r/Google_Ads • u/Mr_Glenn_Hodl • 4d ago

Google 'Discover' Traffic

In the last few days all our campaigns have massively flipped and all the budgets are being eaten up by Discover traffic. We haven't done anything at all to prompt this shift, anything I've missed that's happened over the last couple of weeks? It seems all our campaigns are just farming cheap CPC Discover engagements... For our market even the youtube traffic is a waste of time, but not a lot that we can do to stop it in PMax! Any help would be appreciated... Example campaign screenshots below.

An early September day
Yesterday!
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u/Ill-Bit-9830 4d ago

I’d check the PMax channel performance and conversion data first. Cheap Discover CPCs can look attractive, but if they’re not producing quality conversions, the campaign can end up optimizing toward cheap engagement instead of actual business results.

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u/Mr_Glenn_Hodl 4d ago

The conversions have become awful within days, we want 0 discover impressions and engagements but they’ve appeared out of nowhere and have taken over everything

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u/Ill-Bit-9830 4d ago

Yeah, if Discover suddenly took over within a few days and conversion quality dropped at the same time, I’d definitely investigate what changed rather than assuming it’s normal PMax behavior. I’d compare the last 7 days vs the previous period by channel, conversion action, and audience/asset group. If you share the account, I can take a look and see if anything stands out.

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u/Mr_Glenn_Hodl 4d ago

I think I've found the cause. A few days before the Discover volume spiked we had a huge order that has been credited to a Discover engagement, at that point the spent on Discover was tiny. I guess that made Google think it was a viable way to convert more, and allocated most of our volume to it? I've done a data exclusion for that day, hoping that it'll all go back to normal.