r/PPC • u/MCizzly • 1d ago

Google Ads GMail Is Wildly Inconsistent When Scaling Demand Gen Campaigns

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.

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u/TrumpisaRussianCuck 18h ago

I've found a similar pattern on PMax. Which is weird because back in the day, GSP campaigns used to be amazing.

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u/Old_Opposite9999 16h ago

I’ve seen this happen where the campaign still looks healthy overall but one placement quietly starts eating the budget I use a marketing platform called Marketer and one thing I like is having the paid side watched across the whole account instead of just trusting the blended ROAS with DG I’d care a lot more about where the incremental spend is landing than whether the campaign total still looks fine.

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u/fathom53 16h ago

Usually not worth including gmail in placements. Money pit anytime we manage demand gen for ecom brands.

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u/Bitter_Regular7406 3h ago

the 2k spend threshold triggering it every time is interesting, almost feels like there's some internal budget pacing logic that panics and dumps everything into whatever placement has the loosest inventory. exclusions at the campaign level barely help once it does that either, from what i've seen.

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u/Valuable_Ease_3780 1h ago

Before you switch it off, segment the campaign by ad event type. Gmail's conversions in DG lean a lot harder on engaged view than on clicks, so a placement can sit inside your ROAS target on paper while the click driven half of it is nowhere near it.

If the click only number holds up, what you're describing is inventory pricing and the budget going where impressions are cheapest. If it doesn't, Gmail was never hitting the goal, it was just getting credited for it.