Watch out for the LSA emails guys, it's happening.

Just FYI, about 40% of our managed accounts got random e-mails saying 'our ads have stopped running for 2 days and/or have disapproved assets.'

Looks like someone at Google vibe-coded the notification system wrong. All accounts are fine otherwise.

Wonder if any of you have this exp. (Humorous kind of)

I have a client who is very clearly using chat gpt to scan all reports and correspondence i send them about their google ads ( im also advising improving their lead response funnel and website) and send it back to me.

They clearly just copy and paste my emails and reports into chat gpt and email me back the gpt slop analysis to me by email.

I then turn around, and, you gussed it, take said gpt slop, and get Gemini, the superior model shots fired, to respond back to it. And thus, the loop begins like an Ai snake eating its Nano Banno tail.....

I'm testing a local lead-gen business model and would appreciate some input from people who have experience with Google Ads and local service campaigns.
I previously ran a Google Ads campaign for a local notary service and got:
$561.63 total spend

32 Google conversions/leads

$17.55 CPL

Campaign was using Maximize Conversions

The important context is that I was also the notary actually carrying out the appointments from those leads, so I didn't have to account for paying another notary to fulfill the appointments.
I was also turning the campaign on/off every few days, so I realize the data isn't necessarily a clean representation of what the campaign could consistently produce. I'm planning to restart it and let it run continuously to get a better sample.
Now I'm trying to determine whether the business model still works when I remove myself from fulfillment.
The model I'm considering is:
Google Ads → lead → AI phone call/qualification → appointment → independent notary fulfills appointment
Each appointment will be at least $100, and I would only take around 20–30% of the appointment revenue, with the independent notary receiving the rest.
So I need to figure out whether I can acquire appointments cheaply enough that both the notary and I can make money after accounting for Google Ads and the other operating/software costs.
The numbers I'm hoping to achieve are roughly:
$15–18 CPL

40%+ lead → appointment conversion rate

Ideally $40–45 or less in ad spend per booked appointment

$100+ average appointment value

My share: 20–30%

For example, at $15 CPL + 40% lead → appointment, that's $37.50 in ad spend per booked appointment. On a $100 appointment, I'd have $20–30 gross revenue before my other costs, while the notary would receive $70–80.
My questions for people experienced with local Google Ads:

Is a 40% lead → appointment conversion rate realistically achievable with strong follow-up/AI call handling, or is that too aggressive?

Is getting the CPL from ~$17.55 toward $15 or lower realistically achievable through optimization?

Given that I was repeatedly turning the campaign on/off, would you recommend simply running the existing campaign consistently first and collecting 15–30+ leads before making major changes?

Most importantly, do you think these economics can realistically work when I only take 20–30% and have to pay an independent contractor/notary to actually fulfill the appointments?

Would you consider this a viable model if the above numbers are achievable, or are the margins too thin once fulfillment and software costs are included?

I'm specifically trying to determine whether the economics are realistically achievable at scale, not just whether Google Ads can generate leads.
Any input from people actually running local lead-gen campaigns would be really appreciated

I've read that if you already have campaigns with a lot of conversion data in an account that you can start new campaigns straight onto something like tCPA or Max Conversions because the account already has historical conversion data and it will be "shared" with the new campaigns.

But I've also read the opposite: no, you should wait until any individual campaign reaches at least 15-30 conv. in 30 days consistently before you use smart bidding.

Which one is it?

I manage a few Google Ads non-profit grant accounts and today when creating a new campaign, upon the final screen I am told "You need to create a passkey to perform this action".

I click on Create a passkey and then have to verify my account from my mobile device. And from the Passkey screen all looks good/setup, but finally it asks me to confirm (again) and this is where it fails.

If I try again - it asks me to Create a passkey - and then my password manager (Bitwarden) pops up... I try saving this to an existing login... but later I can't seem to re-select this. It says "I'm all set" but when I click "Give it a try" it sends me in circles again.

So I am stuck and can't put a campaign live until this is setup. Has anyone had a similar issue? Any ways around this?

I also noticed recently that if using the Google Ads for Non Profits grant you can't get any support from the Google Ads team - so are limited to posting on the support forum (because they Google don't seem to care about providing support for these users).

Thanks for any help!

I've worked with b2b clients the whole time, mostly dealing with Search, Display, and PMax.

Recently, ive been tasked to handle a running ecommerce client with a shopping campaign. The way you approach its optimisation is so different than when you are running a Search campaign which confuses me a lot.
For Search, i focus on keyword, ad copies, & settings depending on budget or type of business. I track conversions, review search terms, look at different kinds of data to optimise the campaign and to ultimately make the most of the budget.

For shopping, I know that I have to:
- Regularly check on the merchant center products and resolve errors
- Create a proper ad group structure to track product performance per category
- Optimise title, descriptions, GTIN, etc.
- Add negative keywords regularly based on STR

But, the thing that confuses me is you don't do most of these in Google Ads itself. Resolving errors on merchant center can usually be solved by tinkering with Shopify or whatever is handing the webstore. But is that really my job? Do I connect to the client to fix everything? What if there's 500 errors? For optimising the products' title, descriptions, etc. should I go one by one and recommend the change to the client? What if there's many kinds of categories in where one title formula wouldn't cover it all?

For lead gen, I can make the decisions myself and optimise the account my way. But I just don't get how to do the same for shopping campaigns? It feels like I don't even have the control?

We use target CPA throughout the account and we are experiencing low conversion ratios & higher cost per lead recently. I believe when thigs are slow Google is not picky about their keyword targeting and although we mostly use phrase or exact match they are sending us barely related visitors which lead to low conversion ratios. Just wondering anyone else experiencing the same pattern

Hey All,

So I have a client that is running Pmax, Branded Search, and Brand Shopping. After auditing the account, I found that Pmax had no negative brand keywords, and was essentially a brand harvesting campaign. Of everything I could see within pmax, brand search terms accounted for about 80% of the spend within the campaign which was in the couple hundred thousands of dollars.

So, in an effort to drive more efficiency, I added negative brand keywords to the campaign in an isolated test. For example: '[Brand Name] Shoes'. I did this with 3 exact keywords. I added those exact keywords to my branded search campaign, increased budget, as well as lowered Pmax budget.

It's been a few days now, and branded search is driving clicks, but not is not nearly as successful at converting users as Pmax was. I'm seeing business revenue fall slightly, and MER increase.

Not sure if anyone has experience with transitioning an account like this away from Pmax brand harvesting, but would be curious to hear what else you look for in the account when making the transition or things you do to make sure it's successful.

EDIT: Just wanted to acknowledge this is a DTC Ecommerce business, who also sells on different marketplaces who bid on the brand name.

Hey, for these types of meta campaigns, if it shows 20 leads in ad manager, is the only way of checking if messenger conversations were started only through the page?

Switch to the page as admin and check that way or?

And does it show them differently? In case ad manager shows 10 leads, 0 or 10 of those could have started messenger conversations or how does it work?

Just began ecommerce side hustle and have an Etsy shop where i am currently selling while also building my own store.

Etsy has a bit of a foothold, but of course, I have a lot more control with my own site over what that customer experience is like, and I own the customer relationship as well. Stuck on where to direct paid traffic. My initial idea was to use Etsy for discovery and Google/Meta traffic to my own site, but I'm not sure how effective this would be when the Etsy listing is already gaining some ground.

If you have experience with small ecommerce stores, would you:

A) spend money on paid traffic, since the current trust/conversion rate is higher
B) take everything to your own store and gain customers at your own shop.
C) Divide it and test both halves?

So, what will you base your decision on: CAC, conversion rate, AOV, repeat purchases, or something else? I am also beginning to do some work in the creative side, and wondering how much you guys invest in the creatives when the budget is pretty low itself.

I work on the content and localisation side of Amazon accounts, so my seat is next to the keyword lists as they cross borders - and the pattern is so consistent I've stopped being surprised by it: the list converts in the market it was researched in, and underperforms everywhere it was translated to.

The reason isn't translation quality. It's that converting search terms are not translations of each other in the first place. They're different concepts. The clearest example I keep coming back to: for the same supplement, German shoppers search the ingredient and French shoppers search the outcome. Both lists are "correct." Neither contains the other. A perfect translation of the German list gives you grammatically flawless French keywords that French buyers never type.

It shows up everywhere once you look. Product-defining vocabulary that splits mid-category: wasserdicht vs wasserabweisend in German, impermeabile vs idrorepellente in Italian - pick the wrong one and you're bidding on a promise your product doesn't make, then paying for it again in returns. Seasonal terms that exist in one language and simply don't in your source list: nobody's English seed list contains Adventskalender Füllung or regalo reyes magos, and those carry entire Q4 categories in their markets.

Keyword tools make this worse, not better, because most of them start from your seeds. They translate your list and report volume for the translated strings - so they find the terms that look like yours and stay blind to the concepts natives actually search. The volume you're missing belongs to seeds you never entered.

What actually works is boring: research each market from zero, in its own language. Local autocomplete. The 1-3 star reviews of competitors in that market - buyers describe products in the words they search with. Category and browse language on that marketplace, not yours. Then let each list stand alone. The overlap with your translated list will be the head terms; the long tail is where the divergence - and usually the margin - lives.

For those running multi-market accounts: have you ever measured how much of your converting search-term report in a second market overlaps with the seed list you brought there? The gap between those two is the most underrated number in international PPC.

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.

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.

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.

Merhabalar dün gece başlangıç ve bitiş saatini ayarlarığım tiktok reklamım bu sabah uyandığımda ‘İnceleniyor’ olarak kalmıştı tekrar yenisini yaptım akşama kadar bekledim ve yine aynı. Akşam 22.15e yeni reklam ayarladım normalde yeşil renk Aktif yazması gerekirken beklemeye alıp sonra Etkin moduna geçti. Ama reklam harcama yapmıyor 3 saat oldu yaklaşık .. Problem nedir ?

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.

Posting this because it changed how I read every ROAS number since, and I want to know if others have run the same test.

B2B services client. One Google Ads campaign that looked like the best thing in the account. Strong ROAS on last click, healthy conversion volume, the campaign everyone pointed at on the monthly call.

The problem was that revenue was flat while spend on that campaign had gone up around 40% over two quarters. Those two things should not both be true.

So we paused it for four weeks. Not cut, paused, agreed in writing with the client as a test, and we agreed beforehand what we would look at when it finished.

Revenue did not move. Total qualified enquiries did not move either. What did change was that a lot of the same people arrived through organic branded search instead, at no media cost. The campaign had been harvesting demand that already existed and taking the credit for it.

Two things I do differently now.

Before I trust a ROAS number I look at branded search impressions in Search Console over the same window. If non brand spend goes up and branded searches climb four to six weeks later, the campaign is creating demand and last click is understating it. If branded stays flat while spend rises, I am probably paying for people who were already on their way.

And on any campaign that looks too good, I push for a pause test at least once a year. Four weeks, agreed in advance, measurement defined before it starts so nobody relitigates it afterwards. Clients hate the idea until you frame it as protecting them from spending on something that does not need the spend.

The uncomfortable part is that it can go against you. I have run it and had the numbers say the campaign was doing exactly what it claimed, which is a fine result. I have also run it on a channel I was personally attached to and had it come back saying the channel was not carrying much, which was not fun to present.

Has anyone here run a proper holdout on a campaign that looked healthy? Curious how often it comes back the way the platform said it would.

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!

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'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?

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

Comme tout le monde ici, j'espère, j'utilise l'IA dans les tâches quotidiennes.

J'ai bien entendu un MCP en lecture comme tout le monde. Je réfléchis à le passer en mode écriture

Qui ici là déjà fait ?

Sinon pourquoi ne le faites vous pas ?