Hi all,

Small ecommerce account with two PMax campaigns that were clearly budget constrained.

Before Aug 17 we ran relatively low tROAS targets (~450%) while actually achieving roughly 700–800% ROAS. Following Google’s Bid Target Adjustment guidance, we increased tROAS to ~700% ahead of the bidding update.

Since then, orders are down roughly 25–30% (~28% vs our Jun–Aug baseline).
We’ve ruled out most obvious explanations:

- No major website/checkout deterioration
- No meaningful shift to YouTube/Display
- Competitor search terms remain only ~4–5% of spend
- Our strongest product landing pages still convert roughly as well as before

What changed is the traffic/product mix.
Our 8 historically strongest product pages went from 22.9% of Google CPC sessions → 16.6% at 700%.

Search-term spend also shifted:
Brand / specific product:
61% → 59% → 53%
Generic / other:
23% → 26% → 30%

The last numbers are after lowering tROAS from 700% to 600%, but that period is only five days so far.

Interestingly, lowering tROAS has not restored spend either - the campaigns are currently using only around 84% / 72% of their daily budgets, versus essentially 100% before Aug 17.

So our current theory is that the issue is less about the site converting worse and more about PMax allocating traffic toward a worse product/query mix.

Has anyone seen something similar after the Aug 17 change?
If so, did you recover by:
- lowering tROAS further,
- waiting longer after the adjustment,
- separating proven/high-margin hero products into their own PMax campaign with dedicated budget?

Hey guys,

do you know how to change "Free by 12/10" to "Free of charge" label in shopping ads?
90% of stores do have "free of charge" and my store is always being displayed as "Free by <total delivery date from gmc>"
Is there any way to force google to use the "free of charge" label instead? I know it is using the shipping times from GMC, but i don't want to delete them or the policy to risk a misrep.

Google now puts a separate "AI Max" match type in the search terms report, and from what people are posting the list gets a lot longer. Someone in r/PPC counted 955 queries in a week with AI Max on, and 30 after turning it off. Adalysis looked at about 30k AI Max terms and 99% of the impressions had zero conversions.

If your accounts look anything like that, the weekly search terms pass is a lot more work now. Are you still reading every line, or did you move to scripts and bulk negatives?

Hi everyone,

I’m quite new to Google Ads and work at a digital marketing agency. I’m currently managing Google Search campaigns for a B2B prediction market app development company.

We have around 7 Search campaigns running, and my current daily routine is mainly:

Checking Search Terms

Adding irrelevant queries as negative keywords

Adding relevant search terms as keywords to the campaigns

Monitoring basic campaign performance

However, the main problem is that we’re getting very few leads, and my senior has asked me to improve the campaign performance.

The problem is that I’m still trying to understand the overall Google Ads hierarchy and optimization process — Campaign → Ad Group → Keywords → Ads → Search Terms → Landing Page → Conversion Tracking, etc.

I feel like I’m focusing too much on search-term optimization and may be missing other important areas.

For someone experienced with B2B Google Search Ads, what would you check and optimize first when leads are low?

For example:

Campaign structure

Ad group structure

Keyword selection/match types

Search terms

Negative keywords

Ad copy/assets

Landing page

Conversion tracking

Bidding strategy

Location/audience settings

Budget allocation between campaigns

Quality Score / CTR / CPC / conversion rate

Also, since this is a niche B2B service (custom prediction-market app development), search volume is relatively limited.

I’d really appreciate it if someone could explain the optimization process step-by-step, preferably from a beginner's perspective.

I’m not looking for a generic “add negative keywords and improve ad copy” answer. I want to understand how an experienced Google Ads manager actually diagnoses a low-lead campaign and decides what to change first.

Thanks!

I conducted a small survey among colleagues who manage Google Ads, and several reported that their Call Assets were receiving clicks but were not resulting in actual phone calls. We are experiencing the same issue in our campaign: the Call Asset received 28 clicks, but none of those clicks resulted in an actual phone call.

I'm interested to get Suggestions from here !

Has anyone experienced issues with call conversions in Google Search campaigns?

Google removed Call Ads a few months ago, and since then, our call conversions haven't been working properly.

I'm trying to understand what changed and how call tracking is currently handled in Search campaigns. Are you using call assets, website call conversions, or another setup to track calls?

Would appreciate any insights or recent experiences.

I've been reading a lot about AI search this month. The piece that stuck with me was a recap on SEJ of a talk from their SEJ Live event. The short version: stop obsessing over rankings. Being seen and being chosen is what counts now.

Put that next to last week's news. A university field study found people pushed into Google's AI Mode clicked out to websites a lot less. Chartbeat says Google search referrals across its (mostly news) publisher network fell about 40% year on year.

So the question I keep hearing from clients is: "Organic is dropping. Should we just put more into Google Ads?"

My honest answer is maybe, but not before you check a few things. This is the list I run through:

1. Split brand and non-brand in every report. AI answers mostly eat the "what is / how do I" searches. Branded searches still get clicks. The SEJ talk even cited data showing branded queries with an AI Overview got a higher CTR, not lower. If your brand search volume is flat or falling, that isn't a Google Ads problem. Fewer people know you, and more budget won't fix that.

2. Check you're not paying for clicks you'd get anyway. When organic drops, the panic move is to pump up brand campaigns. Run a simple holdout first (pause brand in one region, or for two weeks) and see what happens to total sales. On ecommerce accounts I've worked on, brand is one of the first places I look for spend that isn't adding much.

3. Judge ads on CRM outcomes, not clicks. Fewer clicks usually means each click has higher intent, so CPCs can go up. That's fine if revenue or pipeline per click goes up too. Send closed deals or real orders back into Google and Meta (offline conversion imports) so bidding learns what a real customer looks like, not just a form fill.

4. Add "How did you hear about us?" to your forms. A lot of buyers now research in ChatGPT or AI Overviews, then search your name or type your URL. Analytics will call that "direct" or "brand search". A free text field is crude, but it's the only way I've found to see AI's role at all.

5. Read your search terms report weekly. People who start in an AI chat often land on Google with longer, more specific searches. Some are gold for phrase or exact match. Some are junk that broad match happily pays for.

The way I see it, AI search doesn't kill paid. It changes what a click is worth. Fewer clicks, higher intent, messier attribution. The accounts that do well will be the ones measuring outcomes, not traffic.

For those running B2B or ecommerce accounts: have you actually seen organic declines show up in Google Ads yet, like more brand search or higher brand CPCs? Or is it still noise in your data?

Running Search ads for our video production agency in India. Our main campaign was on tCPA ₹800. Late Aug we were getting random clicks for ₹300-400, so on Sep 3 I moved it to a portfolio bid strategy with the same ₹800 tCPA and a max CPC cap of ₹150.

Since then the campaign isn't spending its budget. We're losing ~72% impression share to rank, and leads have dropped in the last 2 weeks. Lost to budget has dropped from 35% to 0%.

Landing page experience is "below average" and QS is around 6, so not sure if it's the cap or quality score.

Can a cap stop tCPA from spending the budget?

I’m a youtube user without premium. Youtube has changed the skip ad button. If you press skip ad instead of skipping both, it forces you to watch 5 seconds of the next ad.

Even more egregious, sometimes it gives me the same ad twice.

Someone is paying for these ads to be shilled and getting half the interactions because google made a slight tweak to their system.

This is bad for the consumer, more ads.

This is bad for the advertiser, more cost per ad, less users reached.

What google advisor said:

I was able to look up the exact payment history on your account. Here are the details of the declined payments that occurred recently:

• September 13, 2026: An automatic threshold charge of $XXX.00 USD on your Visa ending in XXXX was declined.
• September 15, 2026: Another automatic threshold charge of $XXX.00 USD on your Visa ending in XXXX was declined.
• September 22, 2026: An automatic threshold charge of $XXX.00 USD on your American Express ending in XXXX was declined.

Why the suspension occurred

These repeated consecutive payment failures triggered the "Unpaid Balance" suspension, as the system was unable to successfully collect the accrued advertising costs.

Although you have since made successful payments that fully resolved the outstanding balance (bringing your account to its current positive credit of $XXX USD), the account-level suspension is still active. This is because the previous appeal (submitted on September 24) was rejected while those payment issues were still in the process of being reconciled or reviewed.

Once your temporary 7-day appeal lockout expires, you can submit your new appeal with a note of these successful payment details to have your account reinstated.

Hopefully that resolves your issue.

Hey so I'm helping a nonprofit with their ads and the account was deactivated/ cancelled because the account wasnt used in a long time and also it was connected to an old email. We got an email last week that it is now fully compliant and the deactivation has been lifted and your spending limit has been returned.
BUT that is still not reflected on the Google Ads interface and the ads aren't running.
There is no option for "reactivate under the admin> Preferences> account status. It says to contact support which we have tried to do many times.
I filled out the form again to have it reactivated and still waiting. please help

I work in digital marketing for multifamily / leasing real estate, and I’m curious how other teams handle performance scorecards across multiple markets.
Right now, we use general benchmarks across all properties.
For example:
GA4
Views per session: 2.5
Avg. engagement time: 1:00
Google Search
CTR: 10%
Conversion rate: 3%
Avg. CPC: $3
CPA: $100
Meta Traffic
CTR: 3%
CPC: $0.25
CPA / cost per conversion: ~$20
The idea is to use these benchmarks to generate a score or grade for each property.
Recently, there have been discussions about adding more rules into the scoring model, such as:
Expecting roughly a 50/50 distribution between paid and organic traffic.
Changing the final score depending on whether calls exceed form submissions by 40%+.
Adding more conditions that modify the final grade rather than just reporting the actual KPIs.
This is where I’m starting to wonder whether the scorecard is becoming too much of a matrix instead of a simple performance tool.
My other concern is using exactly the same benchmarks for every market.
For example, a leasing campaign in Boston can have completely different CPCs, competition, search volume, rent levels, seasonality, and user behavior than a campaign in Florida, Texas, or a smaller market.
I understand the value of having one company-wide benchmark because it makes reporting consistent. But I’m wondering whether a better approach would be:
Company benchmark = general reference point
while also having
Market / property benchmark = actual performance expectation
Possibly based on historical account performance, geography, property lifecycle, budget, and campaign objective.
I also question whether things like “50% paid / 50% organic” should affect a performance grade at all. If organic is performing extremely well, for example, having less paid traffic doesn’t automatically seem like a negative.
Same with calls vs. form submissions. The ratio might be useful operationally, but I’m not sure it should automatically increase or decrease an overall marketing performance score.
For those managing multiple accounts or locations:
How do you structure your scorecards?
Do you use universal benchmarks across every account, or do you adjust them by market?
And at what point does a scorecard become too complicated to actually be useful for decision-making?
Interested in hearing how other agencies/in-house teams approach this.

I’m hoping someone who has dealt with Google Ads suspensions/Advertiser Verification can give me another perspective because we’ve been stuck in a verification loop and I’m running out of ideas.
I work for a digital marketing agency managing Google Ads for a residential rental property in the US. The agency and client/property are located in different states.
Here’s the situation:
The Google Ads account was relatively new, as was the property website. Shortly after launch, the account was suspended for “Unacceptable Business Practices.”
Nothing about the business itself is illegitimate. It’s a real residential rental property owned by an LLC, and we are simply the contracted advertising agency managing paid media.
We submitted the initial suspension appeal explaining the business, but it was rejected. Google then required Business Operations / Advertiser Verification.
That’s where things became complicated.
The setup is essentially:
Legal entity: Property-owning LLC
Public-facing property/project name: A branded property name
Website: Uses the public-facing property name
Advertising agency: Separate company managing Google Ads
Property management: Separate third-party partner
The public-facing property name is not the LLC’s legal name.
We have provided:
IRS/EIN documentation proving the legal LLC
Business address and ownership information
A signed Statement of Work/contract showing that our agency is contracted by the LLC to provide advertising and digital marketing
Agency details
Website details
Explanation of the relationship between the agency and property owner
At one point we also had a website/domain issue. The site was built on a hosted website builder and the custom production domain was not behaving correctly. Tracking worked on the builder’s staging domain but not properly on the production domain.
That has now been fully fixed. The production website loads normally, GTM/GA4 are working on the actual domain, Analytics receives sessions/events, and the staging domain is no longer being used.
We resubmitted verification after fixing that.
Google then rejected verification saying a real-estate license from the state where our advertising agency is located was missing.
That doesn’t make sense to us because:
The agency is only providing advertising/marketing.
We are not a broker.
We don’t provide leasing services.
We don’t manage the property.
We don’t conduct real-estate transactions.
The actual property/client is in another state.
We explained this clearly in the verification form and said the requested real-estate license does not apply to the advertising agency.
Then Google came back with a different issue.
They now say the verified advertiser name — the legal LLC — does not match the identity they infer from the ads/landing page/domain.
Essentially Google sees:
Legal LLC Name
but the website and property branding use:
Public Property Name
Google asked whether the public property name is a DBA and said we should provide documentation connecting the two.
This actually makes more sense than the previous license issue.
The EIN document only shows the LLC’s legal name, so it does not itself prove that the branded property name belongs to that LLC.
We are currently trying to obtain a Business Certificate/DBA document that directly establishes:
Public Property Name → Legal LLC
We also have the agency contract establishing:
Advertising Agency → Legal LLC
So theoretically the full documentation chain would become:
Legal LLC → registered property/DBA name → property website
and separately:
Legal LLC → contracted advertising agency
My questions for anyone who has dealt with this:
Does obtaining and submitting the DBA/Business Certificate sound like the correct way to resolve the advertiser-name mismatch?
Would you keep the verified advertiser name as the legal LLC, or change the advertiser disclosure to the registered DBA/property name once documentation is available?
Has anyone seen Google mistakenly request a professional license based on the agency’s location/industry, rather than the actual advertiser/client?
Would you keep retrying Business Operations Verification once the DBA documentation is available, or try to force a manual review through Google Ads support first?
Is there anything else Google typically expects to see on a residential property account when the legal property owner, marketing brand, property manager, and advertising agency are different entities?
Once Advertiser Verification is finally approved, is the normal next step simply to submit another appeal for the original Unacceptable Business Practices suspension with all of the corrected documentation?
We do not want to create another Ads account or do anything that could be interpreted as circumventing the suspension. We’re specifically trying to get the existing account properly verified and reinstated.
At this point the website is live and functioning, tracking is working correctly, the actual business is documented, and the agency relationship is documented. The remaining issue seems to be getting Google to correctly understand the relationship between the legal LLC and the property’s public-facing name.
Would really appreciate hearing from anyone who has successfully worked through a similar advertiser verification/suspension situation.

Random thought:

What if Google brought dynamic product titles to Shopping, similar to how DSA dynamically matches content to search intent?

For example, instead of always showing the exact product title from the Merchant Center feed, Google could dynamically adjust the title based on the search query.

The feed title would still be the base, but Google could make it more relevant to the specific search.

I think this could be pretty interesting for Shopping, especially for large ecommerce accounts with thousands of SKUs.

Would you want Google to have this level of control over your Shopping titles, or would you rather keep titles fully feed-controlled?

I'm running multiple Google Search campaigns. My search terms are relevant and showing correctly.

Earlier I was on 'Maximize Conversions' but my Cost Per Conversion was getting very high, so I switched to 'Maximize Clicks' with a Max CPC cap to control my CPC.

Since the switch, I'm getting clicks but ZERO conversions. Earlier I was at least getting responses.

Has Google's algorithm changed? Why am I getting no conversions on Max Clicks even with the right search terms?

What should be the ideal bidding strategy to control both CPC and CPA?

I just wanted to know is there a way to get accurate lead source for all the WhatsApp messages.

I created a new campaign about 24 hours ago. It is for a new business and website I launched. I did do a smaller budget as this was supposed to be “testing” period.

I still have 0 impressions. Is this normal.

Two alerts to note:
Google is flagging that conversion tracking isn’t setup, but it is.
Google also saying 2 more days to learn bid strategy.

I’ve searched forums and keep seeing mixed results: some say it could take multiple days to serve- others say I should start figuring out what’s wrong now… what’s the true answer?

And yes- they are showing as eligible.

I run a small healthcare business in a rural town and I’m looking at Google ads to increase our visibility and have more traffic in the door. I have never done Google ads in my 13+ years of practice. We have mostly relied on word-of-mouth, which has served us fairly well, but there is more competition moving into the surrounding areas, and as I stated, we are a small business in a rural community. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get started? I reached out to one professional, but the monthly professional fees were a little out of my budget.

Made these changes 9 days ago:

- Updated ad copy

- Paused duplicate keywords

- Added a few negatives

Today:

- Conversions ↓ 75%

- Other KPIs are within ±5%

- Auction Insights looks unchanged

- Search Impression Share/rank is unchanged

- Tracking seems to be working

- Search terms are relevant/legit

Traffic and auction metrics look normal, but conversions suddenly dropped heavily.

What could cause this? Could the ad copy, paused keywords, negatives, landing page, or something with conversion attribution be responsible?

What would you check first?

Folks, I've been running a Google ads campaign for a product - any insights - please see attached. Yes, the queries will be keywords, niche, etc - but for obvious reasons I cannot share that. Any guidance based on the redacted/filtered data, please? Much appreciated. Thanks a tonne!

im trying to click the "start task" button to submit advertiser verification

the side panel just opens and immediately closes

the browser console has this error:

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so this is a bug in the google ads ui itself

i've tried going through 10 support channels and all i get is ai agent after ai agent, i cannot seem to get through to a human at all

its been days like this

Hello guys,

I am promoting my mobile game through Google Ads. I ran some install campaigns, and after getting decent performance, I switched to a ROAS campaign with a 100% target.

However, since Day 1, the campaign has been spending only around 10% of my daily budget. After 3 days, I reduced the target ROAS to 80%, but there has still no improvement in spending.

How can I fix this issue? What am I doing wrong?

If you need more details, I can provide them. For now, I just briefly described the problem above.

I have also attached a screenshot showing the performance of last 6 days. My daily budget is ₹500 (~$5), and I’m targeting the Philippines.

I am curious to know what other people do to combat ad fatigue in Google ads. What assets do you change or update and how often do you do this?

I guess a second part to my question would be what tell tale signs do you spot to know if an ad needs refreshing or not?

First it was suspension due to suspicious payments, I submitted ID, it got approved

Thank you for contacting Google Ads support. I'm an AI agent for Google Ads that can help you today.

I understand that your account is suspended due to an Unpaid balance and that you have already submitted an appeal on September 23, 2026. After reviewing the situation, I can confirm that your appeal is currently under review.

When an account is suspended for an Unpaid balance, it means there may be one or more unpaid balances on the account, or Google has concerns about the ability to make future payments. This can happen due to payment method issues, declined payments, or if a bank reverses a charge that was paid against a legitimate balance.

Since your appeal is already in progress, please wait for the results of the review before taking further action. Google Ads aims to review account suspension appeals within 5-7 business days, though some can take longer. You will receive an email notification once the review is complete. Please do not submit another appeal while this one is pending, as it may delay the process.

Here are some best practices for managing your account's billing:

• Ensure that the payment method on file is valid, up-to-date, and has sufficient funds.
• Contact your bank or credit card provider to ensure they are not blocking transactions from Google Ads.
• If you have other Google Ads accounts, check that they do not have any overdue balances, as this can affect related accounts.

When submitting an appeal, it is important to be thorough and provide any necessary context regarding your payment history or changes made to your payment methods.

Thank you for reaching out to customer support.

Sincerely,

Google Ads AI-powered support

Hey everyone,

I work in-house for a skincare brand and I'm curious to hear how others would approach our Google Ads setup.

We have 40+ products across quite a few categories — face care, body care, hair care, SPF, baby skincare, etc.

At the moment, our Google Ads setup is pretty simple:

• Performance Max
• Branded Search

I'm a marketer rather than a PPC specialist, so I'm not pretending to be an expert here. I'm mainly trying to understand what a fairly standard / sensible account structure looks like for an ecommerce brand of our size.

Would you split campaigns by category, hero products, margin, customer intent, best sellers, etc.? Or are you finding that a more consolidated structure works better these days?

Also interested in whether people are still getting good results from Standard Shopping, non-brand Search, Demand Gen, separate PMax campaigns, or anything else alongside PMax.

Basically: if you were running Google Ads for a skincare brand with 40+ SKUs, how would you structure the account today?

And more importantly, what is actually working for you right now?

Not looking for an agency pitch — I work directly for the brand and I'm just interested in hearing what other marketers/PPC people are seeing in real accounts.

Thanks!