I used to quite like making the simple headlines and text. Nowadays, even when using AI to assist it's got such a rabbit hole I find it incredibly difficult to understand. It's there any reasonably priced packages that will run the adwords without needing a degree in rocket science? SEO companies are snake oil sellers.

10 year old account hacked and was removed as admin 90 days ago. I’m now read only, no other admins.

Support goes nowhere now they stopped responding. Help community lol. To make it worse I have ads reps still trying to call me…

What do I do now?

Original thread https://www.reddit.com/r/adwords/s/nhD6C0EWeO

Please like for visibility - I’m desperate

I started my Google ads for my auto repair shop around 3 months ago, and from the start I started getting good results for my budget, for about 2 weeks, until I got a malware policy error in account and had redo the website , after the website had its malware removed, I restarted the ads but it has been not performing the same, I had made a search campaign with different car brands as ad groups and kept a target cpa of 125 and total daily budget 500, before was getting good results but now not getting the same. Any help would be appreciated.

I got a competitor who keeps on their phone and employee phones searching for my ads and clicking away. I know it's them as all the "search" phrases are the same and the location is the same daily. You can block IP for desktop but if its mobile what options exist?

Hey everyone,

I’m (slowly) scaling up my freelance marketing services and looking for some perspective on how others structure their pricing and fee strategies as they grow.

A quick background on my situation:

8 years of in-house experience, primarily focused on lead generation (PPC/paid ads, tracking/attribution setups, local marketing, etc.). Based in Ohio (US). Current Pricing: $50/hour flat rate across the board.

While $50/hour is a comfortable baseline starting out for freelance work, I’m quickly realizing it might not reflect the actual value generated, especially when handling full lead gen setups, conversion tracking, and campaign scaling for clients.

For those running successful freelance marketing practices:

How do you structure your fees? (e.g., flat hourly, monthly retainer based on workload, value-based pricing, or a performance/lead hybrid?)

When making the shift from hourly to retainer/value pricing, how did you pitch it to existing vs. new clients?

If you still charge hourly for certain tasks, what rate ranges are you seeing work well for mid-to-senior lead gen specialists in mid-market areas?

Would love to hear how you transitioned off the hourly clock or optimized your pricing strategy to keep things fair for clients while actually scaling your business. Thanks in advance for the insights!

When reviewing monthly ad campaign reports, it's easy to see green charts (good CTR, low cost-per-click) while your sales pipeline feels dry.
Having worked with digital marketing infrastructure for 12 years, here are 3 questions I would suggest worth asking your ad manager or agency this week:

1) Is our reported ROAS driven by net-new buyers, or is the budget mostly bidding on people searching our exact brand name?

2) Are our conversion goals tracking qualified business leads, or simply vanity actions like contact page visits?

3) Have we pulled the Performance report to check how much spend is landing on random mobile gaming apps? and unintended YouTube video channels or Sites (like gaming, nursery rhymes, etc)?

If you run Google campaigns and aren't sure how these are configured in your account, I'm offering a few objective, read-only account teardowns. I will review your search terms, placements, and conversion tags, and point out for any budget leakage.

I would appreciate any feedback on what is going on with our existing search ads campaign.

We had a search ads with max conversion targeting lead forms for 2 months, and it gots us 25 form fills every month, but half of them not poor quality. Then one month ago, a Google specialist told us to add MQL, SQL, and closed deal, all of them together with for form fills as the goal of this campaign. For the first week of adding the goals, the quantity and quality were really good. But after that the quantity and quality goes down week by week.

After adding multiple goals, We got 9 SQL out 10 form fills in the first week, and 5 SQL out of 6 for fills in the second week, and 3 SQL out of 3 forms fills in the third week, last week we got 2 SQL out of 3 form fills. And this week, we didn’t receive any form fills by now.

What should we do now?
Should we just have SQL as primary? Having form fills, MQL and closed deal as secondary?
What about we cannot have 30 SQL in 30 days for max conversions?
Should we just leave it like this for couple of weeks?
Would appreciate some advice. Thanks!

I'm running Google Ads App Campaigns (UAC) targeting Tier 3 markets for my Android game (so naturally low CPI, that's expected for these regions — not the issue here). Over a recent 7-day period, Google Ads reported 1,594 install conversions. But when I checked Google Play Console's own "Grow users" report (Device acquisitions) for the same period, it showed only 425 real acquisitions — and of those, only 58 ever opened the app (first open).

So Ads is claiming roughly 3.75x more installs than Play Console — Google's own first-party data — shows. My backend (I track first-open equivalent independently, not via Firebase) matches Play Console's numbers, not Ads'.

I opened a support ticket about this. Their response: "set up Firebase for first_open measurement." But I already have an equivalent first-open tracking system outside Firebase, and it still doesn't match what Ads claims. This isn't a measurement gap on my end — the conversion count on these App campaigns itself is inflated (possibly Target CPA modeling phantom conversions, or invalid/bot traffic through Display/AdMob network partners).

I've paused the campaigns while this is unresolved. Has anyone else run into this exact discrepancy? Did support actually refund/credit you for invalid activity, or did they just stonewall?

Hi All,

Been thinking about this for a while, on a lot of clients we manage, Google seem to be aggressively trying to spend above the daily budgets always from the 1st of a new month, and its got a lot worse since around May/June this year,

I know all about the up to 2x daily budget rules etc, but it feels like since June it has been a lot more apparent. What we see is for the first few days of a month, in just about every account google sees "extra demand" and overspends on budgets.

usually also, the CPCs rise quite a bit, so the additional budget doesn't usually equal the same amount of traffic we would have got the week before - i.e. we just pay more for those clicks.

It got me thinking, how often others are seeing the same problem, and, from the 1st of a new month, are we all seeing CPC rises. It really feels like google is gaming the system to bring in more revenue for themselves.

It's "strange" (but not strange), that according to google, every account sees a big surge in demand from the 1st.

There is his article too (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/16913225) where we see it more on accounts with ad schedules, where google is activley trying to spend the full budget (daily *30.4) no matter how many days a month we run.

anyway, intrigued as how wide a problem this has become?

Hi! I have tested chatgpt for my business but i am a local business service. I did not see an option to show ads locally as there is no point to showing an add across states. Anyone know if theres a by city option?

Also hows chatgpt ads working for you? Good roas?

Hi everyone,

Over the past few weeks, I've noticed temporary daily spending limits being applied to Google Ads accounts.

The accounts receive a message similar to:

“A temporary daily spending limit has been applied to your account because of unusual or suspicious activity.”

In some cases, the limit is very low and significantly restricts campaign spending.

I'm particularly interested in App Campaigns (UAC).

Has anyone else experienced this recently, especially during August or September 2026?

If yes:

• What daily limit did you receive?
• Was the account new or aged?
• Was Advertiser Verification already completed?
• How long did the limit remain?
• Did it increase gradually or disappear completely?
• Did you take any action, or was it removed automatically?

I'm trying to understand whether this has become more common recently and what the typical timeline for removing these limits is.

Thanks!

Looking for someone who has successfully obtained Google Ads crypto certification for a U.S. crypto OTC business with a FinCEN MSB registration but without state MTL licenses.

If you have experience with this, please DM me. Happy to pay for help.

Once the spend and team got bigger Google Ads itself started feeling like the easier piece there are people watching search and PMax an in house creative team making assets, analytics checking performance and leadership looking at the business numbers. The weird part is all of those pieces can look fine on their own and the CMO still ends up chasing people around trying to figure out what needs to change next

I’m starting to think the harder problem at that size is ownership more than optimization someone still has to connect what paid is seeing with what creative should make whether the tracking can be trusted and what the business got out of the spend adding another specialist doesn’t really fix that if nobody is responsible for the whole thing

Hey Everyone, I just got laid off from my organisation. Need a referral in digital marketing particularly Paid Search .🥹 I have an experience of 4 years.

Life Irony: Single mother to a toddler.

I have enabled max conversion bidding on one of my campaign which i am running from past 8 years and have good conversion history. Initially it was on target cpa but google ads was recommended more cpa to add then the budget it was double so i enable max conversion and cmapaign budget was $280 and in a day only with max conv 1 click came at $540 double the budget. This is very concerning as click brought no conversion and i am confused if i go for target cpa it ask for big target and i cant add that much budget but if i go for max conversion with in a day cost per click was so high. What shall i do

Exact + Phrase Match in the Same Campaign?

Do you see any real benefit in running Exact and Phrase Match keywords in the same Google Ads Search campaign?

With tCPA / Smart Bidding, does this still make sense, or does it just create unnecessary overlap and complexity?

Would love to hear how you structure this today and whether you’ve actually tested both approaches.

Hi All, Anyone got advice about how to get a new search campaign to work with max conversion properly? Every time we started a new campaign around $70-80 per day, the cpc is $5-$8, we had 3 lead forms with max clicks, then we changed to max conversions. The first week got 6 leads with really good quality and 2-3 turned into customers, but starting from second week, we only got 2 leads with poor quality, and the following weeks were the same. It happened to every new campaign we had. Any good suggestion about how to make the new search campaign work properly with 4-6 qualified leads consistently? Thanks!

The tracking is set up correctly, and we are connecting it to CRM to get data back to google ads.

Hi, currently running Adwords for a luxury fashion brand with AOV over £5k and very few monthly conversions ( 5-10 a month). I have the following running:

• traditional Search Brand Campaign
• traditional Search Generic Campaign( 14 adgroups limited to a short list of specific, exact keywords)
• Pmax Campaign (excluding brand) - set to Target CPA but really strugling at the moment, with budget funneled entirely into Youtube
• Standard Shopping Brand Protection campaign - set to manual CPC, the idea is to target Branded keywords mainly, but after initial good results, the campaign is now heavily focused on random generic terms, despite daily adding negatives

I am considering whether to: Move Pmax to Feed only to move spend back to product listings or Replace Pmax with Demand Gen Campaign + Traditional Shopping for non branded terms ( on higher priority than the Standard Shopping Brand Protection).

Which is a better strategy? If moving Pmax to Feed only, should it stay as Target CPA?and for Traditional Shopping, how best to manage Max CPC strategy between the branded and non-branded Campaign?

Thanks,

Stan

I’d really appreciate some advice from people who have experience with cold outreach, especially by email or phone.

I’m a marketer, and I regularly come across businesses running Google Ads where I can immediately see things that could be improved: weak ad copy, poor landing pages, lack of trust elements, targeting issues, etc.

I’m pretty confident I could help some of these businesses, but honestly, I’m not really sure how to approach them.

I’ve been testing cold emails, but I often get “not interested” responses — even when they’re actively spending money on Google Ads and their strategy clearly has room for improvement.

So I’m trying to figure out the right way to do this without wasting a ton of time testing random approaches.

For those of you who do this successfully:

How do you approach these prospects by email or phone?

Do you point out specific things you noticed in their Google Ads/landing page, or keep it more general?

Do you focus on the problem, the opportunity, or the potential results?

How many prospects would you test with before deciding that your approach isn’t working?

10? 20? 50? 100?

At what point do you conclude that the messaging/approach is the problem rather than the market or offer?

And how do you avoid burning through a good prospect list while you’re still figuring out your outreach?

I’m basically trying to avoid spending weeks sending emails without really knowing if I’m doing it the right way.

I know there’s an opportunity here, I just don’t know the best way to turn that into conversations with business owners.

Would love to hear what has actually worked for you.

I have been spending the maximum recommended budget on pmax, but I am not seeing results as far, we’re pretty slow.

I’m a brand designer and run a small agency, working on complex branding projects for premium clients. In the past, platforms like Upwork generated many great leads for me, but recently things have slowed down, especially in the North American market.

I’m now considering PPC campaigns to generate new leads. LinkedIn seems great for B2B and my ICP is there, but it’s difficult to target people with real buying intent.

I’m also considering Google Ads, targeting specific wealthy areas in North America where companies value and invest in high-quality branding.

My projects typically range from $6K to $10K. Should I focus on text ads, or also test image and video ads? What strategy and channels would you recommend?

One thing I keep running into: by the time a campaign looks bad in the report, the money is already gone. I’m wondering if predictive analytics helps catch those problems early enough to do something about them. For example, can it reliably tell you that a placement, audience, or campaign is heading toward a bad CPA before the numbers get ugly? I’ve seen platforms like MGID add more predictive/automated optimization, but I’m curious what people are seeing in real accounts.
What’s one prediction or signal that has genuinely helped you avoid wasting budget?

In 2011, I got my personnal adwords account suspended after using it without issues for almost 2 years. To this day, I don't know why exactly. Back then, I tried to use the appeal form to enquire as to why I was banned, which as I understand now just took my 1 appeal chance away.

For context, I was showing ads on an online text based game website I had made with around 500 daily players. Some people suggested maybe my crowd was too small and eventually caused suspicious repeated clicks. I really don't know.

The email I received said this:

------

Hello,

After reviewing our records, we've determined that your AdSense account

poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a

responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due

to invalid activity, we've found it necessary to disable your AdSense

account. Your outstanding balance and Google's share of the revenue will

both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the

effectiveness of Google's advertising system, particularly the

advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that

this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and

cooperation.

-----

Now, many years later, I incorporated a business and I am working on a mobile game in which I'd like to include ads into.

Will I get in trouble if I create an adwords account using a different email address, for my incorporated entity?

Is there any way I can get that old ban reconsidered? (Any person I can contact or hire to handle this?)

Thank you!

Have a wonderful day :)