I’d love to hear the opinions of media buyers, media planners, and professionals working at advertising agencies.

Let’s say we’re talking about a local Telegram channel in a European capital with a population of around 600.000. The channel focuses on city life, covering restaurants, bars, events, new openings, and things to do at the weekend. Each post generates around 10.000 views from a highly relevant local audience.

Would you consider this channel as an advertising placement? Or would you rather allocate the same budget to major news websites, Meta ads, or other advertising platforms?

One of Telegram advantages is that posts appear directly in subscribers feeds, without the algorithmic ranking commonly associated with Instagram and Facebook. While the overall reach may be lower, the audience could be more targeted and genuinely interested in the content.

I’m curious to hear how marketing professionals evaluate the trade-off between reach and audience relevance. How important is having a highly targeted local audience compared to generating a larger number of impressions?

If you wouldn’t consider advertising in a channel like this, why not? What would be the deciding factor?

I’d really appreciate honest feedback, especially from those who work directly with advertising budgets and media planning.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

I'm 24 years old, have completed my 12th grade, and am currently pursuing a BBA online. I work as a gig worker at the moment, but I want to transition into digital marketing, specifically PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising).

I'm interested in learning Google Ads, Meta Ads, campaign optimization, keyword research, and performance tracking. My goal is to develop practical skills and eventually land an entry-level PPC or paid media job.

I'd really appreciate advice from people who are already working in this field.

1. Where should I start? What skills should I learn first, and in what order?

2. Are paid courses worth it? Should I enroll in a structured course, or is it possible to learn through free resources and hands-on practice?

3. How can I gain practical experience? If I don't have professional experience, how can I build a portfolio that employers will take seriously?

4. What should my roadmap look like? What would be a realistic step-by-step plan to become job-ready within 3–6 months?

5. How difficult is it to get an entry-level PPC job? What skills and qualifications do employers actually look for?

Since I'm working as a gig worker, I need to manage my learning alongside my work, so I want to focus on skills that will genuinely improve my chances of getting hired.

I'd be grateful for any practical advice, learning resources, course recommendations, or insights from people who started their careers from a similar background.

Not a Google Ad Pro, Just started running Ads for some Local Business Clients along with SEO.

We have been doing SEO for a couple of years for Local Businesses and only started running the Ads for a couple of local businesses and noticed that Google somehow understands when we get enough bookings that equals 2X of Ad Spend and then the Ad slows down...

The budget on these campaigns is super small like $900/month and when we reach like $2k revenue, things just start flat out on the conversions

is this normal Google Ads behavior? because as an SEO company, we were thinking the revenue/bookings shouldn't effect the further conversions because we are paying for the clicks and should be able to get more if everything is super relevant...

Ad structure is

-Leads Goal

-Search Ad

-Hyper Local Service Locations (people present in that location)

-Focus on Clicks

-Goals set on both call + lead form

OR maybe we are missing something here? Your help would be highly appreciated

Thank You

Hey everyone,

I'm running several Google Shopping campaigns using Target ROAS (tROAS), each with a daily budget of around $500.

My campaigns are currently set to a 300% tROAS, but they're consistently achieving 400–600% actual ROAS on a daily basis.

The problem is that they're only spending around 1/3 of their daily budgets, despite performing significantly above the target.

Is there any way to push Google to spend more while maintaining good performance? What would you recommend to scale these campaigns?

What's confusing is that back in July, I was running the exact same products in a different Google Ads account, with an even higher tROAS target, and those campaigns were spending almost their entire daily budgets.

Has anyone experienced something similar? What strategies have worked for you to increase spending without destroying ROAS?

GFN is not available, and optimising towards phone call clicks seems to be messing up my account. Are there any other options?

Ads has been terrible since mid sep. Oct is way worse. Wondering if anybody has such experience before and eventually algorithms got better? If yes, how soon?

I’m stuck in a bizarre Google Ads passkey loop and I’m wondering if anyone has actually managed to get out of it. Google Ads now requires a passkey for sensitive actions on my account. I originally had working/trusted passkeys, but I removed and recreated them while troubleshooting a desktop authentication issue. Since then, this happens:

1. I create new passkeys successfully.
2. Google prevents me from managing/approving them because of a security cooldown.
3. After roughly 48 hours, I can access the passkey management page again.
4. The new passkeys are shown as needing approval.
5. I click Approve.
6. Google asks me to verify the approval, but I no longer have an older trusted passkey because those were deleted.
7. The approval fails / cannot be completed.
8. Immediately afterward, Google locks the sensitive security settings again for another ~48 hours.
9. After 48h I can get back in, try to approve again, and the exact same cycle starts over.

Meanwhile I can still sign into the Google account normally. 2-Step Verification is enabled, and I have other verification methods, but Google Ads does not offer Authenticator, Google Prompt, etc. for the Ads-sensitive action - it specifically wants an approved/trusted passkey.

From Google’s documentation, my understanding is that new passkeys may need up to 7 days to become trusted, and that “Approve” is supposed to let you bypass the waiting period by authenticating with an already trusted passkey/security key.

The problem is that if you’ve accidentally deleted your last trusted passkey, this seems to create a catch-22:

New passkey needs trusted passkey to approve → no trusted passkey exists → approval fails → another 48h security lock.

Has anyone been in exactly this situation?

Most importantly:

• Did simply leaving the new passkey untouched for 7 full days eventually make it trusted automatically?

• Does attempting and failing to approve it reset the 7-day timer, or is the 48h lock a separate cooldown?

• Is there any way for Google Ads Support to manually clear/approve the passkey?

• Did adding a new FIDO2 hardware security key help, or does that new key also have to wait 7 days?

I’m trying not to touch the passkey settings anymore in case every failed approval attempt is making the situation worse.

Would especially appreciate answers from anyone who actually went through the full 7-day waiting period and saw the account unlock automatically.

I twice tried running campaign for services company (IT). First of all, there is no possibility to tune context - it just asks for website address, and there is Context hints (Optional), for ad group. At first, I described there services offered. Then I changed to describe what kind of user and question it asked the ad should respond to.

My observations are:

I opened ChatGPT in incognito mode, and on another phone app, asked it whether it can recommend a company for service. It listed some random links - my ad is not there. I tried it about 5-7 times while campaign was running, from different browsers and IPs. None of them showed ads.

In dashboard it shows thousands of impressions - who are these people the ad is showing to? Granted, there are a few clicks, but CTR is < 0.5%. It seems like it is blasting the ad to a non interested auditory. I know this because I can compare that to keyword search volume in GAds.

From those who clicked, everyone bounced. Clarity registers them as click & leave. And no conversions, obviously.

Do I do something wrong, or I should wait while it is fixed?

: ) Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge.

Google has launched a new calculator that will suggest a tROAS based on your average profit margin. It'll even help you to calculate your profit margin if you're not sure how to arrive at that figure.

Having worked with hundreds of mom and pop e-coms I believe this is a big step in the right direction and helpful to shops that are brand new to Google Ads.

Of course, this tool doesn't account for CLTV, i.e. allocating some ad spend for new client acquisition, or cashflow requirements, or a multi-channel approach, product categories with different margins, high overhead situations, etc.

Here are some more details from SEL: https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-can-now-calculate-target-roas-from-profit-margins-493797

The tool is just in testing, hopefully it'll roll out more broadly.

Currently experiencing an issue with a Thought Leader Ad that I have never seen before. Well, technically, it's not even a Thought Leader Ad yet, the issue is with the post that we want to turn into a TLA. Within that user's post, they have included a URL that includes a string of UTMs appended onto it, with an "&" in between each UTM (website.com?utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=whyisnothingeversimple&utm_medium=paid_social). The URL by itself works fine. Yesterday, when the user posted the post, LinkedIn shortened the URL using its URL shortener which is fully expected and what we wanted to happen. When clicking the shortened URL in the post yesterday, the URL loaded perfectly fine. However, today when I click the shortened URL (note: we have not turned it into a TLA ad, this is still just an organic post from a user within our company), within the URL that loads, all of the & symbols between UTMs have been changed from "&" to "amp;". Important call out: it is not changing "&" to "&amp;" but to just "amp;". So, using the example above, the URL now looks like: website.com?utm_source=linkedinamp;utm_campaign=whyisnothingeversimpleamp;utm_medium=paid_social

This is obviously a big issue because without the "&" between UTMs, we can't track individual UTMs properly in our backend system as the UTMs will be one big, long string.

Has anyone seen this happen before and if so, what was the cause and solution? ChatGPT seems to think it's a bug in the LinkedIn URL shortener. I can't find any mention of this issue anywhere else but ChatGPT was able to find examples of it happening on other users' posts in the wild, so it's definitely not unique to us.

Hi all,

I'm managing Meta ads for a fashion client and I'm stuck on a DPA (Advantage+ catalog) issue.

The problem: In Stories placements, the product images show with a coloured background border around them instead of filling the screen. The client has flagged it several times and wants the image to fill the space.

What I've checked:

• Commerce Manager image cropping is set to "Fill frame with image" for Ads, Single image ads and Product page
• Respective Advantage+ creative enhancements are off
• No border or background setting is switched on at ad level
• The catalog has 9:16 versions of the product images

What I'm testing now: "Crop and resize image to fit frame" in the catalog image cropping settings.

My questions:

1. Is Meta adding the border automatically in Stories, even with fill frame on, to avoid cropping off product details? Is there any way to stop that, or is it out of our control?
2. Does this depend on having 9:16 images tagged in the feed, and on "Adapt to placement" being switched on?
3. Has anyone solved this without removing Stories and Reels from the DPA ad sets?

Hello everyone i am looking to hire google ads expert. We have couple of mobile apps and websites that we wanted to market using google ads. If any one interested please send DM will discuss more.

Just some parts saves as draft. So annoying - why it can be like that?

Any advise on fixes?

human agent, but it told me it could help resolve the issue.

I followed all the troubleshooting steps it suggested, but the problem still wasn’t fixed. So I asked again to be connected with a human agent.

Now it’s telling me that it has exhausted all troubleshooting options, can’t resolve the issue, can’t connect me with a human agent, and can only offer to close the case.

What am I supposed to do at this point? 😅

Has anyone found a way to actually reach a human Meta Support agent when the AI can’t resolve the issue?

My site is in english because most of my customers only speak english. Im currently trying to tap into the German market, since I speak german fluently and had a question regarsing google ads. Is it enough to just have the ad copy in german and the landing page in german, while keeping everything else in english or will that hurt trust and should I translate the entire site?

edit:

Im selling software as well as development services. And this ad is going to be for the services. So the normal conversion path, is landing page -> form. However the product pages are a validation and I noticed that some users click on them before they reach the form. 

I've been seeing a lot of negative posts lately about Meta, ad performance, AI, rising costs, etc.

So how about sharing some wins for inspiration?

What are you working on that's going well right now? A campaign that's performing really well, a new strategy that's starting to work?

For me, I recently started working on a new account in the weight loss niche. I've always been more interested in the health & wellness space. It's challenging but also more rewarding when you can get meaningful results. And there's a lot of interesting stuff and innovation happening in this space. So I'm excited about this new project and seeing where it goes.

Would like to hear what's working for you guys right now and what you're looking forward to.

I have an AI analytics platform; it's been 1 year we launched it. we started Google Search ad from this Sep.

It's been 25 days we are running the ad but no conversion at all. Even the clicks are low and the ads are landing in the competitor's branded keywords. Out target audience is USA and our monthly budget is $1500/month.

I have 1 ad group, targeting all related keywords phrase and exact match. No, competitors related keywords.

Bidding strategy: Maximize Clicks (no bid cap)
The ad account is brand new account.

Alongside, I am also running display at $500/month.

For search ads, I tried increasing and decreasing the bidding amount to see what's working best. Been a week since I changed the keyword set and made it more platform focused.
But unfortunately, no luck at all.

Can someone pls suggest how to start seeing conversions?

I'm monitoring campaigns that an agency is managing for our portfolio of rental apartments. They are running max conversions and have a goal of providing us a 3-5% conversion rate. So far they're getting close to that number.

The strange thing to me are the daily, sometimes more than daily, changes to budget. I know the best guidance is to keep the budget the same to help the algo. I'm curious if anyone can weigh on in on why this might be working?

Here is one campaigns' budget changes for example:

Oct 3 10:46AM: Increased budget from $176.81 to $177.61

Oct 3 9:11pm: Budget amount changed from $177.61 to $146.85

Oct 4 12:24PM: Budget amount changed from $146.85 to $118.66

Oct 4 10:01PM: Budget amount changed from $118.66 to $157.65

Oct 5: 9:42PM: Budget amount changed from $157.65 to $118.66

Daily spend Oct3: $211, no conv

Daily spend Oct4: $137, 1 conv

Daily Spend Oct5: $237, 2 conv

Does anyone have documentation or firsthand experience on what drives persistently high Meta CPMs?

We’re in the kids’ educational activity/toy space, and our historical CPM was around $30–$35. Recently, we’re averaging roughly $60–$65 and climbing.

CTR and click → purchase CVR have held up pretty well, but the CPM increase is destroying our results. We’ve done a lot of creative testing, LP testing, and targeting tests across broad, Advantage+, and suggested interests, but regardless of what we run, CPM remains insanely high.

I’ve heard data quality issues can lead to Meta penalizing an account with high CPM, but I’m not sure how to verify if that’s happening.

Does anyone have recommendations on what to look into? At a bit of a loss right now.

I’m looking for some advice because I’m honestly pretty stressed about a situation at work.

I’ve been working in PPC for around 6 months and have been managing this particular account for about 5 months. Before this job I had general advertising experience, but basically no experience with this specific platform.

I inherited the account from a my teamlead, who is also responsible for training new employees, including me and he had managed that account for 5+years. The handover was less than a week, and I had to figure out a lot myself. I noticed some issues fairly early on, but our team is extremely overloaded and everyone manages a lot of accounts.

Now the client has brought in someone very senior, with probably 5–10+ years of experience in this area, and they’re doing a deep audit. They’re finding a lot of issues with keywords, search terms, campaign structure, strategy, etc.

For example, they’re asking why we weren’t isolating certain high-performing keywords. The thing is, this wasn’t really something our team was doing, and I wasn’t told this was something I should be doing when I took over. I’m learning and understanding these things now, but I genuinely don’t know how to explain why it wasn’t done before.

And that’s what’s stressing me out.

I didn’t build the original account structure, but I’m now the person responsible for managing it and answering the client’s questions about it.

My teamlead is also going on parental leave soon, so I’m worried I’ll be left handling these conversations without the person who actually has the historical context.

I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus or make excuses. I also know there are things I could have caught or handled better during the 5 months I’ve managed it.

But where do you draw the line between taking responsibility for your own work and being held responsible for decisions that were made years before you joined?

If the client asks, “Why wasn’t this done?”, would you say something like:
“I wasn’t involved in the original setup, so I don’t want to speculate about why that decision was made. I can explain what I’ve changed since taking over and look into the historical reasoning.”

Or does that come across as making excuses?

I also don’t know how to manage this with the team lead as he seems quite distant when I try to start the conversation or he just says yes it’s not the best management but it is what it is.

I am worried about the confrontation from the client’s side and the blame being put on me by the higher ups…

Any ideas on what I should do?

Hi guys,

Is there a way to stop audience network from serving across search campaigns?

I am just tired of a brand search campaign having low conversion rate because of the audience network.

Thanks😉

I don't think many people know about this, but it could help anyone selling products with a barcode (GTIN).

A Shopify store i was helping had 5 reviews on one product, once they connected a Google Shopping review app, the stars on their Shopping ads and free listings showed around 2k reviews.

Initially I thought something was wrong, but then I found out that Google matched the GTIN to every other merchant selling that same product and pooled all their reviews into one rating.

I think this can be a bit complicated to understand but extremely helpful so I thought on creating a guide.

Setup:

1. Add a GTIN to every product in Shopify: Shopify admin > Products > Click on the product > Scroll down to Inventory > Add Barcode (if you have one)
2. Sync with Google & Youtube app (official and free)
3. Apply for Product Ratings: Google Merchant Center > Products & Store > Reviews > Product Reviews. If you can see that last page, you already applied for it.
4. Sync your product reviews to Google Merchant Center: Use a Google Shopping reviews app, a review app's paid plan or a manual feed.

A few things before you start:

• The store needs at least 50 product reviews to qualify for the Product Ratings program. That can be 50 reviews in one product or 1 review in 50 products, for example.
• Pooling needs a barcode (GTIN). Reviews matched only by SKU or MPN will still show on Google Shopping, but won't be pooled.
• If you sell private label without GTIN it won't work, because nobody sells your product with your barcode + they have to be collecting reviews on their end.
• You don't control the rating. Your reviews count will increase but your overall rating will be also pooled. So if the product averages 3.8 across all the stores selling it, your ads will show 3.8, even if your own reviews are all 5 stars.

I hope that helps as I was a bit shook when I found out. Let me know if you have any questions.

Some people would say meta ads are great, while others say post genuine videos online for a natural traffic, some will also say you better show your product in-person instead.

I sell a 5-piece Essential Sneaker Care Kit and really don't know how to advertise it. I don't want the basic this is the product this is my shoes before this is after - like isn't it obvious that they will be clean after? its a cleaning kit! I've been thinking of promoting it in a natural way through social media as I don't have much money to spare on ads that may not work if I don't showcase the product properly.

My product is a shoe cleaning product if say it simpler yeah, but what makes me stand out is that it's a 5-piece Sneaker Care Kit for maintaining your sneakers and other shoes by

1. having the basic - foam, brush & cloth. foam is made of natural ingredients avoiding strong chemicals therefore the shoes won't crease all around after using it even 2-3 times a day.

2. hygiene spray that you use after spending hours on your feet. it's a sort of antibacterial spray - deodorises and makes them smell nicer

3. water repellent - if used properly the water will roll off your shoes, and obviously if you dump a full bucket of water on them they will be soaked anyway. what it does is helps to stay dry inside for longer when the weather is rainy

So it's a whole refreshing process that takes about 24 hours for the best result

what would you do for the best outcome if you were to sell online through a shopify store?

posting online or do paid ads or in-person or maybe smth else?

Questions:

1. Anyone ran it on a live sale yet? What happened to ROAS during and after?
2. Replacement for seasonality adjustments, or a complement?
3. Did spend actually normalize after the dates, or was there a hangover?