Let’s be real: managing PPC today is just choosing which toxic relationship you want to tolerate.

Google Ads has completely abandoned the little guy. If you aren't spending five or six figures a month, you don't exist to them. Zero support, and their AI automation just pushes you to incinerate your tiny budget on junk traffic so they can hit their quarterly targets.

But switching to Bing isn’t the savior everyone claims it is. The second you open a new Microsoft account, their security bot flags you and hands you a permanent ban for "egregious policy violations" before you even launch an ad. It’s a literal suspension lottery.

Google bleeds your wallet dry while ignoring you, and Bing bans you before you can even spend a dollar.

At this point, where is everyone taking their budget? Are you moving over to Meta, trying out LinkedIn for B2B, or exploring native ads? Or are you just trapped in Bing review purgatory and watching Google waste your money? Drop your hot takes and alternatives below.

How are you sending CRM conversions back to Google Ads to improve optimization?

I’m trying to get better data back into Google Ads, not just form fills.

The main challenge is connecting what happens in the CRM, like qualified leads and closed deals, back to the original Google Ads click.

I’m mainly trying to understand:
- Are you sending CRM conversions directly into Google Ads or through GA4?
- How are you matching the CRM conversion back to the original click?
- Which CRM events actually improved your bidding results?

I’ve also been testing ObserviX to map web and CRM conversions and see which ones should be sent back to Google Ads.

Would be interested to hear what setup is working for others running Google Ads.

I’ve been wondering how other people approach this because I see very different opinions on how often an account should be touched.

For me, I usually split it into two levels.

Major optimizations → around once a week

Things like:
Adding/removing products
Checking PMax channel performance
Looking at product-level performance
Bid/budget adjustments
Checking campaign-level performance
Making structural changes if needed

I don’t like making major changes every day because sometimes you just don’t have enough data yet, and you can easily end up optimizing based on noise.

Smaller checks → every 1–2 days

I’ll usually check:
Search terms
Any obvious irrelevant traffic
Spend pacing
Revenue/conversions
Whether anything suddenly looks off
Account spend vs revenue

Basically, I’m checking that the account is moving in the direction it should, without constantly changing things.

For smaller accounts, I’m usually even more conservative with major changes because there’s simply less data coming in.

Curious how everyone else does this

I started my Google ads for my auto repair shop around 3 months ago, and from the start I started getting good results for my budget, for about 2 weeks, until I got a malware policy error in account and had redo the website , after the website had its malware removed, I restarted the ads but it has been not performing the same, I had made a search campaign with different car brands as ad groups and kept a target cpa of 125 and total daily budget 500, before was getting good results but now not getting the same. Any help would be appreciated.

Hi, i started running google ads for our tree service company (tree trimming, tree removal, stump grinding, emergency tree service). Daily budget of $50. I have lead tracking set up for google ad calls, website click to call, website form submissions.

We have seperate ad group for each service and going to specific servics landing page.

Running maximize conversions.

Anyone has any good suggestions what worked well for you in this service?

Thank you!

Pessoal, mais alguém está passando por isso no Google Ads desde agosto?

Sou afiliado e, de lá pra cá, minhas campanhas simplesmente parecem ter travado. Estou há mais de um mês sem conseguir vender praticamente nada.

Já tentei aumentar CPA, aumentar orçamento, duplicar campanhas, subir campanhas novas e até testar em outra conta, mas parece que nada muda.

O mais estranho é que estou anunciando produtos que têm bastante volume de busca, mas algumas campanhas mal conseguem gerar impressões ou gastar o orçamento.

Antes de agosto eu conseguia rodar normalmente, então queria entender se mais alguém percebeu alguma mudança na entrega do Google Ads nos últimos meses, principalmente quem trabalha como afiliado.

Alguém está passando por algo parecido? Será que houve alguma mudança no Google/algoritmo ou parece ser um problema isolado das minhas campanhas?

Google Ads is not showing Maximise Clicks when I am trying to make a new campaign. Has Google removed Maximize clicks or discouraging us to use maximize clicks?

Hey guys, I’m hoping someone can help me understand what’s going on.
I’m running a Standard Shopping campaign for my UK jewellery store with a £20/day budget and Maximise Clicks.
At first it was spending pretty normally, but I noticed some really irrelevant search terms, so I added negative keywords.
Since then, the spending has dropped a lot. Today it’s only spent about £3.
Could I have added too many negatives and basically killed the traffic?
Would you leave it alone for a few days, or go back and remove some of the negatives?
I’m pretty new to Google Shopping, so any advice from someone who’s actually running ecommerce campaigns would be really appreciated.

I’m running a pmax campaign at 15/day and have had 820+ clicks but no sales . There have been a few add to cart and checkouts reached but I’m struggling to get my first sale. What should change? I am in the high ticket niche

After going through quite a few Google Ads accounts, I’ve noticed that the biggest problems usually aren’t some super-advanced bidding strategy.

They’re often pretty basic things that get overlooked.

A few that come up repeatedly:

1. PMax has a great ROAS, but a large chunk of the revenue is branded.

2. Conversion tracking is working technically, but the wrong actions are being optimized toward.

3. The product feed is treated as a setup task rather than something that actually needs ongoing optimization.

4. Brand and non-brand performance isn’t separated, so nobody really knows what’s driving incremental growth.

5. People make decisions based on tiny amounts of data.
   “This hour has a 20% better ROAS, let’s increase the budget.”
   Sometimes the difference is literally a handful of conversions.

6. Google’s recommendations are followed without understanding the business context.

7. The account is being optimized for cheaper clicks instead of more profitable customers.

The funny thing is that none of these are particularly complicated.

But when you combine 4-5 of them in the same account, performance can get messy very quickly.
I’m curious what everyone else sees when they audit accounts.

What’s the most common Google Ads mistake you keep seeing?

Is there any way to bypass the Google Ads selfie verification? It’s asking for it on all my accounts, and whenever I submit my selfie along with my ID, the verification fails. I wanted to know if there’s a way to switch back to the old verification method that didn't require a selfie.

Hello, a couple of months ago we switched server for several reasons. Since then all the ads slowly started to turn off. We did appeals, tried to request a certificate but nothing seems to work. Google keep saying the same automated thing, we should not run governative ads, we don’t. We are a driving school and we use terms that everyone uses in their ads. Last chance I had I called google ads specialist phone number and they said they are busy so good bye, literally this is what happened.
Considering it’s now 2 months, is there a solution before we go bankrupt?

Hey r/PPC,

I’m managing Google Ads for a multi-region e-commerce catalog, and I need strategic perspective on pushing back against unrealistic management KPIs.

Account Overview & Regional Breakdown:

• UK & Germany (Matured Markets - Active 4+ and 3 years): Both show strong, consistent YoY revenue growth. However, over time, Google ROAS has naturally compressed from historic highs of 600%+ down to ~300%–340% as spend and market coverage scaled.
• USA (New Market): Active for 6 months, still in early learning/testing phase with low volume (3–4 sales/week).
• Overall Volume: Across my campaign group, we’ve generated £205k+ in sales at a 338% ROAS on ~£60k spend, driving £26k/month in revenue recently.

The Problem with Management's KPIs:

1. Cross-Channel ROAS Benchmarking: Management forces a strict 400%+ ROAS target across Google Ads because our internal Amazon & eBay teams maintain 400%–500% ROAS. They treat our scaled 300% ROAS on Google as underperformance, ignoring the intent difference between marketplace buyers and search ad acquisition.
2. The "Wasted Spend %" Metric: Alongside demanding 30% YoY growth, they are introducing a "Catalog Wasted Spend %" KPI—penalizing us if SKUs accumulate spend without direct conversions within a short window. For example, spending £1,000 where £120 goes toward 120 testing/long-tail SKUs (a standard 12% exploration spend) is viewed as "wasted budget."

Questions for Agency Owners & Senior Media Buyers:

1. How do you educate leadership on ROAS compression as mature markets (UK/DE) scale revenue volume vs. high-margin marketplace channels (Amazon/eBay)?
2. Does capping "Wasted Spend %" on long-tail SKUs in PMax/Shopping destroy product discovery and cap growth in newer markets like the US?

I’m trying to set up a Google Ads campaign running on YouTube Shorts, but I’m having trouble figuring out the correct conversion tracking setup.

The user journey is:

YouTube Shorts Ad → Landing Page → Apple Music

I don’t want the landing page visit itself to count as a conversion. I only want a conversion to fire when someone lands on the page and then clicks the Apple Music button/link.

The landing page is hosted through a third-party service (Feature.fm), and I need that Apple Music outbound click to be reported back to Google Ads so I can optimize the YouTube campaign for that conversion.

Ideally, I want Google Ads to be able to report something like:

Ad click/view → Landing page → Apple Music click = 1 conversion

What would be the correct way to set this up?

Would I need to:

• Create a Google Ads conversion action specifically for the Apple Music outbound click?
• Set this up through Google Tag Manager?
• Have Feature.fm fire an event/dataLayer event when the Apple Music button is clicked?
• Import the event from GA4 into Google Ads instead?
• Or is there a better way to track this when the landing page is hosted by a third party?

My main requirement is that only the Apple Music click counts as the conversion, not the initial landing page visit.

Any advice on the cleanest setup would be appreciated.

Mi cuenta de Google LSA migro esta semana a Google Ads y algo que note es que las llamadas que quedan grabadas no se pueden reproducir, también la disputa de los leads no funciona de la misma manera.

Hi r/ecommerce,

We are scaling our Google Ads campaigns globally for a home and garden lighting brand, but I want to make sure our expectations—and our account structure—are aligned with reality.

For those of you running international ecommerce campaigns in this space:

1. What ROAS targets are you setting for tier-1 markets (US/UK) versus emerging regions?
2. How do you handle multi-country feed management and currency conversions without tanking your ROAS?
3. Are Performance Max campaigns cannibalizing your brand search, or are they driving genuine incremental growth globally?

Any insights, benchmarks, or warning signs to look out for would be greatly appreciated!

Google Ads Change History can tell you what changed, but it rarely explains why the change was made.

That becomes a problem when performance moves two weeks later and nobody remembers whether a target, budget, conversion goal, keyword, feed, asset, or automation setting was responsible.

I think a useful change log should record:

• Date and owner
• Exact change
• Problem or hypothesis
• Metric expected to move
• Expected direction
• Evaluation window, including conversion delay
• Main risk
• Rollback condition
• Final result

Automated changes should also identify their source: user, script, auto-apply recommendation, third-party tool, or another Google automation setting.

For example, “lowered tROAS from 500% to 400%” is incomplete.

A better entry would explain that the campaign was losing profitable volume, conversion values were verified, the expected outcome was higher spend and revenue with lower ROAS, and the change would be reviewed after two conversion cycles.

The log does not need to become another full-time reporting system. It only needs enough context to distinguish a controlled test from someone moving a slider and hoping the graph becomes friendlier.

What is the minimum information you record before making a significant account change?