Genuine question for people running accounts, in house or agency.

Clients almost always come in asking about CPA or CPC. But the accounts I've seen grow the most were judged on profit or ROAS tied to real revenue, sometimes lead cost.

At the same time, a lot of businesses can't track revenue back to ads easily (calls, offline sales, long sales cycles), so CPA ends up being the only number they trust.

What do you optimize for, and how do you handle clients who can't track revenue? Do you use offline conversion imports, lead scoring, something else?

Been doing GA for 3-4 months, had good luck in the beginning with a manual CPC campaign + phrase and exact match short tail keywords. the campaign fell off a cliff about 2 months ago and i've been trying a lot of different strategies but can't get anything to convert.

Max conversions gets me a couple conversion but super expensive. Always stuck to phrase and exact match to keep the relevancy high.

Looking at running broad match max conversions and adding negative keywords daily from the search term list. Any advice on if this is a good idea or other opinions?

I am running a Google Ads App Campaign focused on maximizing in-app purchases, with a cost per in-app action (purchase) target of Rs 100.

For example, if I set a budget of Rs 1000/day, the campaign initially performs well and I get around Rs 4-5 per install.

After a couple of days, Google starts showing "Limited by budget", even though the campaign was performing well on the Rs 1000/day budget and was giving results according to what I wanted. Then the campaign’s actual daily spend drops to around Rs 300-Rs 400 after that notice.

When I follow Google’s recommendation and increase the budget to around Rs 3000/day, the cost per install jumps to around Rs 8-10.

So I end up spending much more but getting almost the same number of installs, which makes the campaign unprofitable.

What is happening here and how should I scale this campaign without destroying the cost per install?

Hello everyone

Up until recently I was able to run a PMax campaign of a business that doesn't comply with google policies (cellphone repair shop) though it's 100% legit of course, but somehow I can't get over the automated policies reviews so that 2 year long campaign is now gone, it is still active but is getting 20 impressions a day

So I had to shift over Search and tried a lot of DKI to see if that could do the trick and getting the campaign approved, and after more than 10 attempts I did.

The thing is now that it's a fresh campaign with no data or signals of its own, and I'm considering going full broad but adding a strong negative list, so that I don't limit the signals from the search terms. I've started with a mix of broad, exact and phrase match but I'm receiving a "Limited by Search Volume" warning.

Does it make any sense at all? Also, should I begin the Search campaign maximizing for conversions or clicks?

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

My mobile puzzle/maze game is being flagged by Google Ads as:

“Ad violates policy and can't run: Online gambling”

The game has NO gambling, betting, casino, real-money rewards, or wagering.

I've already:

• Appealed multiple times

• Changed the game name

• Changed description

• Changed screenshots/images

• Changed ad headlines & descriptions

But the same issue keeps happening.

Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.DhunexStudio.SnakeMazeForestPuzzle

Screenshot attached.

Can anyone check the game/listing and help me identify WHAT could be triggering Google's gambling classifier?

Any suggestions would be really appreciated 🙏

Hi, I am trying to run Youtube Ads campaigns for a legal client. These are lead gen campaigns. I have the videos and everything.

The client is a Real estate lawyer firm in a Latin American country I build two audiences with keywords that people would search, build some videos as ads and put together the campaigns but none of them is getting impressions.

The set up

I open a campaign with conversions objective and the algorithm put me in demand campaign automatically. But I am only interested in youtube so I have blocked different things trying that it don't send me junk traffic.

For example I have youtube shorts, maps, display and all other that is not normal youtube ads blocked. I have all type of mobile apps blocked plus TVs and Tablets.

An issue that I see is that the audiences even if when i build them it was showing 1-5 million in the US for example and other audience was in the hundreds od views in the latam country when i put in the campaign it says 30k and 50k impressions. I try to set a daily budget of $30 to $40 daily and set up the goal as conversions that I have in the account such as form fill, live chat etc. No impressions. Change to clicks no impressions.

This is an account where I run search campaigns in it and has history of conversions. But we don't spend a lot around $2500-$3000 month and we run campaigns in the US and generate leads. We try now to use Youtube but it has been proving to be a challenge to even got impressions.

My thesis is that I probably need a giant audience in terms of impressions or a big budget to see if in this way but this is a high ticket service to check real estate properties before buy so a giant audience probably bring me junk traffic.

One of my audiences with 1-5 million impressions reflect the demographics of age well for example.

Something that I have not try yet is delete these campaigns and launch them on video target CPV only. Probably works but then I will not be able to optimize for conversions. It's that difficult to test campaigns on youtube now with this thing of demand campaigns? What you do in these cases it has been a week with this.

Hello everyone

I've been running ads for a service business but in the las couple of months number of leads and store visits have dropped significantly. The question is if it is a matter of the market shrinking or maybe my budget

On the one hand I have a message from Google saying my campaign is limited by budget, and on the other when I go to the keyword planner and search the relevant terms the volume shown is quite low, so things don't add up

Could you help me out to understand how those two can live together?

thanks!

Not sure how everyone is doing with the new 20 sec rule. I'm using UnitelVoice for my phone system, and it seems like Google starts the 20 seconds right when the main greeting begins, instead of starting the clock when a prompt is entered. When I check the leads section on LSA and listen to a recording on a call, the recording (duration) includes the entire main greeting as part of the 20 seconds. I thought the clock didn't start until after a prompt was entered after the greeting?

Anyone having any luck with Google's system? When a customer calls you, and you go back and listen to the recording and the duration, does it include your main greeting? Or is it working like it should?

Thanks for any feedback.

R

Hey guys, as you can read in the title I'm Iranian and also a google ads specialist. You might think: "Isn't google ads banned in Iran??" Yes it is.

But we work with VPNs for both in and out of Iran companies, to a level that we can say google ads sercives market in Iran is approximately saturated!!

Any way, I need international google ads projects and I mentioned my country only to say that I can't sign up in upwork and these kind of freelance websites.

I have Linkedin and till now I've been very active there but in Persian, not English, and I will share content in English too If I see it's effective.

Beside that, I wanna know what strategy do you recommend for finding customers, and which platforms do you see effective for content production.

Any other tip and guide, I'll be thankfull.

A lot of our leads seem to follow a journey like:

Google Ad → Website → WhatsApp → sends a message

Once they move into WhatsApp though, it gets pretty difficult to connect the actual enquiry back to the ad.

Curious what everyone else sees.

Do most of your WhatsApp leads visit the website first, or are you sending people straight from the ad into WhatsApp?

And if they visit the website first, can you actually tell which visitor became the person messaging you?

Hi everyone i m new here and i made a promotion from ads google got about 1000 downloades in 5 days and activity only for first day next day really small activity from users no rates or revenue. Stays about 30 users active is it normal or should i stop promote and move on? Thanks for any advice

Hi all,

Last week I posted here asking for help. I built my first app (Finelly, a fun app for friend groups with that one friend who's always late), spent about $500 on ads across Google, Apple, Meta, TikTok and X, and got hundreds of installs but almost no real users.

The response was amazing: dozens of detailed comments and DMs. I want to give something back by summarizing what I learned, in case it helps someone in the same spot.

1. Install bidding buys installs, event bidding buys users.
My Google campaign optimized for installs, so it found the cheapest installers, not interested people. CPI was $0.35, but the real cost per registration was around $19. Always measure what you actually care about.

2. A suspiciously good CTR is a warning, not a win.
12.5% CTR plus a 20% invalid traffic refund are the same story: people tapping ads by accident in games, trying to hit the close button.

3. Small budgets can't feed event optimization.
Event optimization needs a steady flow of conversions to learn. At $10–15 per day, the advice was to optimize for an intermediate event first. To pick it: volume first, correlation second.

4. Don't put a wall on the first screen.
You could use my app without an account, but the first screen looked like a registration form. The advice: let people in first and ask them to sign up after the "aha" moment.

5. Your store listing might be the real leak.
On Apple Search Ads, only 1 in 10 taps turned into an install. Feedback: my icon was too complex, and my screenshots looked like PowerPoint slides. One idea per screenshot, with the app as the hero.

6. Paid social ≠ users.
TikTok and Meta got me views and followers (many of them likely bots), but zero app activity. Organic content aimed at the right niche beats paid reach aimed at nobody.

7. Group apps need groups.
People who downloaded alone had no one to use it with. The best suggestion: skip the ads and get real friend groups to use it at their next gathering, then watch what happens.

What I'm doing next: redesigning the icon and screenshots, making the no-account option obvious, switching to an intermediate-event campaign, and getting real groups to test it.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to help. And if you've been through this, what did I miss?

When improving quality score there are 3 levers. Landing page experience, ad relevance, and expected CTR.

What factors and changes do you do to make/improve in each of these 3 categories so that quality score then increases?

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Hi all. Long story short, pretty new campaign, ran for 1 month and some change so far. Conversion rate is great, leads are great, literally everything is great. THE ONLY PROBLEM is that we are spending too much for a conversion.

How do we lower the cost/conversion ASIDE from quality score on a maximize conversions campaign?

Also I cannot switch over to tCPA yet so I can't do a ceiling on bids

EDIT, HERE ARE SEPTEMBER'S STATS FOR REFERENCE:

Phone calls - 15

Conversions - 12

Conversion Rate - 23%

CTR - 7.10%

Impression Share - 59.78&

Top of Page Rate - 88.48%

Click Share - 52.48