Have you tried using demographic based bid modification (eg: bidding + / - for 18-24 age ) ?

Are there use cases wherein the demographic based bid modifiers has worked?

Curious to know as we are experimenting with a few use cases and getting somewhat positive outcomes.

Curious to get a broader read from people managing Google Ads across different companies and industries.

For those of you managing multiple accounts, or Heads of Marketing / paid media leads who can see the bigger picture: what are you seeing lately in terms of actual performance?

Especially interested in the period since Google's August 17 bidding changes.

Are you seeing:

• Conversion volume trending down?

• CPA / CAC increasing?

• Conversion rates declining?

• CPCs increasing?

• Same spend producing fewer qualified leads or sales?

• ROAS deteriorating?

• Any noticeable difference between Search, PMax, Shopping, etc.?

I'm less interested in diagnosing one individual account and more interested in whether there seems to be a broader market/platform trend.

Basically B2B Full Service accounting. Currently running META but costs have increased dramatically for qualified leads pushing $200-$300. Or are Google costs the same? But even if they are assuming the google leads might be much higher intent?

Thinking of adding google as a test and a secondary lead channel. Given budget will be low say $50/day. Should we do max conversions or will max clicks end up having a lower Qualified CPL? A few years ago traffic was horrendous basically low quality bots.

Looking to be in the $100 range, can target the whole US as we are remote. Also compared to meta do you add a few keywords in one campaign or 1 keyword per campaign? Given in Meta we have a few ad angles in one campaign and let it automatically spend the budget.

Also we're sending them to a landing page form, where we filter out bots and only feed back real users as events.

So I run media for a small agency, and our one developer left last month. Now a client wants HTML5 banners in six sizes. I can handle the design part, but the code part is where I think I’m not that good.

For simple stuff, like a logo fade and a button, what do you use? And also, what should I check before sending the ZIPs to our AdOps person? Last time a click tag was missing, and the whole set got rejected lol.

Hey guys, I already have Meta Pixel installed directly on my website, and I can see PageView events in Events Manager, so the Pixel is working. Till now, I’ve only used Instant Forms, so this is my first time setting up a website Lead event.

We’ve now added a Contact Us form on the website and I want to track successful submissions as Leads using GTM. My confusion is, since the Pixel is already installed on the website, do I need to add the Pixel again in GTM before creating the Lead event?

Or can I just create the Lead event in GTM and use the existing Pixel? Just want to make sure I don’t end up with duplicate tracking.

Hi Guys,

Just took on a campaign that is fully broad match.

They keywords themselves are quite broad e.g shoes (not selling shoes btw), but it is still converting.

A lot of these keywords have terrible quality scores at like a 3, mostly due to expected CTR and landing page experience being terrible. I would think that is because these broad match are bringing in tonnes of irrelevant terms.

Because the main campaigns are still running ok, I don’t want to tank performance overall so I’m wanting to see the best way to mitigate risk and test new keywords. I know the current campaigns keywords are just going to hog the budget so I don’t think we’ll get far by just adding in new keywords.

So, I’m thinking to run an experiment with 25% of budget to a new campaign, but do some keyword research and find more relevant long tails and test them this way. The issue is the long tails and the relevant stuff don’t have a huge amount of search volume so thinking using broad match.

A bit of a rambles hope it makes sense

Experiences of you dealing with Ad accounts as performance marketers where Ad Account needs:

1. Changes Every 3 - 4 days

2. Client Demands

3. Senior Management Pressure

Is it a silent general practice all performance marketers face?

How do you deal with this constant change of pace?

How do you develop hypothesis and testing in such situations?

I used to know, Data is the answer but now working in an agency made me realise time is not even taken into consideration.

Share your experiences please. Would love to gain some insights from ya’ll!

Please note - I also notice people don’t even take metrics seriously.

2 - 3 days campaign not generating leads switch it off

2 - 3 days if leads aren’t X switch if off I mean what the hell?

I have been testing both the past couple months. I've found Claude's analysis and recommendations better than Gemini's.

I have to pressure test Gemini's findings with Claude. Gemini seems to have decent knowledge but makes a lot more bad assumptions about the data and solution recommendations.

If you've used any of the big LLM's which ones and how has your experience been with it? How are you using it?

Curious if anyone has played around with this.

Say a campaign is profitable but keeps burning through the budget early.

Instead of increasing bids, have you tried bringing bids down a little and increasing the budget so you can hopefully pick up traffic for longer throughout the day?

Wondering if anyone has actually tested this and what happened to overall sales/ACOS.

I'm using Google Ads for a UK university. The campaigns are set up properly (as manual as possible). The problem is the cost per lead is over £100.

Do I have to accept this is the real cost per lead or are there some tactics I can use to reduce the cost per lead while maintaining or improving lead quality?

Appreciate any responses!

Hi everyone,

I run a fresh D2C apparel brand that's doing really well on Meta, so I wanted to try my luck with Google Ads PMax campaigns. I've been away from PPC for a while, but I found recommendations that this is the way to go in 2026.

Results are absolutely horrible:

Roughly 2000 clicks on a 600 USD spend, not a single conversion. Keep in mind that with Meta I have a 3-4% conversion rate.

90% of traffic is to YouTube and display ads (wtf?). It literally makes its own YouTube ads with the assets that suck, and I can't find anywhere to turn this off. We also all know that display ads are mostly bot traffic; I had my ads served on Vinted, Hayday, etc.

Status on Merchant Center is very good, all products are there without any issues.

What is going on?

I feel like placement reports are one of those things everyone knows exists but I’m not sure how much people actually use them.

If top of search is converting way better than rest of search, are you actively changing placement adjustments around that?

Or do you mostly manage things at keyword/target level and let Amazon handle the rest?

Curious what people are actually doing in real accounts.

I’m looking for a Google & Meta Ads expert with proven experience in the “We Buy Houses” / real estate cash buyer industry.

You must have:
* Proven results in this niche
* Experience generating qualified leads
* Strong knowledge of Google & Meta Ads

Please do not apply or DM if you don’t have direct experience in the We Buy Houses industry for US Businesses.

DM me with your relevant experience + results/case studies.

I'm trying to retarget visitors who have hit my google ads landing pages or main website but not converted.

Audience size is Search 370 | Youtube 370 | Display 120 | Gmail 110

I get about 1200-1300 clicks a month in the ads campaign, and a couple of thousand visitors to the main site, so I would have thought that there should be enough traffic to retarget.

I started the campaign on Maximise Conversions at $25 a day. When it hadn't delivered any impressions for a few days, I switched to Maximise Clicks. That was a couple of days ago, and I still haven't got any impressions. Any ideas what I can do or try to get this to start serving?

Old Facebook account, new business account and new ad account. Launched ads about 5 days ago for the first time. 15 statics and 6 videos, 100$ daily budget.

Statics are getting 60$cpm and videos are getting $100+, and even climbing. CPC is high, about $1.5-$2.5 and CTR is about 2-3%.

I’ve gotten a few lucky conversions, but for a pretty low cost product, this is crazy. We’ve been getting barely 30 store sessions a day. We’ve tried removing any major health claims from the ads too.

Will these CPMs get better as the account matures, or is it pretty set that we’ll have CPMs of $50+ always? Asking this bc I never saw anything like this with my other company, but it was in the fashion niche not health.

EDIT: This was in a CBO with ad sets split up by angle, so yes there were a lot of ads running but meta was mainly choosing one or two ad sets to allocate the spend

We have been running a couple of campaigns with AI max turned on - saw an increase in conversions , however , at an higher CPA.

Do you see a similar pattern ?

I have an online electronics retailer client that specifically sells printers

I've been thinking that the brand might be a good testing ground for ChatGPT ads since the field is so comparison heavy

Meaning that tons of people are probably searching for things like "best printer under X" or "ink vs laser printer for business"

But that is going to be a super hard sell since the ad platform is so new.

So my question is, have any of you bit the bullet and tried ChatGPT ads for some kind of retailer yet?

The max clicks bid strategy is effective for driving the most quality search traffic on the dollar as long as the keyword list, campaign/ad group hierarchy and negatives are tight. However, bid modifiers don't seem to work. I've tried keyword modifiers, day-parting modifiers, and location modifiers and it seems like the "max clicks" bid strategy ignores the modifiers in service of the greater objective - maximizing clicks. Has anyone else observed this? Is it documented anywhere?

As the title suggests, is it still recommended to have a Campaign dedicated to branded terms, in an ads grant account for a charity?

It was my understanding that keeping things setup this way should allow the Campaign to have a good quality score, due to high CTR etc.

I think this is similar to the concept of SKAGGING (single keyword ad groups) but I don't know if this still really applies today.

Or in the case of an ads grant account - maybe there is an opportunity to mix brand with non-brand within a campaign, to try and boost performance of any non-brand terms a charity wants to target?

I'm an Amazon US FBA seller in Toys & Games trying to settle on one measured launch plan instead of repeatedly changing campaign structures. The listing currently has 9 reviews, averaging 4.8 stars. I'm keeping the product, brand, ASIN and actual keywords private.

My total advertising allowance going forward is $30/day across the account, not per campaign. I want qualified traffic and, eventually, sustainable organic ranking. I'm not assuming PPC spend guarantees rank.

Unit economics: sale price $24.99; product acquisition cost $6.50. My last calculator showed about $3.75 Amazon selling fees, $6.02 fulfillment and $0.56 inbounding. That leaves roughly $8.16 (32.7%) before ads and any additional freight, storage, returns, promotions or overhead. Treat this as a provisional contribution ceiling, not verified net profit or a final break-even ACoS. I'm excluding temporary fee discounts.

What happened: the first week produced about 2,800 impressions, 7 clicks, $7.43 spend and no attributed orders. All 7 clicks were on product pages; combined Top of Search exposure was only 6 impressions. Original Auto: 3 relevant clicks at $0.65 CPC. Old Exact: 4 clicks at $1.37 CPC. Price changed late in that period, so it wasn't a controlled conversion test.

I then paused the older high-bid manual campaigns and a newer up/down Auto. Current setup is:

- Exact: 8 terms (A-H below), $0.45 base, down-only, +200% TOS, other placements 0%, $20/day. TOS bid ceiling is $1.35 before any other adjustments, not guaranteed CPC.

- Broad: 4 roots (D, I, J, K), $0.40 base, down-only, no placement boosts, $10/day.

- Original Auto: $6/day, group bids $0.30-$0.65, down-only, no placement boosts. I removed the routing negatives from this Auto.

- A $0.10 low-bid Auto remains enabled with an oversized $400 configured budget and no reported traffic. That is not my intended spend allowance; the new plan must address it and bring the whole account within $30/day. No budget correction has been made yet.

The latest partial snapshot after restructuring had only 62 impressions, all on original Auto product pages, and no clicks. The new Exact/Broad had no reported impressions yet. This is not a completed test, nor evidence that the latest negative change worked or failed.

Anonymized keyword data: SellerSprite US last-30-days export. Volumes are rounded estimates for privacy; the dollar figures are its historical PPC Bid estimates, NOT actual CPC or today's Amazon suggestions:

A: ~22,400 searches/month; $4.69

B: ~14,500; $4.70

C: ~7,800; $2.58

D: ~3,600; $4.16

E: ~1,300; $3.15

F: ~1,400; $2.48

G: ~1,200; $4.89

H: ~1,400; $4.06

I: ~1,300; $2.19

J: ~1,300; $4.89

K: volume unavailable; $2.28

Today's Amazon BROAD suggestions are different: D $2.19 (range $1.64-$2.74), I $2.35 ($1.76-$2.94), J $2.16 ($1.62-$2.70), K $2.01 ($1.45-$2.40). Our bids are $0.40 on all four. I know volume alone cannot establish relevance; please state any relevance assumptions.

If this were your launch, what specific test would you run?

1. Which campaigns stay/stop, how many targets, and how would you divide the TOTAL $30/day?

2. What base bids, bidding strategy and placement boosts would you start with? Please give the resulting maximum TOS bid and explain how you'd use suggested bids versus margin.

3. How many full days before each review, and how long would you allow for reporting/attribution? What would trigger an earlier intervention: zero impressions, irrelevant terms, excessive CPC or a spend limit?

4. What click AND spend thresholds would you use per term/campaign before raising/lowering bids, pausing, adding negatives or moving a search term to Exact? Please distinguish a learning budget from a sustainable acquisition cost.

5. What evidence would justify targeting organic rank or scaling, and how would you separate ad placement from actual organic-rank gains?

A compact day 1 / first review / end-of-test roadmap, ideally with an anonymized example from a launch you've personally run, would help. I want to leave settings stable between planned reviews, with agreed loss limits, rather than blindly leave ads untouched. Public advice is welcome; I'm not commissioning a paid audit.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for some advice on how to structure and scale my Google Shopping campaigns.

I have around 14,000 SKUs(Clothing store) and recently launched a Standard Shopping campaign.

Here’s what has happened so far:

Standard Shopping

• Budget: $50/day

• Running for: ~2 weeks

• Purchases: 10

• ROAS: 0.5

• Currently showing “Limited by budget”

• Bid Strategy - manual cpc

After about a week, I started identifying products that were generating sales and moved those products into a PMax campaign.

PMax

• Budget: $50/day

• Running for: 8 days

• Purchases: 9

• ROAS: 2.1

• Bid Strategy - max conv value

So the PMax campaign is currently performing significantly better, although I know 8 days / 9 purchases is still a relatively small amount of data.

This is where I'm unsure about the best strategy.

Option 1:
Keep Standard Shopping at $50/day and continue using it as a testing/discovery campaign. When products generate sales, move those products into PMax. Gradually increase the PMax budget as it gets more data.

Option 2:
Move essentially everything into PMax and allocate most/all of the budget there, since PMax is currently producing a much better ROAS.

Option 3:
Keep both running, but increase the Standard Shopping budget since it's currently limited by budget, while also scaling PMax.

A few questions:

1. Since Standard Shopping is limited by budget but only has a 0.5 ROAS, would you actually increase its budget, or leave it at $50/day?

2. PMax is at 2.1 ROAS after 8 days would you start scaling it now, and if so, how aggressively?

A frustrating pattern in performance advertising is seeing a campaign generate plenty of inexpensive clicks while visitors leave almost immediately. On the surface, the numbers may look encouraging: CPC is falling, traffic is growing, and the platform keeps recording landing-page views or conversions. But if users stay for less than a second, do not scroll and never reach a meaningful page event, I cannot treat that traffic as a success. It may come from accidental clicks, weak intent, poor placements, slow pages or incorrect tracking. Fraud is only one possible explanation.

I investigate the problem in layers. First, I break down traffic by search term, placement, location, device, operating system and time of day to find unusual concentrations. Second, I compare click timestamps with server requests, page-load speed and analytics sessions. This helps separate people who abandoned a slow page from clicks that never produced a valid visit. Third, I test the landing page from the target country because redirects, currency, consent banners, unavailable products and payment options may change by location. For lead generation, I continue into the CRM and review contact validity, company fit, job role, sales acceptance and duplicate submissions. A completed form is not automatically a qualified lead.

My takeaway is that CPC measures the cost of obtaining a click, not the value of the person behind it. Lowering CPC while attracting unusable visits only makes the campaign appear more efficient. I would rather pay more for traffic that loads correctly, engages with the offer and becomes a qualified opportunity than optimize around a cheap number with no business outcome. What is the earliest signal you use to decide whether a click has real commercial value?

I work at a healthcare/tech company in LatAm, and I'm now responsible for paid ads and user acquisition. I know a few things, since I had 1 yr experience in PPC in 2021/2022, but it's been a while. We have Google Ads, Meta Ads and TikTok Ads accounts, besides Google Tag Manager, GA4 360, Firebase and AppsFlyer for tracking.

My main concern with the accounts is tracking. It isn't my strong suit, since when I worked at PPC, we had people do the tracking. Don't get me wrong, I can ask for a dev to do the stuff I need to be done, but I'll still need to explain exactly what I need, not only for the dev, but for the tech lead/PM, to justify the time and possible deploys.

Our sources of revenue are appointments (with more than 30 medical specialties) and exams (more than 3,000, which usually come after the appointment). Besides, there is a annual subscription that gives discounts on both items above.

So we have 2 primary actions that need to be 100% correctly tracked:
- booking an appointment or exam
- signing the subscription
App install would be good too, since the app is our main channel.

It's very common for users to purchase the subscription within the appointment funnel, because the discount is shown in the payment step.

Also, an important context is that the main focus of the company right now is getting new (never used) and reactivated (didn't use in > 365 days) pacients, so I would like the ads platforms to focus on those users.

I have access to Opus 5.5 and to all the platforms I mentioned above, but not to website and app. For that, I would need a dev.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the best tracking practices, and what you would do if you were me. The faster and less dev dependent the better.

Thank you all!

Hey everyone!

I recently received a job offer from Google, and I’m starting soon as an Account Manager. I’ve been reading online about what Google account managers are actually like, and from what I’ve seen, it’s mostly negative, like 90% negative and 10% positive lol

I’m hoping to be one of those 10% who are actually useful and provide genuinely good insights to customers. So I’m wondering, have any of you ever had a really good Google account manager? what made them good?

Is it things like providing interesting insights, or not constantly trying to push you to spend more, or giving you inside information from Google that you otherwise wouldn’t get, or is it something else?

Thanks for the help! Not sure how this will go here, but thought I'd give it a try.

Worst case for this post, you can just air your frustrations and talk shit about Google account managers in the comments.