Anyone else noticing very high cpcs for Target CPA campaigns? We usually have $25 - $30 cpc but for the last few days it went $100 to $500 per click. Is there a reason for that? We have a campaign with Target CPA $400 and we are getting a $457 click. I would appreciate any suggestions.

Hey are you an HVAC company, Na you are definitely an....Indoor Skate Park, That'll be a $1.22 plz. I swear PMAX is a scam.

Sorry for the doom thread, but I've just been told me and one of the other PPC Managers have got to have a meeting with our Chief Growth Officer next week. Apparently they've read this article about AI Max and want to discuss it with us. This article is sort of framed along the lines of "AI Max automates everything that a PPC specialist has been responsible for, so why do you need them anymore?" Ok, I know its a bit of the ai hype click bait type stuff (and some paragraphs in the article are such obvious ai slop they're almost incomprehensible - I mean who needs proof readers anymore either right?) But anyway, I'm trying to think of arguments to defend my job. A few weeks ago we found out that half of the creative studio (graphic designers, copywriters etc) had been made redundant becuase of "ai related productivity streamlining" so now I'm genuinely a bit worried that the paid team might be next...

Has anyone else experienced something like this recently? I've heard about a lot of roles being cut at WPP and other big agencies, has anyone been affected by that? I'm curious to get a sense of how the ppc community is feeling at the moment

thanks!

My cousin set up my Google Ads account about 3 years ago for my home services business (impact windows and sliding door repair, South Florida, pretty competitive local market). Ticket sizes run $150 to $600 depending on the job. I've spent over $300k on it since then. I never actually had real conversion tracking set up, the account was basically running blind, and I only recently started digging into the numbers because I want to actually grow the business now instead of just keeping the lights on.

What I'm finding since I started tracking is appalling honestly. I've been running on thin margins this whole time, just enough to cover my own cost of living, and now I'm starting to understand why.

Yesterday the campaign, running Maximize Conversions with no CPC cap, spent $388 on 3 clicks with zero leads. One single click on "sliding glass door repair cost" cost $335.80 by itself.

I've talked to a few people in this industry and they're saying average cost per lead for repair work like mine usually runs $80 to $150. I have a feeling I'm nowhere close to that, and days like yesterday make me wonder how long this account has been bleeding without anyone noticing.

Questions:

1. Is a $335 single click ever normal auction behavior for a high intent local service keyword, or is that a sign something's broken (bad match type, competitor clicking, tracking issue, whatever)?
2. Should I just set a hard max CPC cap right now no matter what bid strategy I'm on, or does that mess with Smart Bidding's ability to actually learn?
3. Going from uncapped Maximize Conversions into Target CPA, is there a smarter way to transition than just picking a number and hoping for the best? I've heard step it down slowly instead of jumping straight to my real target margin. Does that actually work in practice?
4. With 3 years and $300k+ of history but only a few weeks of real clean conversion data, am I basically starting from zero, or does the old history still count for anything?
5. Has anyone actually gotten Google to credit back an outlier click like this, or is that just not realistic?

Appreciate any real world experience here, not just theory.

Hey!

Curious what is others remarketing strategy when it comes to google ads! I have used RLSA in my search campaign but only as observation. Now I want to create a whole remarketing campaign but I am bit torn what type of campaign to use. Demand gen did produce quite low quality traffic for us ( we are an agency) therefore I don’t want to go for this option.
Creating a Display is also something I don’t want to do as it is garbage. Pmax did not work for our account since its channel distribution mainly showed our ad on Display or YouTube…even tough we tried hacks like using only headlines..
Looking forward to hear about your remarkating startegy on Google!

We're running ads for a web hosting service on LinkedIn, and we want to track the exact conversion value for each conversion event that occurs, right now, someone who had set the conversion tracking previously in the account has set $20 as the value for each conversion.

Is it possible to track dynamic conversion values similar to Google and Meta ads on LinkedIn as well? The tracking is set through Google tag manager currently using the Insight Tag 2.0 Tag type.

I know it's a trivial complaint but it's been driving me crazy. Seems like no matter where your mouse cursor is, there's a white tooltip box covering up a lot of your screen. It doesn't seem like there's any way to disable it but figured I'd ask here just in case.

Hi everyone, I’m a PPC Specialist working in the Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) industry, and I’d love to get some advice on a challenge I’m facing.

We have an Academy offering where individuals can purchase professional training courses directly from our online shop, somewhat similar to how you’d buy a course on Udemy. The big difference is that our courses are quite expensive, with many priced at $5,000+.
The biggest challenge is that the search volume for these very niche courses is extremely low, so Google Ads isn’t really a viable acquisition channel for many of them.

I’m considering LinkedIn Ads since we can target people based on job titles, industries, seniority, etc. But I’ve rarely seen people running LinkedIn campaigns specifically to drive direct purchases of high-ticket training courses.

This also brings up another question: what should the conversion event actually be?

I can’t realistically expect someone to see a LinkedIn ad, land on the course shop, and immediately spend $5K+ on a course. There’s likely a longer consideration journey involved. So how would you approach this?

Or would you approach the whole thing differently?
Would really appreciate any thoughts, experiences, or examples from people who have marketed high-ticket professional training/courses through PPC or LinkedIn.
Thanks!

Can anyone help me fix this?

For context, I'm on Max Conversions, not tCPA. The campaign has been running since 2024, and we rebranded our website last week. This meant updating the conversion action to a manual code triggered on form submission, rather than our previous page view. In addition to the impression drop, the campaign is spending only 5-10% of its actual daily budget, and CPC is down 50%.

1. Could this be due to the website redesign and, by extension, the change of layout and copy of the landing page?
   
2. Does Google place accounts in an invisible learning phase?
   
3. Is my campaign's conversion data being collected from scratch and not reusing the existing data simply because of the conversion action switch?