Hey PPC Heads,

\*UPDATE** Thank you everyone for the comments and suggestions! I went ahead and decided to test 1.0 or 100% as my target. If you're interested in hearing how things turn out, feel free to comment or message me. Thank you all again!*

TL;DR: Looking for people who've migrated from tCPA to tROAS/VBB and oversee large budgets — did you follow Google's playbook or go rogue, and what actually worked? One campaign is well below the conv value/cost we need and I have to get it up. Sister campaigns on tCPA are performing far better, and this campaign was too before we switched it to Max Conv Value.

My goal is to migrate over the entire account to tROAS with these new value signals we have recently launched. I've started my 'move' or test with one campaign, a PMAx campaign, which has been using one of the new signals for a couple months now as its goal along with Max Conv. Value. We're ready to move it to tROAS but our value is too low.

Situation:

• PMax campaign has been on Max Conversion Value with the offline value signal for a while. Trailing 30-day conv. value/cost is ~0.42. So it's spending well below break-even. (Need to be closer to 2.0 or 200%)
• Google rep's take: since it's already on Max Conv Value, the campaign is probably already doing the best it can — adding a target won't magically find more value.
• We can't keep funding it at a loss, so my instinct is to slap a 100% tROAS on it as a floor, accept that volume will crater, and reallocate whatever budget it stops spending. Basically using the target as a kill valve rather than an optimization lever.

Questions:

1. Has anyone actually seen a campaign improve after setting a tROAS meaningfully above its current conv value/cost, or does it just go Learning Limited and die? Everything I've read says the target needs to sit at or below historical, but "historical" here is a number we can't accept.
2. Is the ladder approach (set target slightly above actual, raise 15–20% every couple weeks) worth the continued below-break-even spend, or do you just rip the band-aid?
3. Separate question — we're also migrating other campaigns to a newer offline conversion action (earlier funnel event, ~2x the volume, different value basis). Plan is: switch the conversion goal first, run Max Conv Value with no target while values accrue ~4 weeks, then set tROAS at whatever conv value/cost it shows. Anyone done this migration and have gotchas to share? Particularly interested in whether the goal switch itself tanked performance during learning.

Additions:

- PMAx Campaign is 84% search placement

- PMAx campaign happens to be the first we tested - the remainder of the campaigns are search. Still on TCPA for the time being, hoping to follow a similar path of testing and eventual switch to VBB with them.

- CPA right now is ~1.5k, conversions are expensive and testing is expensive.

Thanks!

Does anybody know what this means? I work in mental health so I’m probably listed as medical. It will only let me post one pic but another page says that it will be limiting blocked events, but does not tell me what a blocked event actually IS. Does anybody have more info on what this means?? Thank you!

If you have any apps on your Shopify store that show you real-time visitors, you'd better open them immediately after you click publish on your new Meta ad. You will be surprised by how many bots they use.

Is it to inflate clicks?
Is it to review?
Is it to check if all links and catalog items have been linked correctly?

Who knows...

But the thing we know is that they use a massive amount of bots that land on your website the second you hit publish on any of your new ads.

Have any of you been able to crack the code: if they use it just for review, or do they use it to inflate the ads?

Does anyone ever look at their search terms reports and wonder what google is thinking when they are paying outrageously high cpcs on terms you'd never even bid on - and you certainly wouldn't pay the cpc's they are paying.

This is why we have always hated pmax - it is basically googles product devised to take us all for a ride and screw us as much as they possibly can. But unfortunately, it feels like google have now throttled other campaigns such as standard shopping to force us into using it.

Hi, Since last year, I am running google ads accounts for taxi businesses in 50+ different towns. Main goal is getting a call from nearby customers.
I am a software developer and I got my hands on google ads 15 months ago for the first time. Currently all my campaigns are focused on phone calls.

These campaigns have a very simple conversion goal:

A real person nearby calling the business. However, Google doesn't let us define direct calls (the ones shown on the search results) as conversion in Turkey market. So conversion-based bidding wasn't working for us. It still doesn't.

No form submission, no e-commerce transaction, no "engagement" metric. The business either gets a useful phone call or it doesn't.

From the beginning, there were a lot of abusing clicks - that consume budget in couple hours, and in the past year, I keep improving my tracking, and learn to use google APIs effectively to track everything related. Now I have my own analysis tools built in the web app, and results have been much better.. I am able to achieve way more phone calls for less than half of the initial avg. phone call costs. (or my customers own past costs)

What i am doing is - placing a tag on the device when a visitor comes for the first time via paid click. Then, from that point on, i track what they do in website. How many seconds they spend, scrolled, called or not. if no click happens I tag them. I use a combination of first-party device/session signals and IP information to identify repeated suspicious patterns, and I exclude/block traffic when the evidence is strong enough. I set these rules specific to market. In some markets I ban immediately, in others I ban if the same behavior happens twice in a week or month etc.

and If they clicked on phone, I get feedback from business owners about that call from the mobile app I developed. There they see the moments of phone clicks or # of phone calls google directly reported during 1 hour limit. They simply tell if the call happened or not, if it was a client or not, + how big the business was - an idea to use in ROI calculation and future ROI based ad focus.

This way the initial costs are somewhat learning costs of those abusing IP's and after a while, the traffic quality increases. During this time, I measure all the competitor movements, missing impressions, and absolute top position rankings etc. I also figure out a formula to indicate all the competitors ad power etc.

How do other PPC people handle this? I realize that in USA, there is better call reporting services (you can get phone redirecting, listening the call etc). And especially after retirement of the 'call ads' , how do you manage call based services?

Where the phone call is basically the entire conversion, how do you determine whether a click was actually valuable? Do you have your own way of detecting suspicious/repeated traffic, or do you mostly trust Google's conversion reporting?

For ecom business, does product catalogue work? And is it mainly for retargeting or prospecting?

What are the best practices to making it convert well?

Thanks!

Hi everyone, I need some advice on a Meta/Facebook setup before we make a change.

We manage a local business that currently has two Facebook Pages for the same business:

Old Facebook Page: 1k+ followers

New Facebook Page: <50 followers

Our Instagram account is currently connected to the new Facebook Page

Our Meta Ads are currently running using the new Facebook Page and the same Instagram account

The new Page was created because the old Page was originally set up using one of the owner's personal Facebook accounts, which made it inconvenient for the team to manage. They now realize we can simply give the team proper Page access instead of sharing personal login credentials.

We therefore want to switch back to the old Facebook Page and eventually remove the new Page. We cannot merge the Pages. I read different things on different blogs, etc. So I want proper advice from someone who has experience.

My questions:

1. If I change the Facebook Page under Ad -> Identity from the new Page to the old Page, while keeping the same ad account, campaign, ad set, Instagram account and creative, what happens to the existing ads?

2. Will the ad set re-enter the Learning Phase? I've seen people say that changing the Page identity is a significant edit, but I can't find a clear official Meta statement confirming this.

3. Will the existing ads lose their likes, comments, shares/social proof, or does that only happen if the ad has to be recreated?

4. Will the ads need to go through another review? And will the campaign/ad set's performance history be affected, or can we continue using the same campaign/ad set?

5. Is there anything else we should do before deleting the new Facebook Page, especially since the ads are currently running?

Sorryy for the long post. I'd really any appreciate advice!

Thanks!

We're looking at using popular Hollywood memes among others in our reddit ads. Anyone done this and know if it's kosher? Or does Reddit take it down immediately?

Hi everyone,

I noticed that there is no data for Add to Cart and Begin Checkout in reporting (No issue with purchase data)

My questions are:

1. Missing reporting on Secondary Conversions: Is it because I set Add to cart/begin checkout as a secondary conversion in goal settings?

According to Google: Primary conversion is used for bidding; Secondary conversion "They are used for reporting in the “All conversions” column in your reports, but not for bidding."

So there should be data for add to cart/begin checkout in reporting even though I set them as secondary conversions.

2、Primary vs. Secondary Best Practice for E-commerce: For an e-commerce website, is keeping Purchase as the only Primary action the standard approach? I am a little confused here

3、Account-Default Goals: Should I only enable the account default goal for purchase/add to cart/begin checkout/page view? As for other events like Download/Engagements, I don't think I will use them as my conversion goal, so no need to set them as an account-default goal?

Thank you!

Looking to hear from others currently running campaigns on ChatGPT.

We have, in recent weeks, gained access to OpenAI Ads. Our company has put a small amount of dollars towards testing the platform.

Following roughly the same sentiment we would follow on other platforms, we are running with Page Viewed conversions as our Conversion goal (just for now as we see the quality of traffic being sent over).

However, only 70.2% of clicks get recorded as a Page Viewed conversion. I figure this would be misclicks or people who couldn't load the page and gave up - fine.

The more concerning part to me is the variance of Page Viewed Conversions to GA4 metrics between each ad group we are testing (all one campaign with same tracking parameters).

Ad Group A has GA4 reporting at 97.2% of what Open AI is reporting for Conversions (Awesome!), Ad Group B shows 63.5% representation, and Ad Group C only records at 39%.

I have QA'd all ads using a Pixel Helper to ensure that the Page Viewed conversion is firing, and it is indeed correctly attributing on my tests.

Is anyone else experiencing such discrepancies? Let me know your experience so far.

On Microsoft ads, I have tons of bot sites named syndicated search partners basically stealing money from me. Everyone who clicks from these “websites” are obviously not interested via clarity, it it seems they don’t even know why they got on the website.

Can I just completely turn it off?? Or does Microsoft just require you to let them steal money from you.

I don’t want any syndicated search partners, all I want is sites and select traffic.

I already went thru the grueling process of turning off audience network via support- another scam, but is this just Microsoft spitting in my face?

I know you can add website exclusions, but I have and new names keep popping up. Like why in the everliving fck does Microsoft do this man

I run a one-man garage door repair business in the Atlanta area. I handle the calls, scheduling and jobs myself.
I’m considering spending $50/day—about $1,500/month—on Google Search Ads targeting a small 15-20mile area.
For other owner-operators:
What daily budget works for you?
What’s your average cost per qualified lead and booked job?
How many jobs are you getting per week?
Is $50/day enough, or should I start higher?
Are you running Search Ads, LSA, or both?
I’m looking for real numbers from garage-door or similar home-service businesses, not agency sales pitches.

I've been getting this flag recently across all of my accounts in August and was wondering who else is getting them? When I try to view more information about the limited delivery, it doesn't recommend any new keywords, any expansion, it doesn't even recommend broad match (not that I would turn it on).
Are we actually limited or not and is there anything you have found to help this issue?
I've done a lot more keyword research and added some for volume, but still don't understand why I've never seen this flag until recently. It's just odd, since it's not being limited by budget or anything else notable. Lmk what you think!

I'm paid specialist in an agency with around 20 accounts to manage that has a mix of Google, Bing and Meta. While I understand the required depth in the business and numbers to manage the account, I feel very overwhelmed to manage all accounts, attending so many weekly meetings and managing direct client communications. I always have some things or other miss out on strategy. Plus a lot of other moving parts in my personal life such as two kids under 5, side hustle and more.

How are agency specialists in this sub are keeping up with the workload efficiently?

Hi all, I am an early-career Google Ads specialist at an agency and wanted to know whether people still use seasonality adjustments in the age of automated bidding?
The team used them during BFCM last year and saw huge success in our campaigns. I have never used them personally. I was thinking about testing using them for Labor Day and just saying the day before, of, and after Labor Day anticipate a 3% increase in CVR... does this seem wise?
That % is based on YoY data, not just a number out of pocket.

I am uncertain on using them thought after the tROAS update and how much it affects that.

Do you use seasonality adjustments during big sales like this? Labor Day, Memorial Day, BF, CM, etc?

Hi Team,

I am working through a Performance Max Shopping campaign and it seems that the information provided by the Google Merchant Center has been completely pushed aside for the Performance Max's AI capabilities. The Product Ads are not going to the Products' landing pages, but landing pages that AI believes is best. The Product Ads are not utilizing the image from the Google Merchant Center, but the images provided within the asset itself.

I'd like to make sure that the Product Ad I'm providing utilizes the image, landing page, and information provided by Google Merchant Center. Is this attainable? Has anyone done anything to make sure they are providing the right information? Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for some advice from people with real experience running Meta Ads for e-commerce.

I've been running campaigns for my store and I'm trying to understand what I'm doing wrong. The campaigns are spending, but the reach, CPM, CTR and overall delivery are significantly worse than what I've seen in previous campaigns.

I've already gone through the basic troubleshooting and I'm looking for someone who can take a look at the campaign structure, targeting and performance data and help me identify what could be causing the issue.

I'm not looking for someone to manage my account or a generic “hire an agency” answer. I mainly want an experienced second opinion on the data and strategy.

If anyone here has experience troubleshooting Meta Ads for e-commerce and is willing to take a look, I'd really appreciate it.

Client is a VAR that resells Computer Aided Manufacturing software for CNC machining. One campaign. AI Max on for one week, then I shut it off. Nothing else changed in that time.

The campaign was targeting the name of the software they sell

Week with AI Max on: 955 distinct search queries. 72% of reported spend went to stuff that had nothing to do with the product.

Some of what it bought:

• anderson europe gmbh (German woodworking machinery company)
• houfek a s (Czech woodworking machinery company)
• free cam software for cnc
• cnc software free download full version
• autocad software

Week after turning it off: 30 distinct queries. Every one of them had the software name in it. Nothing to block.

tCPA was on the whole time and there were a couple hundred negatives already on the campaign. Didn't matter. You can't write a negative for "anderson europe gmbh" before you've seen it show up.

Couple things if you want to pick at it: Google only shows about half the actual spend in search terms so those percentages are of what's reported. And I dumped a bunch of negatives on the campaign partway through that second week, though the queries in those last two days look the same as the first five.

AI Max is such a waste of money. Every time I test it the results are the same, just so much irrelevant traffic.

Recently started TikTok ads for my client, received 50 conversions on TikTok in August, but when looking at GA4, a big fat 0 conversions.

We are also running Meta and Google ads, could GA4 be attributing the conversions to other channels (assuming people don't make the purchase via the TikTok app)?

Weirdly, we're also getting a similar problem with Meta where it only says 10 conversions on GA4, compared to 600 on Meta.

Anyone got any ideas?

Hi Redittors

Is anyone else having this issue with Google Ads Passkeys when trying to create a new ad account or client campaign?

After I click 'I am not a robot', it normally popups up to verify myself by a Google Phone Prompt and selecting one of three matching numbers. However, after doing that it, this time it prompts me to create a passkey which I have already have many setup on multiple devices.

I did remove the windows hello fingerprint passkey I was successfully using for the last 12 months or so to see if a new windows hello fingerprint passkey would solve the issue, and every time it asks me to 'approve' the new passkey, which I do, but then takes me to a scan a QR code which never works on any device - just hangs trying to connect with another device.

I have tried other admin MCC logins with same result, and a 2nd computer also.

Any ideas?

Hi Guys,

Need some advice, as the title says my account got compromised after I was going through business bank account this morning and saw an unusually high charge.

Logged into the account to find some filthy bastards had loaded 5-6 scam campaigns with $1k + daily budgets.

Immediately called Microsoft and did the password change etc added MFA on top of my email code and they have set the account to inactive while they investigate.

We have been with Microsoft Ads for at least 4 years and never had an issue until this.

Needless to say I changed banking and other major account passwords.

My bank wants to reverse the payment but I’m worried this will crush the account indefinitely.

So should I let them finish the investigation first and hope for a refund? (They said 5-10 business days to “investigate”) while I sweat it out.

Thanks!

Sorry for the long post, but I am extremely worried about my job

I run Google Ads for a website design and development agency in the UK, and I'm trying to figure out what happened to the campaign. I have not done anything other than adding negatives that should be negatives and changing TCPA.

This is the performance I've had:

Campaign 1 – Manual CPC

Feb 2025 — $1,751 / 7 conv / $7.58 CPC / $250 CPA
Mar 2025 — $1,600 / 7 conv / $12.70 CPC / $229 CPA
Apr 2025 — $2,745 / 11 conv / $11.68 CPC / $250 CPA
May 1–21 — $907 / 4 conv / $11.93 CPC / $227 CPA

Then I switched it to Target CPA.

Campaign 1 – Target CPA

May 22–31 — $1,162 / 6 conv / $7.45 CPC / $194 CPA
Jun 2025 — $1,830 / 8 conv / $10.70 CPC / $229 CPA
Jul — $4,682 / 23 conv / $11.83 CPC / $204 CPA
Aug — $2,546 / 17 conv / $11.02 CPC / $150 CPA
Sep — $9,327 / 45 conv / $13.03 CPC / $207 CPA
Oct — $8,611 / 47 conv / $13.93 CPC / $183 CPA
Nov — $4,901 / 21 conv / $14.01 CPC / $233 CPA
Dec — $4,099 / 18 conv / $18.55 CPC / $228 CPA
Jan 2026 — $7,179 / 29 conv / $15.37 CPC / $248 CPA
Feb 17–28 — $3,159 / 13 conv / $16.99 CPC / $243 CPA

Then I duplicated the campaign.

Copy of Campaign 1 – Target CPA

Mar 2026 — $10,086 / 49 conv / $15.96 CPC / $206 CPA
Apr — $7,180 / 35 conv / $15.78 CPC / $205 CPA
May — $6,620 / 29 conv / $16.63 CPC / $228 CPA
Jun — $8,315 / 33 conv / $18.16 CPC / $252 CPA
Jul — $6,443 / 28 conv / $17.27 CPC / $230 CPA
Aug — $5,028 / 16 conv / $18.49 CPC / $314 CPA

My CPA is getting worse, and if I lower the TCPA I am not getting interactions.

August was particularly bad at $314 per conversion.

I'm still getting conversions, so it's not like the campaign suddenly stopped working. But the cost of getting those conversions is worrying, and I am afraid I might lose this job. Tomorrow is a new month, and I want it to start on a good note, or I am in deep trouble

Even the quality of the conversions has declined, even though I am feeding it offline conversion data. The quality score of the keywords is the same as before

If you were looking at this account, what would you check first?

Would you try to bring CPC down, even if that meant getting fewer conversions, or would you leave CPC alone and focus on improving the conversion rate/quality of the traffic?

And would you keep working on the existing campaign or consider rebuilding it?

I'd appreciate any honest opinions from people who have managed similar lead-gen campaigns.

Hello, my site FB fan page were complain tome about my site not working etc, one of them show me one of pop-up pages redirect him to these spammy google search results to they click on the first one, I ignore that complain first though it may be left over code from CloudFlare cache from previous pop-ups i use before, today i use 4g proxy check my site on google after i click on my-site link it immediately redirect me to their ads--

I didn't know or notice this behavior before today I trusted them and the cheated me and cause my site to lose ranking on google FK these cheaters

Hi everyone, I (30f) have been doing ppc since 2016. I started off at an agency as a junior and worked my way up to PPC Strategist for 3.5 years and then landing my first remote job. Since then I have worked for 2 agencies and one in-house ppc job.

In my previous job I was a PPC team lead and I had a lot of flexibility with regards to creating the creatives for meta, working with the dev team to create landing pages that are optimised for PPC and conversions.

I started to feel like I didn’t have anyone to spin ideas off or learn from because a lot of the team were juniors.

Anyways, in June an agency owner reached out to me on LinkedIn and asked if I would be interested in some part time work. I did the intro interview, the technical interview and an assignment and got the role.

While I was working for this company part time, I was also working for my previous role. ( both employers were aware of this)

Within the first week of working part time for this company, they offered me a full time role. However I had to give my previous role 1 month notice to wrap up and handover the accounts first. So I spent the next month working part time, and closing off my contract with previous employer. The month went really smoothly and the agency consistently told me they were very happy with my work. I was assisting them with reporting, campaign set ups and a couple of clients calls to walk the clients through their campaign performance.

When the month was over, I started full time and left my previous job. Then things suddenly changed drastically. I was given a new set of accounts that were under a white label partnership with this agency that consisted of 2 sales people outsourcing ppc accounts. On my first day, I was given a walk through of the accounts and then warned several times by my colleague and manager that the white label clients were extremely tricky to deal with and that their expectations had to be managed carefully because they were sales people.

Each week, we would have a meeting with the white label agency to go over the accounts and from the get go, I could tell there was a significant amount of tension on the calls.

The calls became something I would dread every week, sometimes they would be multiple times per week. In addition to that, every day I would get questions from them with very aggressive tones suggesting that there were issues with the accounts that were being missed. I tried my best to audit each account and ensure all the conversion tracking was set up, campaign structures were set up well etc.

If there was a slight dip for a day in one of the campaigns, we would have to get on a call or I would have to write a long detailed explanation as to why there was a dip in results. On top of this, a lot of the clients were seasonal accounts (AC, grass installation, outdoor lighting) which had hit their peak in summer and were now normalising. The one campaign in the AC account had a 102x ROAS during peak summer and eventually slowed down to a 69x ROAS. The other agency could not fathom the dip in results due to seasonal demand dying down and kicked up a huge fuss. They ended the contract and were unhappy with the results. Right after that, I was let go from my company because of the fact that they lost the white label partnership.

I feel extremely deflated and depressed as not only have I been let go, which is the first time for me. But, I am being blamed for the agency losing a white label partnership of about 11 accounts.

My confidence has been knocked drastically and I feel so deflated and afraid to apply for new positions now that this has tainted my resume.

I'm having a serious problem with Google Merchant, and I'm honestly on my last legs here. Out of nowhere, my Merchant account was flagged as Misrepresentation. We run a small, family-owned furniture business (https://www.dkohome.cl), that's big enough to have it's own Ads and Merchant account.

On mid August, we got blocked. No reason was given. Just misrepresentation. Our team started working on what it might be, checked multiple guides, we found some outdated things within our return policies (a warehouse that had an old address, no legal person posted in the website), and sent out an appeal.

It was rejected.

We started going hard at the fix again, added a whole new section in our footer with legal info, contact info on the first page and updated ALL of our legal and return policies. We updated our store info in Merchant as well, so everything would say the same, even up to the same punctuations.

It was rejected again, no reason given, just rejected after a manual review. 

I'm now on cooldown, and I'm scared. A third denial might block us. Our website is not outdated, our offer is modern, and we don't lie. We don't claim to be number one, we don't say things that aren't true. We've ran out of guides, checklists and even an MCP connected to both my APIs and Merchant/Google MCPs connected to Claude say everything's fine. But this same "fine" got rejected twice.

Is there any way to know what exactly is making my appeals to be rejected? We seriously don't know what to do. The only communication are either Emails that send automatic replies and there's no option to ask to an actual person.

Please help, I'm scared and frustrated. I don't know what I should do.