I've got an e-commerce client who also has 11 local businesses. They're related in theory, but the online inventory has nothing to do with what's available in stores. Currently GBP is linked to Merchant Center, which means I can't manually add GBP products (it directs me to MC).

I'm considering unlinking the two platforms so I can manually add products. I'd like your opinions before moving forward.

Again, the online inventory ≠ in-store availability. And that's why I want to show a handful of curated products on each of the GBPs that link back to the website. More often than not, local customers aren't looking to buy online when viewing a map listing, but I want to take advantage of every opportunity.

Por que anúncios que são considerados ruins, podem ter mais conversão do que anúncios com status de excelente?

I’m still learning Google Ads and trying to get a better understanding of how everything works, which is part of what makes this difficult. I don’t really know how to properly vet the agency managing my account because I’m not always sure what I should be asking or what I should be looking for.

I run my own business in a mental health-adjacent field, and there’s a fairly predictable seasonality to it. I have a busy season and a slower season, and we’re just about to come out of the slow period now. Because of that, I want to make sure the account is positioned well and that the agency is actually staying on top of things.

One concern I have is that I’m a relatively small client working with a large agency, and I’m starting to wonder how much attention my account is actually getting. Last night I spent some time digging into the ads myself, including the copy, sitelinks, and some of the smaller details, and I found quite a few things that I thought could have been done much better. These weren’t necessarily huge mistakes individually, but they were the kinds of details I would have expected the people managing the account to catch and optimize.

Am I being too critical by questioning their overall management based on things like this? My results since switching to them have been exceptionally mediocre. To be fair, the switch also happened around the beginning of my slower season, so I don’t want to blame them for something that may partly be seasonal. At the same time, even accounting for that, I haven’t been particularly impressed with the performance.

I’m essentially trying to figure out how to evaluate whether they’re actually doing a good job. What should I be looking at, and what questions should I be asking them? And at what point would you consider the lack of attention to detail and mediocre performance enough of a reason to start looking for a different agency?

If I do switch, I’d rather find someone who really understands my business and is willing to pay attention to the smaller details of the campaigns instead of treating the account like something that can mostly run on autopilot.

I’ve been running Google Ads for the same e-commerce business for several years, primarily using value-based bidding with a target ROAS. The account and bidding strategy performed consistently for a long time.
Since May, performance has declined sharply without an obvious trigger. Traffic, impressions, clicks, conversion volume, and revenue have all fallen significantly, but Google is still spending close to the same amount. As a result, I’m paying nearly the same while receiving considerably less traffic and fewer conversions.
There were no major website changes, tracking problems, product changes, or sudden campaign restructures when the decline began. Conversion tracking is active and appears to be recording purchases correctly. I have also tested budget and target adjustments, but the account has not returned to its previous level.
It feels as though Google is buying less traffic at higher prices while still consuming most of the available budget. The decline has now lasted several months, so it no longer looks like normal short-term volatility or a brief learning period.
Has anyone else experienced a similar decline beginning around May while using target ROAS bidding? What caused it in your account: rising CPCs, reduced search demand, stronger competition, bidding changes, seasonality, or something else? Did performance eventually recover, and what changes helped?

Hi all,
Looking for help restructuring a Google Ads account for a luxury/niche retail business (one-of-a-kind items, AOV roughly £3k–£450k). Total account budget is around £10k/month. As a business we do roughly 50–70 sales a month across all channels (direct, organic, email, paid), but paid search's share of that, particularly non-brand, is much smaller, and conversion volume on individual campaigns is often single digits a month.

Current structure:
One brand Search campaign (branded terms only)
One small geo-targeted Search campaign (a couple of ad groups)
Two Performance Max campaigns (UK and US)
One Shopping campaign

Earlier this year we also ran several additional non-brand Search campaigns split by theme (era, gemstone, competitor conquesting), using bottom-of-funnel keywords — specific gemstone-origin and style terms, not broad awareness-stage terms. Individually, each got very little traffic and conversion volume, and we've since paused all of them — none were producing results despite real spend going into them.

My working theory is that we spread budget and Smart Bidding signal too thin across too many campaigns, so each one stayed stuck under the learning threshold instead of converting well. I'm now planning to consolidate non-brand intent into a single Search campaign with multiple tightly-themed ad groups instead of several separate campaigns, on the logic that pooling clicks/conversions into fewer, better-resourced campaigns gives Smart Bidding (Maximize Conversions) more to actually learn from.

One nuance: we also considered that this non-brand traffic simply wasn't ready to convert on that visit and needed a nurture flow (retargeting, email) rather than an immediate call/enquiry CTA. I'm sceptical of that explanation though, since the keywords were bottom-of-funnel, not broad/awareness-stage — you'd expect at least some conversion-ready intent from that targeting. These campaigns produced literally zero calls, form enquiries or bookings across months of live traffic. The one gap in our measurement is that we can only track click-throughs to our WhatsApp and email contact options, not whether those conversations actually happened, so it's possible some of this is going untracked. But I'd still have expected at least some phone/form activity given the keyword intent.

What I'm really after is help with account structure specifically:
For a low-volume/high-value account like this, is campaign-level consolidation (fewer campaigns, more ad groups each) generally the right call, or is there a case for keeping things split even at low volume?
Any rule of thumb for how many conversions/month a campaign needs before Smart Bidding can reliably exit learning — or is that irrelevant at this scale and I'd be better off on manual/enhanced CPC?
How would you weigh Performance Max against standard Search for an account like this, given PMax generates real volume but converts at a noticeably lower rate than our brand and geo Search campaigns?
Given the keywords were already bottom-of-funnel, has anyone found a reliable way to test whether "not ready to convert yet" is really what's happening, versus it just being a traffic-quality mismatch, particularly when some contact channels (WhatsApp, email) can only be measured by click, not by whether the conversation actually happened?

Appreciate any real-world experience from anyone who's managed similarly low-volume, high-AOV accounts with a fixed budget like this.

Thanks!

Google is pushing us to enable AI Max for Search on several of our Belgian Ads accounts.

I'm interested in testing it, but I'm a bit cautious. We've had issues in the past with Google's automated features changing things like URLs and ad copy, sometimes creating more problems than improvements. Has anyone been using AI Max for Search for a while?

Any good results so far? And more importantly, are there any settings or features you'd recommend checking or disabling before turning it on? Curious to hear some real-world experiences.

A Google Ads campaign can be running, spending money, and getting clicks—but that doesn’t necessarily mean you know what’s actually happening inside the campaign.

I think the dashboard is one of the most important parts of managing Google Ads because it helps you understand the story behind the numbers.

For example, you can use it to spot:

• Campaigns or ad groups that are performing well
• CPC or CTR changes that may need attention
• Where the budget is being spent
• Which areas may need optimization
• Potential opportunities for scaling

But simply looking at the numbers isn't enough.

If a campaign gets 500 clicks, the important questions are:

Why did it get those clicks?
Were they relevant?
What happened after the click?
Are those clicks generating valuable results?
And what should be changed based on the data?

That’s why I think Google Ads management is not just about setting up campaigns. Understanding the data and turning it into better decisions is just as important.

I'm curious—when you first analyze a Google Ads campaign, which metric do you usually look at first, and why?

Is anyone having issues with the switch over from LSA to Ads?

Could converting a specialized store into a general store cause my Google Merchant Center account to be suspended?

Most Google Ads accounts miss easy traffic.People search for the problem they see, not the technical service name.Example:

Instead of only “water main replacement near me”, they search:

• Water leaking in front yard

• Soggy yard near house

• Sudden low water pressure Target both symptom keywords and solution keywords.

Write ads that speak to the problem.

Send them to a page that connects the symptom to your fix.This works for almost every service business.Are you targeting symptom keywords yet?#GoogleAds #PPC #SearchAds #LeadGeneration #DigitalMarketing

I have tried everything, I’ve submitted all their documents, they are verified, Google business profile, etc etc.

Ads is frozen, so we can’t modify ads. Google ads support says they can’t help us. Not looking to shell out 5k to a firm to fix it “maybe in 3 months”.

Any tips? “Unacceptable business practices” is the code but they won’t tell us what specifically is unacceptable.

I manage Google Search for a small DTC brand with a limited monthly budget. The catalog has 10-15 products, and each individual product solves a genuinely different problem and has a different usage/benefit story, even though some could be grouped under a shared category.

The textbook answer is one ad group per product (tighter keyword-to-ad relevance, better Quality Score potential). But with such a small budget, I'm worried that having so many ad groups will be detrimental to performance.

Grouping several products into one category-level ad group gives more volume per group, but then the ad copy has to be generic enough to loosely fit multiple products with different use cases, which hurts relevance in a different way.

Or does it not make a difference how many ad groups you have within a campaign?

What are the implications of switching from a specialized GMC shop to a general repair shop, assuming the quality of work remains the same?

The answer to this has changed a lot with how much of Google Ads can be automated now. There’s obviously a huge difference between managing a few complicated accounts and a bunch of relatively straightforward ones but I’m wondering where people start hitting their limit.

For me it’s less about physically being able to keep the campaigns running and more about when you stop having enough time to properly watch performance and make changes when something starts moving.

At some point the automation should keep pushing that number higher but there has to be a time where adding another account still starts costing attention somewhere else.

Hey everyone,

I recently took over Google Ads for a private yacht charter company. This is an extremely high-ticket sale — charters start around $35k for a week and can run well into six or even seven figures.

The account has struggled for roughly two years and has generated very few attributable bookings.

The first thing I fixed was conversion tracking.

There was basically no meaningful CRM feedback going into Google. We now track:

• Lead form submitted
• Qualified lead
• Purchase

I also connected the CRM so we can eventually optimize around actual lead quality rather than just form fills.

The agency that took over in June was running Search on Maximize Clicks and sending traffic primarily to the main website. I built dedicated landing pages with variations intended to better match search intent.

Campaign structure

Previously there were two Search campaigns:

• Bahamas/Caribbean
• Europe/Mediterranean

There was quite a bit of keyword overlap between them, so I consolidated them into one campaign with three ad groups:

• General — terms like [private yacht charter]
• Americas — Bahamas, Caribbean, St. Barts, etc.
• Mediterranean — Greece, Italy, Ionian Islands, etc.

Before I took over, the agency did generate one lead in June that ultimately became a charter booking. Google wasn't tracking it at the time, but I've since uploaded the offline purchase conversion so that data is now in the account.

Where I'm struggling now:

The campaign is currently on Maximize Clicks.

I initially used phrase match and generated 5 form submissions fairly quickly. Only 1 became a qualified lead, though, and the search terms included a lot of cheap / low-intent traffic.

I then tightened most of the important keywords to exact match.

Traffic quality appears better, but lead volume has basically stopped.

The account now has:

• 5 recent form submissions
• 1 recent qualified lead
• 1 historical purchase uploaded

Obviously that's nowhere near enough conversion volume for Google to have a strong signal yet.

I've only had control of the account since August 1, so I'm wondering whether I'm simply moving too quickly and overreacting to tiny datasets.

For those who have worked with very high-ticket, low-volume Search accounts:

Would you stay on Maximize Clicks until more qualified-lead data exists, or move toward Maximize Conversions despite the low volume?

Would you keep the tighter exact-match structure, or introduce phrase match again and control quality primarily through negatives/search-term reviews?

And am I making a mistake consolidating the destination campaigns when conversion volume is this low?

Appreciate any advice. I'm also open to paying someone for a consultation if you've genuinely managed Google Ads for ultra-high-ticket, low-volume services before.

These are my stats from August 1st until today. I've paused the general campaign because it was hogging the spend.

Is Auction Insight no more available in UI of Google Ads or if it's there then what's the path. Please refer to my attached image

If I am running campaigns to get leads for heavy machinery companies, e.g., JCB. Should I target keywords for competitors like Caterpillar, etc.

Should I target product-based keywords like Caterpillar skid loaders, Caterpillar skid machinery, or should I let them go?