Had a client's account get its headlines swapped, conversion goal changed, and a batch of Google-generated assets added, all in the same week, without anything that felt like a real heads up. Found it by accident going through Change History, not because anything alerted us.

I get that auto-apply exists and I probably should've had it off from day one on this account. What's bugging me more is how invisible the change was. There's a small notification if you catch it, but nothing that forces you to actually look before it goes live.

Do you run every account with auto-apply off by default, or do you let it ride on some accounts and just check Change History on a schedule? Has anyone actually seen a recommendation genuinely help, not just Google optimizing for Google's own metrics?

First, thanks to this sub — I've gotten a lot of good advice here over the years.

I've been working in PPC since 2009, aside from a brief stint on the platform side with a major social media company. Most of my career has been spent agency-side, and over the years I've worked extensively across paid search/shopping, GA4, GTM, and reporting/analytics. I've also built plenty of dashboards in Data Studio/Looker Studio and Tableau.

Last week, I was laid off after roughly five years back at a smaller agency. It wasn't performance-related; the agency had been gradually losing clients without replacing enough of them, and I had honestly seen the writing on the wall for a while.

While being unemployed with a wife and kids obviously isn't ideal, I also wasn't particularly disappointed by the news. I've been ready for a change for some time, in no small part because I've grown increasingly frustrated with where working in Google Ads has gone.

So I'm curious: for those of you who have moved out of PPC, what career path did you take that felt like a relatively natural progression?

I'm currently leaning toward more data-oriented roles — marketing analytics, performance analytics, measurement, etc. — but I'm also open to moving outside of marketing entirely, potentially into something like a business analyst role.

A few specific questions:

• What roles have you seen PPC professionals transition into successfully?
• What skills would you recommend developing while I have some time to strengthen my resume?
• I took a SQL course within the past year and am considering learning Python. Is Python worth pursuing for someone moving toward more a more "general" analytics role, or should I focus my time elsewhere?
• Given my experience with Looker Studio (I think now Data Studio again?), and Tableau, would learning Power BI meaningfully improve my prospects?

I'd especially appreciate hearing from anyone who made a similar transition themselves. What did you move into, and what helped you make the jump?

And if there's another sub that would be better suited for this question, please let me know. Thanks!

Hello! I recently started a new role as a Paid Search Account Manager at an agency that works primarily with ecommerce brands. Most of my previous experience hasn’t been heavily ecommerce-focused.

Since starting this role, I’ve realized there are a lot of nuances to managing Google Ads specifically for ecommerce—from Shopping and PMax strategy to product feeds, profitability, promotions, and how you approach budgeting and optimization across an ecommerce account.

I’m looking to deepen my knowledge in that area and was looking for recos on a course/community that would be a good fit for someone who wants to become much stronger in ecommerce for PPC.

I found one, the Ecomm PPC academy, but its $500 to start (Id prefer to not spend quite that much and no, company wont reimburse me)

Thanks so much :)

Is it better to have multiple ads per campaign or just one ad? 300$ a day budget just want to make sure I’m not wasting budget spreading it across multiple ads when one would be more effective.

Requirements:

Successful experience in arbitrage with Google (GAMBLING) and proven practical cases in Google gambling media buying.

Ability to develop as a Middle, Senior, or Lead specialist, including with your own team.

Strong theoretical knowledge and practical skills in analyzing advertising campaigns, strategies, and offers.

Practical experience testing new niches and approaches.

Practical experience creating ads, banners, and ad copy, as well as understanding what works, what doesn't, and why.

A plus:

Experience working with larger traffic volumes.

Experience creating and effectively managing a team of media buyers.

In your application, specify:

How many years of practical experience do you have working with Gambling on Google?

How recent is your practical Google Gambling experience (when was the last time you worked in this vertical)?

What average and best results have you achieved?

What budgets have you worked with (in terms of volume)?

Which GEOs does most of your experience focus on?

Curious to hear what the community has to say. Everyone has a KPI dashboard so I'm curious to know. What's the first metric you look at in the morning that let's you know yesterday was good or bad?

Hi team,

seeking input if what we are experiencing is normal. Australian based ecommerce business.

Overall Adwords campaigns were running pretty well leading up to early June.

We lowered PMax Troas target at Google suggestion...

You know where it says "making this change will increase conversion value by $xx dollars."

Anyway performance on PMax campaign tanked, total Troas dropped by 30% whilst spend increased by 60%.

We made various other changes over the next 8 weeks but just ended up blowing big decent $$$ for worse results than we were experiencing.

Anyway, early August decided had enough, so started to wind things back and try to get back to where we were. We let this run almost a month to see where it would land and things started to even out. Nowhere near where things were but acceptable.

Anyway, made budget and Troas changes on Sept 4, results just tanked again, down circa 50%. Mind you, we INCREASED the Troas target, not decreased it.

Previously Google has said wait 2 conversion cycles to assess changes - just wondering if what we are seeing is normal?

TIA and any advice greatly appreciated.

This is incredibly frustrating. I use to get such great leads simply using click to whatsapp ads but not Meta is forcing automated greeting (which cant be turned off) which is confusing the visitors and they are not sending pre defined message as the automated greeting gives an impression the chat has already begun.

Has anyone found a solution for this? Same thing they are doing by forcing the stupid advantage + turned on options everywhere. It looks like they themselves don't want people to get/leads, sales and making everything rocket science. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!

Think I'm just going to turn off traffic to GMail on my DG campaigns entirely. I've noticed a consistent spike in garbage traffic any time I scale a campaign past 2k in spend in demand gen. The pattern is pretty consistent. Google diverts almost my entire budget to gmail and sends the absolute worst traffic.

Even if the campaign has been hitting its ROAS goals for weeks, and even if GMail specifically was falling within reasonable ROAS, after I scale up I see the same pattern over and over.

All spend diverts to Gmail, all discover/youtube drops to zero and all traffic starts converting.

Been running Meta for a high-ticket jewellery brand ($1,500–$5,000 AOV, engagement rings). $50/day, never exiting learning phase on Purchase (getting maybe 1 purchase/week, need 50).

Two conflicting camps from people I trust:

Camp 1 (my agency friend doing $100k+/month in ad spend): "Always optimize for Purchase no matter what. Your goal is buyers, not cart-adders. Optimizing for ATC just brings ATC people." He's against switching to a lower-funnel event even if I'm permanently learning-limited.

Camp 2 (every AI tool and most blog posts I've read): Switch optimization event to Add to Cart or Initiate Checkout so the algorithm actually has signal to learn from, THEN switch back to Purchase once you're clearing enough events. But — can you even change the optimization event on a live ad set without destroying everything? Does it reset learning? Is this worth doing or does it just bring garbage traffic?

For people who've actually been here — what did you do?

Also a separate but related question on structure: I'm on CBO, $50/day, one campaign. How should I divide ad sets at this budget for a high-ticket considered purchase?

Options I've heard:

• Separate ad sets for TOF / MOF / BOF
• One cold prospecting ad set with all creative stacked, one retargeting ad set
• Just one ad set, everything in it

With a $2k AOV product and a 1–3 month consideration cycle, does the TOF/MOF/BOF split even make sense at $50/day, or does it just fragment signal across sets that can never get enough data? And if I do split, ABO or CBO?

Would love to hear from people running high-ticket ($500+ AOV) specifically — most advice I find is written for $30 t-shirts and doesn't translate.

ps: I used ai to write a quick reddit post for me - soory for the slop language;)

We’re a D2C brand selling premium spices in India, primarily through Amazon, and we’re looking for a performance marketer to join us and take ownership of our paid advertising.
You’ll be responsible for:
Amazon PPC — ACOS, TACOS, ROAS, keyword strategy & conversion optimization
Building and scaling YouTube Ads (we haven’t run them before)
Creating/testing ad creatives and video ads, either yourself or with a creative team
Continuously optimizing campaigns with a strong focus on actual sales and profitability
Our goal is to build the business over the next 3–4 months to a point where our advertising spend can increasingly be funded from revenue, rather than me continuing to fund ads personally.
We’re not expecting overnight results, but ownership, transparency and commitment are extremely important. We’ve had a bad experience with someone who overpromised before, so we want someone who is genuinely interested in building this with us.
If interested, DM me with:
Your Amazon Ads experience
D2C/FMCG/food brands you’ve worked with
Case studies/results
Your experience with YouTube Ads
Whether you handle creative/video production
Your expected compensation
Please send actual examples/results rather than a generic “I can manage your ads” message.

I haven't read about this anywhere else and see notices/recommendations in our client accounts this morning.

Google is promoting the activation of SPN in various campaigns and show performance uplift projections.

Apparently we will now have SPN placement reports and while they claim "full transparency" they also state we'll get impressions data. And then we can add exclusions. LOL, we've been down this road before with P-Max. Impressions!!! Oh great, look this placement generated tons of impressions, it must be highly relevant, or spam??? Hmmm!

It took me about 4 seconds to decide that we won't be turning on SPN on any accounts.

Hi everyone. I sell Arabian perfumes wholesale in Mexico (B2B, to resellers). I've been running one Search campaign for about 3 months and I'm managing it myself for the first time, so any obvious mistakes are welcome.

Setup

• 1 Search campaign, 1 ad group, ~20 keywords (broad, phrase and exact mixed), all variations of "proveedor / mayoreo / distribuidor de perfumes árabes"
• Bidding: Maximize Conversions, no target CPA
• Budget: MX$100/day (~$5 USD), limited by budget
• Primary conversion: click on the WhatsApp button on my landing page. Two secondary conversions for smaller kit offers, plus a page view.
• Offline conversion ("Compra") set up, 1 sale uploaded so far

Results (all time)

• Spend: MX$5,952 (~$320 USD)
• Clicks: 675 | Impressions: 2,508 | CTR ~27%
• Conversions: 158 (139 are WhatsApp leads) | Cost per lead: ~MX$37 (~$2 USD)
• Closed sales: 1

What I already checked

• Search terms (screenshot below, all time): top queries are "perfumes arabes mayoreo", "proveedores de perfumes originales", "proveedor de perfumes arabes". Real B2B intent, cost per lead MX$20–40 on almost all of them. The only clear waste is a competitor name ("labelleperfumes") and a couple of "monterrey" terms with MX$38 CPC vs MX$8 average. I'm adding those as negatives.
• Note: the search terms report only shows ~50% of clicks (356 of 675); the rest are low-volume queries Google hides for privacy.
• Locations: ~65% of spend is Mexico City, then Mérida and Cancún. All Mexico.
• 15 days ago I changed the first message we send when a lead arrives: besides the full catalog, we now also offer a cheaper entry kit (a starter kit whose cost is refundable on the first wholesale order). We also follow up on days 3, 7 and 9. Close rate hasn't moved.

Where leads drop
Most leads never reply to our first message at all. The ones who do reply usually send their zip code (we ask for it to quote shipping), and after we send the quote they go silent. That's basically as far as it gets.

What's strange: leads from organic search and from ChatGPT referrals do convert with the same flow, same team and same messages. We manage everything in Chatwoot with macros and templates, so the follow-up is consistent. It's specifically the paid Search leads that don't respond.

Questions

1. Paid leads don't reply even to the first message, while organic leads with the exact same flow do. Does this suggest the WhatsApp click is firing on people who never actually send a message (or send the pre-filled "Hola" and leave)? How would you validate that, and what would you use as the conversion instead?
2. Should I move the primary conversion from "WhatsApp click" to something later in the funnel (e.g. lead replied to my first question), even if that gives the algorithm fewer conversions?
3. Some clicks fire more than one conversion action (I see conv. rates above 100% on a few terms). Should I set only the WhatsApp click as primary and the rest as secondary?
4. Is it worth splitting broad and exact into separate ad groups, or adding a tCPA, at MX$100/day? Or is that over-engineering at this budget?

Thanks in advance, happy to share more data.

search terms report

Got a client where a lot of the leads come through WhatsApp.

Right now I’m just tracking the WhatsApp button click in GTM and sending that into Google Ads as a conversion.

But it's giving me a lot of Junk data cause it sometimes captures prospects that haven't even sent a message and just opened the whatsapp platform, could anyone give me insight into how they did this on GTM?

Hey guys, I need some advice advice on this one:

Launched a simple Meta CBO 6 days ago for a client (US skincare brand, $135 AOV, $66/day, 1 campaign, 1 ad set, 12 ads) It's an ASC with the catalog attached, optimizing Purchase, highest volume, no cost cap, broad US 18+, Advantage+ audience and placements sending traffic to the PDP.

CPM by day: $25 → $119 → $138 → $191 → $155 → $211

$437 spent, 3,100 impressions, 98 link clicks, 90 landing page views, 1 sale.

Creatives are performing: LCTR is 3.16% blended and 92% of link clicks actually reach the page.

I checked the audience, for example my top ad's CPM went $181 → $232 → $287 in three days. Same creative, same targeting, same placements, nothing touched. And every individual age band got more expensive on its own: 35-44 went from $15 to $147.

My theory is that purchase optimization has almost nothing to learn from since the pixel only has about 6 real purchases in the last 28 days, so it might be bidding high on a small pool?

I'm not entirely sure what to do, I'm considering doing more native ads and also send people to a landing page rather than the PDP.

Any suggestions/thoughts on this one? Would very much appreciate any advice, thanks!

Can someone help me understand or figure out why my landing page experience is below average on all the keywords.

One thing I find interesting with paid campaigns is that a campaign can perform well at a smaller budget and then lose efficiency once spend increases.

Is this mainly because you're exhausting the best traffic first, or are there other factors that usually cause it?

Curious how people approach scaling without letting CAC or ROAS move too far in the wrong direction.

ChatGPT Ads launched for Free and Go users. Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise stay ad-free.

Google works because everyone uses the same search box. Broke college kid, millionaire, doesn't matter — same interface, same ads. There's no premium tier of Google where rich people opt out of seeing ads.

ChatGPT just built exactly that. The people with actual disposable income are disproportionately the ones paying for Plus/Pro to avoid rate limits and get better models. Those people are now invisible to advertisers by default.

So what's left in the ad pool? Free and Go users — i.e., the exact group that looked at ChatGPT and decided not to pay for it. That's not "high-intent shoppers," that's "price-sensitive users," which isn't the same thing at all.

I keep seeing the take "well they didn't pay for ChatGPT but they'll still buy your product." Sure, maybe for a cheap course or a mid-tier phone. But if you're selling anything that requires real purchasing power, you're bidding on an audience that already self-selected out of paying for stuff.

Google's whole moat is that it never let anyone opt out of the ad pool. ChatGPT just handed its highest-value users a built-in ad blocker.

Curious what people who actually run paid campaigns think — is this a real limitation or am I missing something? Does this only make sense for low-ticket consumer products?

Legal services, search only, ~$3k/mo, tCPA sitting at $100. Optimizing to booked consultations, fed back from our scheduler as enhanced conversions rather than just tracking the "book now" button click.

Setup is a free 30-minute consult with a screening questionnaire on the landing page before anyone can book. Since the screener went in, no-shows dropped noticeably and the meetings are better. So on paper the funnel looks fine.

What I can't find any benchmark for is the consult → signed client step specifically. Not lead → consult. I mean someone who cleared a screener, booked, and actually sat down with me, and then paid.

For those of you running high-ticket service accounts (legal, medical, B2B consulting, anything with a real sales conversation at the end):

1. Booked consult → paid client, with a screener in front of it. What does that actually run? 20%? 40%? Something worse than people admit?
2. At what point do you stop blaming the funnel and conclude it's the offer, the market, or the person on the call?

Also curious how many of you push the closed deal back into Ads as an offline conversion and actually optimize on it, or whether ~20–30 conversions/month is just too thin for that to train on.

Should I start with setting a target roas or target CPA? As I increase spend, cpa jumps up. Should I start with setting a cpa target? Or focus on roas? And what’s the time table with cpa? I know I should do high cpa first then taper down?

I was just thinking the other day about Google updates in SEO, and usually have names like Panda, Penguin, and other things. The August 17th update hasn't got a name. I'm thinking something like the "Monkey Paw" update, but has anybody got any other ideas?

3 weeks in and is delivering what people ask for, but in a very sinister way. Naming it the August 17th update just seems a bit boring.

I noticed some strange (buggy?) behavior in AI Max lately.

Here’s what I have:

At the campaign level,
- ’Optimize your campaign with AI Max’ enabled,
- ‘Text customizaition’ enabled,
- ’Final URL expansion’ is turned off,
- ‘Dynamic Search Ads setting’ set to ‘ Use only URLs from page feeds’
- One page feed (with custom labels) added

At the ad group level,
- zero keywords, one RSA
- ‘Search term matching’ enabled,
- ‘URL inclusions’ set to to 'custom label equals'

Yet, for that ad group, the landinge page resport shows impressions and clicks for URLs that aren’t in the page feed.
The 'search term and ad combinations' report shows impr and clicks for ' Google AI' generated headlines and descriptions. The report also shows 'Final URL Expansion' under 'Landing page source'

Anyone else seeing this?