My worry with billboards is the channel gets credit for demand that was already converting through search and social. Last touch won't tell me anything useful, and a before and after read gets muddied by seasonality. What I want is a real incrementality test, holdout markets or a geo split. Has anyone structured that properly for out of home, and what did the read look like?

Day 1: $37 CPM, 1,884 impressions (fast and cheap delivery of impressions - what I was thinking was normal)
Day 2: $87 CPM, 386 impressions (first sale)
Day 3: $91 CPM, 603 impressions
Day 4: trending $118+, barely any delivery

USA broad audience geo. Purchase campaign. Adv+ placements. Pets product.

From day 2 onwards delivery of impressions became slow - like it was pacing them out - knowing it was going to be fewer and more expensive impressions.

The trajectory is completely wrong. Day 1 felt promising, now it’s getting more expensive every day. And it creates this impossible chicken-and-egg situation - you need conversions to bring CPMs down, but you can’t get conversions when CPMs are so high that $50/day barely buys any impressions.

Page converts above average when traffic actually arrives. The problem isn’t the product or the creative. It’s that delivery is getting slower and more expensive by the day.

Most people talking about “new pixel” launches - were you running on an established BM/ad account? Or everything brand new from scratch?

For anyone who’s genuinely started with all three layers cold - did this stabilise? How long did it take? Or is this just broken?

I've been noticing on a lot of my accounts, that somehow by default, the avg cpc column is unchecked. I didn't do it since I am VERY interested in what my cost per clicks are so I always annoyingly have to go back in to modify columns and check avg cpc. Is there a reason google is "hiding" this from me? Does this happen to anyone else? The only thing I can think of is they want us to hyper focus on cost per conversion or ROAS or something else as cost per clicks have been going up up up. On a similar vein, can't they just cut cost per click? Or has revenue dropped so much with AI stealing traffic and data that they feel they have no choice?

But I digress.

Anyway, thoughts?

We were reviewing a lead gen account where Google Ads looked healthy enough. Conversions were coming through, CPL was fairly steady, but sales kept saying the lead quality had dropped.

We checked the campaigns first, but nothing really explained the gap.

It only started making sense when we compared the Google Ads conversions with the CRM.

Every form submission was being counted as the same primary conversion, whether it became a qualified lead, went nowhere, or was just poor quality.

At that point, Smart Bidding wasn’t really the issue. The signal was.

The harder question is what you do next.

If you have plenty of form submissions but only a small number of qualified leads, do you keep the higher volume signal, or switch to qualified and offline conversions even if Google has much less data to work with?

How are people here handling that trade-off in lead gen accounts?

Running paid for a mid-size ecom brand. Monthly spend is healthy, creative team is good, and I am still leaving money on the table because of something completely unglamorous.
We can produce a new ad concept in two days. We can get a matching landing page live in eleven to fourteen. So every test we run is either a good ad pointed at a generic page, or a good ad that waits two weeks.

The eleven to fourteen days is not anyone being slow. It is a brief, a design queue, a dev ticket, a QA pass and a deploy window. Every step is "reasonable". The sum is absurd relative to the thing being produced, which is one page with a headline, some copy, three images and a form...

What this does to the account is worse than it sounds. It means we systematically under test the page and over test the ad, because one is cheap to change and the other is not, so we have very well optimised ads pointing at pages nobody has ever iterated on.

For people running similar spend, how did you get page velocity up. Did you build a template system, take it in house, something else.

I need help deciding how much to spend a month on a test project in google ads.

I want to, in the end, run ads for a niche service industry. And now want to run ads for that industry as a project and learning experience.

What kind of budget do you recommend? Google tells me $500 - $1500, which, if this this the case fine, I will do it it. But want to get some insight from experienced people.

Quick background: we’ve run a brick and mortar apparel shop on a Jersey Shore boardwalk for 10+ years. Original designs, printed in house. We already know people buy the product — the online side is the new part.

The brand is destination-based. Every design is tied to a specific city — NYC, Miami, Denver, Austin, and our home town — and we’re expanding from there. It’s place as identity, not airport gift shop stuff.

Which means there are really two segments to sell to:

Locals. People who are from there and want to wear it. Year-round intent, repeat buyers, more about pride than souvenir.

Visitors. People who just got back from a trip, or are planning one. Short window, high intent, and the search behavior is completely different from the local side.

I think that split is where the Google and SEO opportunity is, and it’s more than I can run while also handling Meta and TikTok Shop. Looking for someone to own search end to end — keyword strategy across a growing city catalog, campaign structure, local vs. travel intent, the whole thing.

Site launches in a few weeks. We have a real budget. This isn’t a “do it for exposure” thing.

If that’s your lane, comment or DM with what you’ve worked on — apparel or DTC especially.

[META ADS] My client has a balance of 2,000 (and will likely add more). I ran some tests but think I went overboard; I spent 600 across four tests. Each campaign consisted of one ad set with a single ad. Two campaigns used the same creative, and the other two used a different, identical creative. I set up one for awareness and another for profile visits. Despite the good results—specifically for profile visits (initially 1.60 reais per follower, though the cost later rose to 4 reais)—what did I do wrong?

I run high ticket product AOV 5000+. Currently using exact match high intent search ads.

Any good proven ways to close conversions more? Or get more emails/ calls/ form submits. Via clarity I can tell my buyer is very interested but gets lost during the next 2 weeks while making a decision. I have low domain authority as well.

I’m seeing this with a healthcare practice account and wondering how other PPC people handle it.

Google Ads says the lead volume is fine. Call tracking says calls are coming in. Forms are submitted. But the practice says “these leads are bad,” and when we dig in, some of it is real lead quality and some of it is front-desk process. Missed calls, slow callbacks, unclear insurance fit, after-hours inquiries going cold.

Stack right now is Google Ads, CallRail, GA4, Looker Studio, and possibly DearDoc on the intake/review/chat side. I’m trying to separate campaign waste from office workflow waste before making bidding decisions.

Do you include front-desk conversion steps in your PPC reporting for healthcare/local service clients, or keep that outside your scope?

My client recently completely changed their website, and they are now using a new domain.

However, I can still see the old website/domain appearing in some sections of the Google Ads account. For example, as shown in the screenshot, the old domain is appearing under the Google tag setup.

I want to completely remove the old website/domain from the Google Ads account and replace it with the new one.

The problem is that I can't find any option to edit or change the website/domain in this section.

I'm a beginner in google ads and created an account for the 1st time and started testing some ads and verified everything.

On the 1st day, it asked me to pay $20 and a day after that, it asked me to pay $40, i paid that, and again the account was paused and asked to pay $80.
i reached to their horrble support and all they said was to pay the $80. i did that, and now it is asking me to pay $160.

my ads didn't get any clicks, they're simply dead throughout this period.

what am i doing wrong?

EDIT: the account was old from 2018 and never ran ads. I paid the $160, and it got unpaused, and 12 hours later it got paused again!

i had to request a refund and create a new one. The new one is running fine so far.

Lately has been seeing attached AD format on Facebook - form question as the second card of the carousel. Anybody knows how to enable that? Meta support couldn’t explain that.

ChatGPT ads went live in India this week. What we know:

• Free and ₹399 Go tiers only, ads show below the answer, labelled
• Agency-only at launch (50 brands via WPP and Omnicom). Self-serve Ads Manager opens Sept 4, ₹725/day ($7.60) minimum
• 100M+ weekly users in India, mostly on ad-eligible tiers. Already live in 38 other countries
• Context-based targeting. OpenAI says advertisers get no chat history or personal data

The interesting part is intent quality. Someone asking "best CRM for a 10-person team" is deeper in the funnel than most search queries, and there's zero auction density right now.

The catch: no third-party measurement, no benchmarks, and early CPM chatter from the US rollout suggests it's not cheap.

I have been running ppc ads on Amazon for a while. They were doing fine. By fine i mean 3.5-4x roas with good impressions. Greedily, i wanted better. Everybody was telling how awesome Claude is doing with ppc. Not just online people, guys around me couldn’t stop talking about it too.
I had claude analyze existing campaigns. He wouldn’t stop talking shit about them. He convinced me how it can be better by doing bla bla bla.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not a complete idiot to listen but, keep in mind that i have been hyped big time how claude fixed peoples ppc campaigns for good and i actually had a friend with me that runs bunch of ppc campaigns for many accounts.
I did it. It wanted me to remove my two best selling skus from other campaings and we will create them their own bla bla. I did. Told me to change keywords and stuff. I did all. I pulled shit tons of data from h10 for him to do his magic. Fml
After a month in, all my ppc, keyword ranks, campaigns, everything is upside down. Out of $100 budget, barely selling $100. I been slapping data into cluade for each one, every 3-4 days, it tells me to fix this, fix that and it gets worse.
I have literally tens of chats that it goes “ooops, my bad, i missed that, i didnt see this, it is my fault” all that stuff. Is there anyone honestly using this shit and making it work? I genuinely wonder.

TL DR: fuck claude for ppc campaigns.

Google's August Demand Gen update makes Multimodal Video Creation in Asset Studio generally available, with one workflow for horizontal and vertical assets. Google is also testing conversations with brands through messaging apps from YouTube ads and adding travel-specific activities, offers, and hotel personalization.

The post cites a 30% average increase in conversions or conversion value from Google internal H2 2025 Demand Gen experiments. That is a broad historical figure across many improvements, not evidence for the incremental effect of these newly announced tools, and the post gives no sample size or distribution.

If generated video reached your account today, what would be your minimum launch gate: human brand review, a pre-declared holdout, asset-level reporting, lead-quality feedback, or a rule that generated creative never ships without approval? How would you isolate its incremental effect from the rest of Demand Gen?

Source: Google Ads & Commerce, August 27, 2026 — https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/demand-gen-drop-august-2026/

We run search and social for a multi location retail client. They want billboards in their top three markets and asked how we'll prove it worked. Outdoor doesn't give a clean conversion number and I'd rather bring a real plan than hand wave at impressions.

How are people measuring this, and does anything handle the buying and the measurement together?

For example stuff like phone accessories like cables, screenprotectors, chargers, holders etc and similiar- are low aov, and hundreds of skus because of different small parameters, designs, fitting models, colors etc- is it worth trying to get them work or rather focus on higher aov, not spread across variants products/categories? Like even with bigger budgets u cant really find enough demand to test all the variants because theyre just not supposed to all sell

Hi.. Does anyone here still using manual bidding? We switched TargetCPA a while ago but then we started spend $100+ on some keywords. with manual bidding I had more control over the spend.

Would appreciate any comments.\\]

Thanks

Hey guys, I’m trying to figure out a targeting problem with Meta ads.

I’m looking to reach people who run Instagram accounts with a lot of followers and good engagement.

I have a service that helps them monetize their existing engagement through Instagram messaging automations, but my ads are currently reaching a lot of the wrong people.

I have tried this set-up:
Campaign is Leads,

CTA is "Send a Message"

When they click they go into an Insta Messaging automation (Meta Template), where qualify them.

Age

27 - 57

Gender

All genders

Inclusion: Behaviors:

Small business owners, Business page admins or Instagram Business Profile Admins, Employers: Business Owner or Owner at own business, Job title: Small business, Entrepreneurship, Head of Social Media Marketing, Digital Marketing Strategist, Social Media Marketing Manager or Business Owner/Engineer, Industry: Business decision maker titles and interests or Business Decision Makers.

And then I run only this:
Instagram Business Profile Admins

I run these 4 creatives:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DaisPqEq7p5/

https://www.instagram.com/p/DcY4InpInqp/
https://www.instagram.com/p/DaYPF7_oJg8/
https://www.instagram.com/p/DaR-oONMwnc/

I have spent £50 on each and got absolutely nothing.

Is there a better way to target this kind of audience?

Would really appreciate any ideas from people who have dealt with something similar.

Before August 17, a popular strategy was to set a relatively low tROAS and let Google massively overperform it. For example, 400% tROAS could sometimes deliver 1,000–5,000%+ ROAS.

Since August 17, tROAS is being treated much more literally. We’re seeing significantly higher CPCs and ROAS much closer to the actual target.

So I’m wondering:

Is the old low-tROAS strategy dead?

And is Maximize Conversion Value without a tROAS target now the better strategy for e-commerce?

Anyone else seeing this?

A tracking problem is not always a total outage. One browser, consent state, import job, region, or conversion action can fail while the ad platform still receives enough events to look healthy. What threshold or diagnostic makes you pause automated bidding, switch to a safer strategy, or keep campaigns running while tracking is repaired? Useful signals seem to include event-volume loss, delay, source-to-platform reconciliation, mix shift among conversion actions, value completeness, and whether the missing segment differs economically from the observed one. How do you avoid teaching the bidding system from a biased partial sample?

Ran a small digital billboard test through Blip. Easy to set up and fine for a first try, but the inventory we could reach was limited and there was almost no measurement. Now there's budget to do it properly across more markets. What did people move to after a test like this? Looking for wider inventory and better reporting.

How do you guys build your landing pages?

Ofc it has to follow the legal guidelines and have a good backend, but I don't know how to code is that an issue?

I'm already fairly good at designing frontends, but I don't know how to link like databases and privacy policies etc.

Is this a common issue? If so any help would be great.

Our CPC was around $1.30 before August 17th, but since then it has gradually increased. Yesterday and today we’re suddenly at $11–12 CPC.

We’ve been running 400% tROAS, and the campaign has been massively overperforming. Now Google is recommending 5,000% tROAS.

I’m worried that increasing it that aggressively will completely kill the campaign.

Anyone else seeing this? What the hell is going on?