google ad calls, calls from the website, and contact form submission and suddenly the actual calls and emails plummeted even thought the CTR has remained the same and I kept max clicks strategy. I'm talking 4-5 leads a day on a $20/day budget to 0-1 leads a day and its been 2 weeks so far of this with the last week upping the daily budget to $40/day.
I am at a loss to why this is happening, any ideas?
Ideally I'd like advices from ppl selling mid-high ticket products!
thx
A client that I'm setting up Google Ads for has a several months (up to 6 months) long window from first visit to a purchase, and purchases are very seasonal. To give Google more data I have instead set up a visit to a specific page as the primary conversion.
Despite that, I would still like to track purchase conversions. Is there a way to track two conversions from different goals? Or will I have to change my setup somehow?
This is how it looks now:
The Purchase conversion has the status Misconfigured because both conversions are secondary. So I guess this won't work?
If so, what should I do instead? Would creating a custom goal and moving both conversions ("View design tool" and "Google Shopping App Purchase") to that goal work as I want?
I would like some advice on google ads to know what I can improve in my campaign and attract more customers and see where I am loosing money.
So how do I find someone just for one consultation only I am currently not looking to be a client so would that make it difficult to find someone?
Update: I am getting a lot of people here messaging me. There are 2 things I need to know - have you worked in the beauty industry before? Are you based in Europe?
I’m currently considering a Google Ads campaign for a real estate agency whose goal is to generate people looking to buy or sell a property.
They already have a marketplace-style website with lots of property listings, but I’m wondering if sending paid traffic directly there is actually the best approach.
In Google Keyword Planner, I can already see search demand around terms like “buy a property” and “sell a property.”
My initial thought would be to create two dedicated landing pages:
→ One for people looking to buy
→ One for people looking to sell
And in both cases, the main conversion would be a lead form, so the prospect can be contacted directly by the sales team.
My concern is: if I simply send traffic to a marketplace with dozens of listings and links, how do I actually define whether the Google Ads campaign is successful?
Would love to hear from people who have managed Google Ads for real estate agencies:
How do you structure these campaigns?
Do you send traffic to the marketplace, or do you prefer dedicated landing pages focused on lead generation?
Curious to hear how you approach this.
I built a translator for English speakers living abroad. I need to target users who have their phone set to English. I ran an ad campaign, set the language, and it still showed the ads to non English speakers. Any advice on how to target phones set to English?
Seems like an easy fix, but I've had a hell of a time. Appreciate any advice. Thank you
Running a handful of small accounts too, and this exact thing used to wreck me.
The honest answer is that I stopped trusting the "just wait two weeks" advice as a blanket rule and started paying attention to what the campaign was actually doing with its impressions. If it's getting clicks and those clicks look like the right people (reasonable time on site, low bounce, whatever signals you have), I'll sit on my hands longer. If it's burning through budget on garbage placements or irrelevant queries from day one, that's not a learning problem, that's a setup problem, and touching it is justified.
My rough personal line: I don't touch bids or targets during the window, but I will add negatives if I see obvious waste. That doesn't reset learning the way bid strategy changes do, and it stops the bleeding enough that I can justify the spend to a client.
On the tCPA vs Max Conversions question, I've mostly landed on Max Conversions to start whenever the budget is small or the account is new, but I set a mental ceiling. If we're at 2x the target CPA with no conversions after spending enough to reasonably expect a few, I'm not going to keep calling it learning. At some point the algorithm needs something to work with and if there's nothing there, waiting longer doesn't fix that.
The part about not being able to tell learning from quiet failure, yeah, there's no clean answer. What I watch is whether the CPC is stabilizing and whether Google is at least spending the full budget. Campaigns that are truly lost tend to either underspend because they can't find auctions to enter, or they spend fine but on total nonsense. Either of those gets me moving faster than a dip in conversion rate alone.
Is it me or is anyone else having such a hard time with Google Ads "Ask Advisor" feature that's in Beta stage? I've been struggling with it so much due to all the inaccurate information it gives me that I've given up on using it, period. If you're curious if it's helpful, let it be known that it's currently not that great and has created me way more headache than help thus far.
I was wondering what the best practice is for formatting long headlines.
Which is better, "adcopy | adcopy" or "adcopy: adcopy"?
Or, is the best practice to keep them short like regular headlines?
Hi all,
It's my first time using Google Ads - I'm setting up a Shopping campaign (without guidance) & Manual CPC, but when I get to the Ad Group and Assets section, all I can see is the Business Logo. I've uploaded it multiple times and even tried their stock photos but when pressing next, or collapsing the logo part, there's no place to add the Ad Group name/Group Bid, then on the summary page when I go to fill in those fields it loops me back to the business logo page!
All my Merchant links set up, verification approved and everything set up in the backend. Google support has been useless so hopefully someone can help!
Hey everyone,
I had an issue where my Google Ads conversion tracking stopped working properly. Because conversions weren't being recorded, the campaign now shows 0 conversions over the last 7 days.
Before the tracking issue, the campaign was running on Target CPA (tCPA) and has around 500–600 conversions lifetime, so there was a decent amount of historical conversion data.
After the tracking broke, performance started falling and I assumed the tCPA was becoming too restrictive because Google was suddenly seeing little/no recent conversion data.
I switched the bidding strategy back to Maximize Conversions without a tCPA cap, with the idea of giving the campaign more freedom to relearn now that tracking is fixed.
My questions:
Would love to hear from anyone who's dealt with something similar.
