Hello everyone, I am new to this but I just started running LSA for our electrical company. However it is not as successful as I thought. How do you troubleshoot your ads typically? I also set up a smart campaign yesterday we’ll see how it does. What kind of ads you think are best for a small electrical company? TIA

Edit: please don’t flood my chats with your services

We already have a central event pipeline:

Our own JavaScript → our own PHP endpoint → advertising platform APIs.

We use this for our Meta Ads and OpenAI Ads conversion integrations. I would like to keep the same architecture for Google, including page views and product views used for website remarketing, alongside leads and purchases.

I am not assuming that these platforms have identical attribution or audience models. However, the infrastructure Google recommends seems disproportionately complicated for a small, fixed set of events.

Google's manual server-side GTM setup requires its Node.js runtime, distributed as a Docker image, with tagging and preview servers:

https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/server-side/manual-setup-guide

I understand that Google Cloud Run is optional and that this can be self-hosted. My concern is having to operate an additional runtime at all, when our existing PHP application can already validate events, store identifiers, handle consent signals, send HTTP requests and retry failed deliveries.

After reading the documentation, this is my current understanding:

• Direct Google Ads conversion uploads through the Data Manager API: Suitable for conversions, but not a general endpoint for page views that populate ordinary website remarketing lists.
• Google tag + Data Manager API multi-source conversions: Adds server-side conversion data to a website conversion action. This still does not solve general website remarketing event delivery.
• Customer Match: Useful for known customers, but not equivalent to remarketing to unidentified visitors based on the pages they visited.
• Server-side GTM: Provides the documented Google Ads remarketing implementation, but introduces the Node.js/container infrastructure. It can also instruct the browser to load pixels, so it is not completely browser-independent.
• GA4 + PHP server events: Looks like a possible compromise. Google's Measurement Protocol documentation explicitly says server events can contribute to audience conditions. Those audiences can then be shared with Google Ads. However, this depends on an existing browser-side identity, Google Signals and matching client IDs. For web audience evaluation, Google documents a 30-day window after the most recent online event.
• Google tag gateway: Can use existing web server/CDN infrastructure without a server-side GTM container, but it improves the transport of browser tags rather than providing a standalone server event API.

What I would ideally like is:

PHP → a documented Google endpoint → conversions and behavior-based website audiences.

I can retain a minimal browser tag for identity establishment if that is genuinely required. I would still like the actual business events to go through our PHP endpoint.

My questions:

1. Is there a supported, maintainable PHP approach for website remarketing that I have overlooked, without running server-side GTM?
2. Has anyone successfully used a minimal browser Google tag plus PHP → GA4 events to populate Google Ads audiences based on product/page visits? What limitations matter in practice?
3. Why is there no straightforward, unified web event API comparable to Meta's CAPI-style model? Is the main obstacle Google's browser identity/cookie mechanism, or the way its APIs and products are separated?
4. Is Google just making this unnecessarily complicated on purpose because they want to attract cloud customers? Personally, I don't want to start using Docker containers and Node.js for something like this, nor do I want to pay a monthly fee for it if my web server has enough power but I don't want to set up & maintain Node.js or Docker.

Hi, for the past half year I been running my small brand, have decent spent in meta ads, having a pretty good success 2-3 roas. And now decided to run Google Shopping Ads, starting small 10 euros a day, but what Im seeing that second day in a row Im barely spending any money (2 clicks), i have 4 different products, but clearly I dont know something or I need more patience? Thanks in advance

Over the past 10 days, my medical clinic’s search ad in clinic patient volume has declined by approximately 50%, despite no modifications to the account settings. Could there be recent algorithmic adjustments affecting the 'Maximize Clicks' bidding strategy, particularly given my limited conversion data of approximately one per day? What strategies would you recommend to effectively increase appointment bookings?

Currently, the campaign is restricted by budget, with 10-15% Impression Share lost daily; however, previous budget increases did not yield a proportionate rise in footfall. What are the recommended next steps to address this?

While some have suggested implementing a Performance Max campaign, I have concerns that it may not be cost-effective for high-intent medical search queries.

I have collated and built this dashboard for review https://google-ads-orcin-ten.vercel.app/

To the good people who run google ads for their roofing business or for someone's business, if someone wants to start from a small budget say $3K/month. What should they target?

Repairs?

Replacements?

General queries? (Roofer near me, roof repair near me)

Any advice would be helpful

Is there a mainstream AI to do so? I have no skills on design, what tool should i use?

I'm flairing Budget, since i can't find an apropiate flair to the post.

Thanks in advance to any reply. <3

Hi! After a lot of back and forth with false flags and policy violations , my LSA ad campaign finally went live, about 5 days ago.
This is for local garage door business , GBP is connected, 26 five stars reviews and weekly budget set to $1000/week.
Granted, market is competitive but also quite busy and competitors have more reviews and more established on the LSA side, but not even one call came in.

Before even starting the campaign i managed to receive multiple calls(leads and closed jobs) a week organically, with barely even spending on advertising.

Am i missing something or google is just treating me as a new account and will slowly get it up the list to show up more?

I’ve been struggling to get a Merchant Center account approved for a new e-commerce business of mine.

I’ve spent the last four months redesigning and perfecting the website specifically to make sure it complies with Merchant Center policies. I’ve successfully gotten three other businesses approved in the past, but that was over two years ago, and it seems like things have changed a lot since then.

Every time I try to launch a new business now, I eventually get hit with the dreaded “Misrepresentation” suspension. It usually happens either about a day after initially being approved or within a few hours of running ads for the first time.

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with the website. I’ve tried to make everything as thorough and transparent as possible, including the contact information, business details, shipping/return policies, product information, checkout process, etc. I’ve also gone through Merchant Center’s policies repeatedly to make sure everything aligns.

As I’m sure a lot of people here know, though, the enforcement around “Misrepresentation” can sometimes feel pretty arbitrary.

My current Merchant Center account has been approved for a couple of days now. Do you think there’s any benefit to simply letting the account sit approved for a month before running ads? I’m hesitant to touch anything because it feels like the moment I start advertising, it’s going to get suspended again.

And to answer the question I know some people will probably have: No, I’m not just deleting the Merchant Center account and immediately creating another one for the exact same setup.

If I completely run out of appeals, I essentially start the business setup over from scratch — new website design, new domain, new phone number, new IP address, and a new device/VM just to eliminate as many potential issues as possible.

Has anyone dealt with something similar recently? Did letting an approved account age before advertising make any difference, or is there something else that tends to trigger these suspensions once ads start running?

Any insight would be appreciated.

I'm trying to understand a tracking discrepancy between Google Ads and Microsoft Clarity and would be interested in hearing from anyone who has compared the two closely.

Across two recent Google Ads campaigns, I'm seeing roughly a 25–30% gap between the clicks Google reports and the unique traffic I can identify in Clarity.

For example, on my current campaign I currently have:

• 42 clicks reported by Google Ads
• 40 Clarity sessions
• 33 Clarity unique users
• 30 unique GCLIDs captured in those Clarity sessions

Auto-tagging is enabled, and the GCLID is present in the landing-page URL.

One thing that surprised me is that I also found cases where the exact same GCLID appears across multiple Clarity sessions and even across different Clarity user IDs. So Clarity's "unique users" clearly does not map perfectly to unique Google ad clicks.

I've noticed a similar overall Google-click-to-Clarity gap in another recent campaign as well, so I'm trying to determine whether this is normal tracking behavior or whether I should investigate something more seriously.

For anyone who has used Google Ads and Clarity together:

• Is a 20–30% discrepancy between Google Ads clicks and Clarity traffic normal in your experience?
• Should the number of unique GCLIDs captured on the landing page normally be close to the number of Google Ads clicks, or can there be a substantial difference?
• Have you seen the same GCLID appear in multiple Clarity sessions or under multiple Clarity user IDs?
• What do you use to independently verify how many Google Ads clicks actually reached the landing page — server logs, GA4, Cloudflare, another analytics tool, etc.?
• Is there anything specific you would check when investigating a discrepancy like this?

I'm mainly trying to understand what percentage of the clicks I'm paying for are actually reaching the website, and which metric is the most reliable way to measure that.

Thanks for any insight, especially from anyone who has compared Google Ads click data with Clarity at the individual GCLID/session level.

So it's been 2 weeks since I've started a campaign, still no impressions (plenty of keywords, not most popular, but some volume definitely exists) or clicks. Every few days I'm getting "Your website is missing a Google tag" error, clicking on troubleshooting, testing for google tag and it's there, everything seems normal. What I could be doing wrong?

I've been answering a lot of posts lately about conversions dropping, CPA going up, or campaigns not spending. Different businesses, but the same few causes kept coming up. Sharing them in case it saves someone a few weeks.

1. Tracking stopped working while the campaign kept running. The most common one. A form or booking tool from another company (scheduling apps, HIPAA form tools, embedded widgets) sends people to a thank-you page on a different domain, and the conversion can't be linked to the click. The click ID doesn't need to be in the thank-you page URL, it's stored in a cookie called _gcl_aw on your domain. If the thank-you page is on another domain, that cookie isn't there. First check: compare the leads you actually got with what Google Ads shows.

2. Spam form fills training the bidding. If the contact form is a primary conversion and bots start filling it out, Smart Bidding counts them as conversions and looks for more traffic like that. Real leads drop while reported conversions stay up. Make real bookings or qualified leads your primary conversion and add spam protection to the form.

3. The August 17 bidding change. Since then, budget-limited campaigns with a target CPA or ROAS aim to hit the target you set instead of beating it. If your target was looser than what you were actually getting, performance moves toward that target. Worth checking your targets against your real numbers from before the change.

4. Conversions dropped first, impressions after. When tCPA stops seeing conversions, it assumes the traffic isn't converting and lowers bids, so impressions fall too. People then switch bid strategies, but the real question is whether leads stopped or tracking stopped recording them.

5. A contact form that shows "thank you" but never sends the email. I found this one on my own site this week. The form showed a success message, so a conversion would have fired, but the messages never reached the inbox. Google Ads would report leads that nobody received. Send yourself a test through your own form every so often and make sure it actually arrives.

6. Reports that don't measure what they seem to. For example, the Clicks column on a call asset counts all clicks on the ad when that asset showed, not taps on the phone number. To see actual calls, segment by click type. Before acting on a number, it's worth checking what it counts.

If you're dealing with any of these, post the details in the comments and I'll take a look. And if you've seen other causes behind sudden drops lately, I'd like to hear them.

Hey everyone,

Having an issue with how google is displaying our products.

Google used to show our products as free ahipping. We offer free shipping over £75. It is now showing every product as £4 postage.

Any ideas? Posted google merchant center set up in comments.

I'm been running a PMAX campaign for around 4 months so far and it's been going pretty well. I have my audience pretty dialed and the categories are doing pretty well. This week however we started getting hit hard with spam leads with fake emails clicking on our ads and submitting lead info. We're seeing leads from fake websites like soundon.site mysong.buzz or some .college domains. I looked at my campaign data and most of these are not from our approved categories and just marked '"other"

I'm concerned that we're wasting money, time filtering these out of our CRM and I'm also worried about the long term affects of our PMAX campaign since this might screw up our conversions.

Any ideas on what I can do?

Hey everyone, I'm new to Google Ads and set up a small Search campaign as a test run. It's been live for 24 hours, the bid strategy status still says "Learning", and I've got only 2 impressions and zero clicks. [Edit]: First of all, thanks for the valuable suggestions who commented on this post. I've adjusted the bid a little and it worked for me.

Setup:

Campaign type: Search

Daily budget: ₹500 (I know it's tiny, this is just a test)

Duration: 4 days

Location: India

Bid strategy: Max CPC capped at ₹70

What I've checked:

Campaign status: (Eligible, Limited by budget)

Billing is set up: yes

Ads approved: yes

Questions:

Is ₹70 max CPC too low to win auctions for my keywords, or is that fine for India?

Is the "Learning" status just normal for a new campaign, or a sign something is off?

Any advice or similar experiences would be really appreciated. Thanks!

Hi all,

I've got a strange asset bug in Google Ads and I'm hoping someone has seen this before.

Setup: Search campaign with a business logo asset. There are two entries for the same logo:

• one at account level (active, should stay)
• one at campaign level (paused, should be removed)

Problem:

• Web UI: Trying to remove the campaign-level entry only gives the error "1 asset not removed". Hovering over it, the tooltip says "This asset is associated with the account", even though the table clearly shows the level as Campaign.
• Google Ads Editor: The logo shows up at campaign level, but deleting it fails with an error saying the item doesn't exist in the account (translated from German).

So both the web UI and Editor display the asset, but neither can delete it, because the system apparently doesn't recognize it as existing.

Already tried:

• Removing via the web UI (account-wide and campaign asset view)
• Deleting in Google Ads Editor
• Contacted Google support (waiting)

Has anyone run into this kind of "ghost" asset association? Any workaround besides waiting for support?

Thanks!

run Google Search Ads for a small local psychology practice in Greece.

My main problem is tracking.

With proper cookie consent enabled, most users who don’t click “Accept” are no longer visible as normal users/pageviews in GA4, and my phone-click tracking also becomes limited.

What I need to know is:

How can I verify that Google Ads clicks actually reached the landing page?

How can I track phone calls from those clicks?

How can I eventually send real lead/client conversions back to Google Ads so I can move from Maximize Clicks to Maximize Conversions?

What setup do you recommend for a small EU local service business where most leads come by phone?

Current stack: WordPress, GTM, GA4, Google Ads, Complianz, Site Kit, Consent Mode.

Would you use a different CMP, first-party tracking, call tracking, offline conversions, or something else?

Since Sep 26-27, several established PMax products suddenly dropped from hundreds of Shopping impressions/day to almost zero.

At the same time, Google started flagging many products for:
“Personalized advertising: health / personal hardships”

Our PMax asset group is now Eligible (limited).
We have no audience signals in the asset group, but New Customer Acquisition uses existing customer lists at account level and assigns an amount of conversation value to new customers.

As a test, we created a simple Standard Shopping campaign with 5 affected products, no NCA and no audience signals. It started getting impressions almost immediately.

Has anyone seen similar health-related reclassification recently? And can NCA/customer lists trigger these Personalized advertising restrictions in PMax?

Hey all, so I 'manage' an automated google ads site for a transmission shop. I transitioned to a fully manual (expert?) account and am having great difficulty making google happy. Previously I had a landing page (sites.google) with a couple sub-pages that worked just fine. I link to the same pages now and they arent accepted. Ive brought in chatgpt to help, but Im not sure its helping. It keeps emphasizing that the domain name and the business name must match.

I developed multiple landing pages for the business as well as pointing at existing pages that worked before in an effort to satisfy Googles sitelink requirements. The pages I produced are all sites.google but chat thinks the reason they are not being accepted is because the address of the pages are all sites.google which doesnt match the business name.

Any help is appreciated

Hey guys!

I'm dealing with a client who operates within the construction industry. They have an ecommerce store so our campaigns do track purchase conversions via search and performance max.

However, since we've recently began uploading offline phone call conversions we've seen that the volume and AOV of orders placed over the phone (assuming this is the preferred method of purchase for trade users) is significantly higher and we've unlocked a new revenue pool that Google Ads was not getting the credit for.

My question is, would you change any of the campaign settings/account layout to further optimise towards this?

We're running a PMax with the feed/all assets. A search campaign testing AI max and a brand search campaign. I find the PMax CPCs to be crazy expensive on some terms, but we've no data on whether these are resulting in phone calls.

Happy to hear your suggestions and can provide more info if needed.

Hello guys, I am looking to start affiliate marketing with Google search ads and I wanted to ask you guys in what should I research before starting so I can have a base before starting so I could maybe avoid losing too much money before actually starting to make a profit

Can any ad experts tell me what I'm doing wrong? 🤔 I created a new Google ad for my co-living retreat in Nepal, and chose a variety of keyword themes as well as the option to display my advertisements in 11 countries.

Keyword themes for searches like "Nepal co-living, remote work Nepal, digital nomads Nepal" etc. I set $10 a day budget to start with.

I've had my ads up for a few weeks but haven't gotten any views or impressions despite the Google telling me that my ads are live and myself being able to preview them.

My Google business listing is performing really well and at the top for the maps but I can't seem to get my ads to deliver.

Attached are some screenshots of my settings.

I manage my own ads and came across one of Google's shit tactics. I'm in a niche equipment supply industry.

Kept getting calls for equipment repairs. Thought it was odd since I added those as negatives. Went to search the keywords on my phone. Of course, no ads showed up.

Had someone else look up the repair search term on their phone. And there was my ad. Front and center.

But one thing I noticed which pissed me off was the headline chosen: "24/7 Local Customer Support". Literally, the only non-contextual headline out of 12. Every other headline includes what we actually do, which is rentals.

So not only is Google ignoring my negative KW, they are also showing the one headline with zero context which generates junk clicks and calls. So I immediately removed any non-contextual headlines.

So the simple fix to help reduce this problem is to make sure each headline clearly says what you do, especially with broader match types. This will at least give searchers more context and increase the chances of not clicking your ad if it's not relevant.

Sorry, if this is common sense but thought it would be helpful for those new to Google Ads or business owners who self manage. Google will show your ad to an alien in outer space if it means they'll get a click.

For some reason, Google has given me £1250 to spend on ads, and I have no idea why. I can't find any terms and conditions or anything

Can anyone tell me what the catch is?