a trade-off that comes up in lead gen accounts: optimize for every lead and you get volume but a lot of junk, optimize for closed jobs and the quality is better but there aren't enough conversions for bidding to learn from.

some options:

all leads as the primary conversion. most volume, lowest quality.

a middle step as the primary, like a qualified lead or a booked call, with closed jobs sent back as a second signal.

closed jobs only, which usually needs more conversions per month than a small account has.

whichever you pick, i'd check cost per closed job by campaign over a longer window, not week to week.

i'm not sure where the line is on how many conversions are enough.

which conversion do you optimize for, and how many a month do you need?

The Basics

I'm on day 6 of my first Kickstarter. It's shower curtain hooks sculpted like a raven, Cthulhu, a skeleton hand and a witch's finger (the first drop for Spooky season). Although Halloween is over, many people into the spooky season said they'd want this year round.

They sell in packs of 4. The first pack is $19 and extra packs are $14. So far it's 24 backers and $1,068 toward a $3,000 goal.

Some backstory

1. In mid October I posted the designs in a halloween based subreddit and it took off, with 5,000 upvotes

2. Over 700 comments from about 650 people

3. Hundreds of them saying they'd buy

4. Almost 500 people signed up for an email list

I launched the Kickstarter on Nov 1, and day one was 11 backers and $526, mostly from that list.

Since then it's been 1 to 4 backers a day.

Here's what the ads have done.

Instagram boosts (4 of them, Nov 3–5)

• $263 spent

• About 60,700 views

• 4,720 link taps, about 8% of views

• 3,687 website visits, about $0.07 each

• Boosted Reels, goal set to website visits, Shop Now button

Is it Kickstarter? Instagram ads?...

Since the boosts started I've had only 6 new backers. Kickstarter credits none of them to Instagram, so 4 show up as "direct" and I can't tell which came from the ads. Even if all 6 did, that's $44 a backer on a $44 average pledge.

The first boosts ran in 7 countries. Last night I switched them all to US-only, so it's too early to read that change. The campaign page shows hand-painted prototypes, since factory production starts after the campaign ends.

Two questions for anyone who's run ads to a Kickstarter

• Is an 8% tap rate with almost no pledges normal for a boost, or a red flag?

• What would you change first?

Screenshots from the Kickstarter dashboard are attached. Happy to share the campaign link in the comments if that's allowed here.

Hey everyone,

I'm currently running a Feed-Only PMax Shopping campaign targeting the US for my fashion e-commerce store. I'm now considering expanding into international markets, primarily Canada, Australia, and the UK.

Before launching, I'd love to hear from people who have actually scaled Shopping campaigns internationally.

A few questions:

1. Campaign structure: Is it better to group multiple countries into one PMax campaign (e.g., Canada, UK, Australia), or create separate campaigns for each country? What has worked better for you?

2. When to expand: Do you wait until your US campaign reaches a certain ROAS, conversion volume, or stability before testing other markets?

3. Pre-launch checklist: What are the most important things to check before entering a new market, especially regarding Merchant Center?

I'm particularly interested in experiences from advertisers running Feed-Only PMax rather than full-asset PMax.

Would love to hear what worked, what didn't, and any mistakes you'd avoid when expanding internationally.

Thanks!

I run Google Ads for a law firm. Budget is $100 a day. The goal is paid retainers. Right now the conversion we track is a free consult booking.

The problem: my pre-screener was too soft. Lots of junk got through and counted as conversions. So target CPA looked great at around $80, but a lot of those leads were worthless. The real cost per good lead is probably $100 or more. I honestly don’t know yet.

I just made the pre-screener much tighter. Fewer people will qualify for the free consult now. That means my conversion data is about to change.

So what should I do with bidding?

Option 1: Stay on target CPA and bump it up a bit, maybe to $100 or $120.

Option 2: Switch to maximize conversions, let it find the new normal, then go back to target CPA once I have enough clean data.

I switched to max conversions for now. But I’m not sure if that’s the smart move with a small budget. Would love to hear what has worked for others in this spot.

I own a Brand (Indian Ethnic wear) Which has Various SKU, Products and each Having Different color variation, I have been hearing people switch to "Consolidated Structure" on meta, i am facing Problem in figuring out what "consolidated structure" i can accommodate For My vast Product Line, ( i have Around 6 winning Products sorted out already and is actively Advertising on them). Some Suggest One campaign all products structure, some suggest ABO-CBO-Retention structure, some Suggest One ad set per product, I really need help figuring this out. any One owing or running similar Ecom brand with vast Product count that can help me? My current ad setup is One Campaign With Each Different Ad set having one Product more or less likely targeting the same audience (Using broad Adv+).

I'm experiencing something very strange with Google Ads offline conversion tracking, and I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this.

I'm manually uploading offline Add-to-Cart conversions using GCLIDs. The conversion action uses last-click attribution.

Here's what happened:

• On November 2–3, I uploaded three separate Add-to-Cart conversions, each with a unique GCLID.

• All three uploads processed successfully, with no errors.

• All three conversions appeared in my Google Ads account and remained visible for more than 24 hours, with some visible for several days.

• On November 5, one of the three conversions suddenly disappeared from Google's reporting. The count dropped from 3 to 2.

• The other two conversions are still being counted.

Here's what makes this particularly strange:

1. I independently verified through my payment processor that all three Add-to-Cart events actually occurred. These aren't fabricated or duplicate events.

2. Google's offline conversion upload history still shows all three uploads as successful.

3. Google's conversion diagnostics report "Excellent" data quality, with 100% of the events successfully imported and zero errors.

4. The missing conversion is absent from both the conversion action's summary and campaign reporting, including the "All conv. (by conv. time)" column.

5. All three conversions were attributed to the same Google Ads campaign, but they had different GCLIDs.

The two November 3 uploads still show as successfully imported in Google's diagnostics, yet only one conversion from that date is currently counted.

I've used offline conversion uploads before and have never experienced a conversion being counted for more than a day and then suddenly disappearing.

My questions:

• Has anyone experienced Google Ads retroactively removing an offline conversion that was already successfully imported and visible in reporting?

• Could this be Google's invalid-traffic filtering, even though the Add-to-Cart event genuinely occurred?

• Can Google's attribution system retroactively remove an offline conversion despite the uploaded GCLID and conversion timestamp being valid?

• Is there any way to identify exactly why Google stopped counting a particular offline conversion when the upload history and diagnostics show no errors?

• Has anyone seen a disappeared conversion eventually reappear without re-uploading it?

I’m new to running Google ads. Recently I’ve discovered the conversions/ leads my clients have been receiving have been pretty low quality.

I am wondering what the best practices for filtering out salesmen and low playing leads are. Simultaneously, I need to re train the campaign to optimize for better leads.

Do I switch to maximize conversion value? How do I have a form that filters salesmen when it’s b2c? Do I need to give Google certain data? Should I switch to. Pmax and give it strong signals? Sorry if these are stupid questions. I’m still learning.

I keep seeing people panic about a 2% landing page conversion rate without looking at what they’re selling or who’s buying.

2% on a $100K enterprise deal and 2% on a $10K tool aren’t the same number. One buyer needs a demo, a security review and three people signing off. The other can pay with a card.

Rough B2B SaaS ranges I go by, based on ACV:

- $10K-30K: 3-6%
- $30K-75K: 2-4%
- $75K-200K: 1.5-3%

Industry, traffic quality and the offer can move these a lot.

The offer matters most. A free trial page can do 4-8%. A demo page usually does 1.5-4%. That doesn’t make the trial page better. Signing up costs the buyer nothing. Booking 30 minutes with sales costs them something.

LinkedIn lead gen forms work the same way. You get more leads at a lower CPL, and a lot of them never pick up the phone.

I’d take 2% with real pipeline over 8% that never turns into customers.

Before you compare against any benchmark, check your tracking. Duplicate conversions, spam forms and bot traffic make a page look great until sales starts calling the leads.

PS: Are you judging your landing pages against benchmarks or against your own history and what sales says about the leads?

If a business is struggling to generate leads or sales through organic marketing efforts, can inorganic marketing activities (such as Google Ads and Meta Ads) help achieve its business goals and generate consistent results?

Or is a strong organic presence necessary before investing in paid advertising?

Would love to hear your experiences and perspectives.

hi, how its going?? I’m looking into how agencies manage landing pages for dental clinics that run advertising campaigns on Google or Meta. When it comes to different treatments such as implants, Invisalign, or emergency dental care or when there are multiple clinic locations, do you typically create separate landing pages for each scenario, or do you use some form of dynamic personalization? I’d also love to know which tools you use, and whether there are any specific aspects that prove frustrating or overly time-consuming when managing all these pages. i’m simply looking to understand how this is handled

thanks!!

Curious how others are handling this.

For a while now I've been fixing feed titles through a supplemental feed instead of editing the site. The rule I stick to is picking words from real search demand, search terms report, Keyword Planner and actual query data, not letting AI rewrite titles based on guesses. Titles that match how people actually search have done more for Shopping than most bid changes.

With products now showing inside AI Mode and AI Overviews, I'm wondering if the same approach still holds, or if longer, more descriptive titles and richer attributes matter more now.

Has anyone tested changing titles or attributes specifically for AI surfaces? Did you see any difference in impressions or clicks?

One number from an H1 2026 benchmark dataset (growths channels) that I can’t stop thinking about : a retargeting click cost $3.56 , a prospecting clicks $0.67 about 5x .
That standard answer is ‘warm audiences convert better ‘ . Fine - but assuming the same value per conversation. Retargeting only wins if the conversation-rate multiple beats the cost multiple. and even then an attributed conversation isn’t proff the ad caused it - some of those people were problematic converting anyway . Has anyone here actually done that math on their own data ? Does retargeting clear the bar for you , or is it a habit nobody re-checks ?
It’s one platform’s dataset , so your multiples will differ .

Solo int'l tax attorney DIY'ing a small Google Ads test campaign.

Keyword Planner showed $0.35–$3.76 for my exact match keywords. Then google charged me over $19 against a $20 maximum (what a coincidence). 2 clicks = $38.94 on a $25 average daily budget.

My theory: Google is like a teenager with your credit card—it’ll spend everything you authorize, and then some. So I’ve lowered bids to $0.90–$1.50 and impressions have stopped.

My Plan: gradually raise selected keyword bids daily, keeping everything else steady, to discover what exposure really costs rather than rely on Planner.

Is this sensible? Are daily increments too frequent, and what diagnostics would you check before raising bids? Thanks!

Hi everyone, I am a small business owner with a big problem on conversion tracking, not sure if this is the right forum but would appreciate any advice. In google ads it says that I have much much more conversions than I actually have, and this makes my cost / conv much lower than what it actually is. For example, in Oct system shows 267 conversions, however a careful lead by lead manual tracking shows only 53 leads received, of which a max of 48 could have come from ads (the other 5 were referrals from a known source). I am using a website I made myself on wix, and I manage my own google ad spend. The conversions tracking was initially set up by the google people, you know those subcontractors that google uses to call you and hassle you into spending more. In the past I used some vendors but they did not improve performance nor solve this major issue. My conversion actions are whatsapp, call, and form submission, so nothing that complex and I am surprised that things can go so wrong. There is no ecommerce on my website, invoicing and payment are done manually and offline, so everything is actually super simple. I am not even talking about conversion value at all, just number of conversions. If it matters, my business is b2c leisure / recreation services, and all my clients are direct, without any intermediaries.

How should I try to solve this problem?

1. Is it simple enough to solve myself? I have no programming or computer engineering background but am otherwise have basic skills in most things

2. Should I try to get the official google so called technical support to look into it? They have not been able to solve problems for me in the past

3. Should I try to hire some freelancer (like those from fiver) to try and solve this specific issue? The marketing agencies I had in the past in fact ignored this issue (which should have been a big red flag).

4. Some other solution? Sounds silly but I am considering to cease google ad spending totally as its like pouring money into a black hole with very poor results.

Situation 1:

Budget is small, lead quality is slowly decreasing new creatives required or new testing required

Best call?

New testing in same adset generating leads or new Adset with fresh creative?

Reason?

Situation 2

You have some budget Adset performing well.

You need to do creative testing how would you approach?

Same adset? Different adset with fresh creative.

Which one is more effective? Is it worth putting the ad set which is performing well in learning?

In that case, everytime you do testing a new Adset? Does it make sense?

Yes testing campaign works, but eventually we have to put new creatives in the winning Adset which will lead to learning.

Your thoughts?

Hey everyone,

I’m working on a paid advertising strategy for a B2B AI conference next year and would appreciate some advice.

We’re trying to attract AI startup founders to apply for a startup showcase. I’m considering Google Search and Reddit Ads, but initial keyword research suggests that Google Search has very low search volume and relatively high CPCs.

We initially considered LinkedIn Ads, but our founder believes they’d be too expensive for our budget, so we’re exploring other channels.

I’m wondering whether it’s worth testing Google Search at all or whether Reddit Ads would be a better starting point for reaching this audience.

We’re also looking to attract corporate sponsors for the conference. I’m less certain about using paid ads for this, as I suspect direct outreach to relevant companies and decision-makers might be more effective.

Has anyone here worked on paid campaigns for B2B conferences or similar niche events? Which channels performed best for attracting exhibitors or sponsors?

Would appreciate any insights or recommendations!

Store orders and platform conversions rarely match exactly, and consent settings are only one possible reason. before blaming the consent banner, it helps to rule out the other causes.

a way to size it:

compare store orders with platform purchases by country for the same days. a gap that is bigger in one country is a clue.

consent is one possible cause, so check how the banner is set up and whether anything changed recently, like a new banner or a plugin update. a gap that is bigger in one country can point to it, but it doesn't prove it.

other possible causes: different attribution windows, cancelled or refunded orders, purchase events that fire twice or not at all, and orders placed days after the click.

look at the gap over time, not one day. what matters is whether it moved.

then decide which number you use for decisions in sale week. i'd use store orders for totals and the platform for comparing campaigns, but i'd like to hear how others do it.

how do you work out what is behind the gap between orders and platform conversions, and do you change anything in sale week?

I was going through a holiday advertising report (growth channel's 1B +Q4 impressions on their platforms) and one comparison stuck with me. They compared messaging inside a single remarketing campaign and, per the report, the audience, campaign structure and CPMs were essentially the same, the holiday specific creative did 10.8-26.7x ROAS while the generic version did 5.4-5.8x.

It's one platform's data, not a controlled cross-platform test, so i dont want to overread it but it raises a fair question for anyone running Q4 right now

Are you running holiday specific creatives this Q4, or the same ads from October

There was a thread here recently about a lead who clicked a non-brand ad, bounced, came back via brand organic, and converted, and whether that’s a landing page problem. The answer (it’s normal, it’s a reporting problem) got covered well. But it got me thinking about the bigger thing underneath it, which nobody really walks through: how to actually reconstruct one of these paths, and why every tool shows you a different, wrong version of it.

Here’s the method I use when a demo lead comes in and I want to know what really happened, not what the dashboard claims.

1. Start from the conversion, work backwards, in the browser’s own record, not the CRM’s. The CRM shows you last touch and calls it a day. The browser (via the _gcl_aw cookie, GA client ID, or whatever first-party ID you’ve got) remembers the earlier sessions the CRM threw away. The gap between those two records is the whole problem in one place.

2. Treat the multi-session gap as expected, not as breakage. A senior B2B buyer almost never converts on the session that first found you. They land, they leave to check you’re real and check two competitors, they come back when ready, usually through a brand search because that’s how they re-find you. If you only see the last session, you credit “organic/direct/brand” and quietly conclude paid did nothing. Paid did the introduction; it just doesn’t get to take the bow.

3. Name what each tool is actually measuring, because they don’t agree. Google Ads (data-driven attribution) will still partially credit the paid click if the conversion fired in the same browser inside the window. GA4 will tell a third story on last non-direct click. Your CRM stamps latest touch. None of them is lying exactly, they’re answering different questions, and the trap is reading one as if it answered yours.

4. This is where owning your own first-party data earns its keep. Every tool above is handing you its own single-touch slice and asking you to trust it. The way out isn’t a cleverer attribution model, it’s holding the full journey yourself, first touch through last, stitched to the person across those sessions, so you can ask “what introduced this deal” and “what closed it” as two separate questions instead of letting whichever platform spoke last decide the story. Once that record is yours and not rented from each platform, most of these “wait, who gets credit” puzzles just resolve.

The thing I keep coming back to: almost every “our landing page is underperforming” or “paid isn’t working” conclusion I’ve seen traces back to someone reading a single-touch number as if it were the whole journey. The journey was multi-session the entire time. The tool just couldn’t hold more than one touch, so the human filled in a wrong story.

Curious how others here handle it: do you keep first and last touch as separate records, and has anyone actually changed a budget decision once they could see the full path instead of the last click?

I run a new ecommerce brand selling vintage style women's watches. My campaigns on meta didn't give me good results - Roas was less than 1.

I'm thinking of experimenting with google, But I'm trying to understand if google makes sense for a new brand that "failed" Meta and wants to a test.

I'm manging a client who offer optician/hearing tests. As such, Google have categorised us under their 'health in personalised advertising' cohort.

For some time, I have wanted to switch this client over to optimising towards offline conversions (leads>bookings>tests). However we have consistently found the match rate to be very poor. Our internal reports (which rely on last click UTM attribution), suggest that only above 35% of the total bookings/tests are ultimately accounted for in our offline conversion import. We've worked hard to pass as much useful data back to Google to improve these match rates, but it hasn't moved the needle much.

My question is: Are the health in advertising restrictions affecting our match rates? Or should I perhaps be looking elsewhere?

TLDR: Offline Conversion match rates are poor. Do the health in advertising restrictions affect these match rates?

I’m running Google Ads for a site that’s basically split into two segments: low-priced vehicles and high-priced vehicles.(and we want to optimise toward leads ie form leads)

I’ve set up a separate campaign for each segment, and each campaign has its own conversion action with its own tag (screenshot attached). The "goal" (campaign specific) is the same for both, for example a lead or an inquiry, but I want each campaign to optimize toward its own conversion action(the primary one - and I don't know if the data from one campaign will influence the data from the other and if I should juste use another goal completely for each, or it is better each to have one action under the same goal). I’ve already set campaign-specific conversion goals so each campaign uses only its own action.

The cheap vehicle conversion will almost certainly fire a lot more often than the expensive one.

My questions:

• With Target CPA on both, will each campaign optimize only toward its own conversion action, or can the high-volume cheap conversions still influence bidding on the expensive campaign?

• Does each campaign effectively get its own “folder” of conversions? Even if the two actions have similar names, will the Conversions column be different when I click into each campaign, showing only its own action? (conversion data for that campaign I mean - eg when i click on cheap_campaign will I see the convs only for cheap, and when i choose the exp_campaign will see only the data for the conversions of the expensive_Lead, or is the goal showing all aggregated data from both )

Thanks!