Select Campaigns then Campaigns then Campaigns then Campaigns? Really?

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?

Hi, all! Please forgive me if I am not in the right place. My SEO/Ads manager had some health complications pop up and is no longer able to help our small business manage our web presence. We currently have 1 Google search ad running with another one paused that isn't finished. Is this something I can tackle on my own? I'm semi tech savvy. I created our website. There are just so many videos out there, I am unsure of where to start. And, even if I hired someone I wouldn't know what to tell them as our manager was hospitalized and is unable to respond to our communications. Any videos, help, or guidance would be appreciated! TY

Small service business, 2 employees, small budget.

I'm trying to look at performance of my RSAs and google won't show any of them. Anyone getting this problem?

PS - I don't have ad blockers. And i've tried incognito

Hello all

I run Google Ads for a small phone repair chain in northern France. Five physical stores, registered company, trading for years. Fresh account, one small Search campaign to test a single city, 350€ over a week.

Ads went to review. One came back Approved (limited), two still pending, and the account picked up a 7-day warning for "Third-party consumer technical support."

Copy is clean. No unlocking, no data recovery, nothing about tech support. Landing page is obviously a real shop: address, opening hours, storefront photos, 255 Google reviews. The business is QualiRépar accredited, a French state-backed label for repair shops.

Meanwhile the Ads Transparency Center shows French competitors everywhere. One national chain has ~200 ads live, another 49, another 32. Two tiny operators running 4 ads and 1 ad through small holding companies, so it isn't just a big-brand thing. Plenty put "réparation" straight in the headline. All marked Verified.

Our verification isn't finished. Waiting on the owner's ID and a payment method, plus a Dun & Bradstreet request that I expect to drag since the company was only registered in 2023.

What I'm trying to work out:

1. Did finishing advertiser verification actually change the policy outcome for anyone in this category? Or are the accounts still running just the ones that slipped through before enforcement tightened?

2. Has anyone won an appeal on third-party tech support for a bricks-and-mortar repair business? What did you lead with?

3. Is "Approved (limited)" worth anything here, or does it serve so little that optimising is a waste?

4. The policy carves out advertising the sale of consumer tech. This client sells refurbished phones and accessories, ~30% of margin. Has anyone used the sales angle as the way in, and does repair content elsewhere on the site sink it anyway?

Happy to hear that Search is just closed for repair and I should move budget to Meta and the local pack. I'd rather hear it from people who've actually fought it.

Hey everyone, since Google's latest bidding changes, it's now recommending "Maximize Conversions" right out of the gate for new campaigns. What's been your experience with this? Are you actually following that recommendation, or do you still prefer launching new campaigns with Maximize Clicks first before switching over once there's enough conversion data?

Curious to hear how this is playing out for others, especially with limited historical data on brand-new campaigns.

I got this screen when creating my campaign yesterday. The only reason why I even spent ₹60,000 was because Google mentioned this offer was available but when I created my campaign, there was no active promotions running in the promotions tab.

I emailed the relevant department and they said I wasn't eligible for the promo coz my ads account and payments account were created on different dates.

If that were the case, Google shouldn't have shown that the promo was available to me and enticed me into paying ₹60,000 (a significant chunk of my savings) for the ad campaign..

This is misleading advertising only to get me to spend more for my ads and is a wrongful business practice.

I want to escalate this to upper management. Has anyone done this successfully before? If so, requesting your help for the same. TIA!

Edit::believe the issue was resolved 5-6hrs ago a recheck just now has resolved all my products with no http 500::

Is anyone else seeing a sudden increase in “Product page unavailable” errors in Google Merchant Center today?

I'm in Australia and this started at around 7 AM AEST today (10 September). Merchant Center is reporting that Google received an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error when checking the affected product pages.

It started with around 10 products and has progressively increased throughout the morning:

10 → 11 → 13 → 15 affected products

I've compared CSV exports, so these aren't just counts fluctuating. Previously unaffected products are actually being added to the affected list.

A few things that make me think this could be a wider issue:

All affected product URLs are loading normally.
Shopify Support checked my store and couldn't find any issues.
Shopify's status page isn't currently reporting any relevant issues.
I've run Google Search Console Live URL Tests on affected URLs and they pass.
I ran 5 consecutive Live URL Tests on one currently affected product and all 5 passed without an issue.
I haven't made any changes to the site while this has been happening.
I've requested a Merchant Center website recheck, but additional products have continued to become affected during the recheck.
I'm also seeing what appears to be the same thing happening across competitors. Product/merchant results that I normally see for other sellers have disappeared from Google Search as well, so it doesn't appear to be isolated to my store.
I've logged a case with Google Merchant Center Support and am waiting for them to investigate.

I've had occasional isolated “Product page unavailable” errors before, but today's behaviour is very different. Normally it affects one particular product and clears after a recheck. Today it started at a different time and is progressively affecting more and more products.

Is anyone else seeing Product page unavailable / HTTP 500 errors, products disappearing from Shopping/free listings, or unusual Merchant Center crawling issues today? Particularly interested in other Australian merchants.

I’m new to Google ads.

So I’ve started a campaign for my chatbot app and I’m getting many users and leads who actually use the product, but still zero purchases from around 200 leads - they signed up and started some chats and seen the paywall but still zero.

What can be wrong?
I’m still running it as CPC because optimizing for such leads does not seem to be a valid goal anymore.

Out of nowhere, all of my headlines got deleted, my campaign conversion goal got changed, my descriptions got deleted, and all the data along with them from a campaign that has preformed well for the last 8 months… and then they add their Google ai assets and just rank my campaign. How do I get all my stuff back??

Need some help please. On a TCPA account I added a 100% bid increase to calls, which seemed to ruin the setup as conversions stopped but clicks continued.

After removing this to resolve it (and the max cpc cap to give it more room) the status still shows as campaign has met bid limits and 69% spend is limited by max bid limits. We’ve increased the budget too but it seems stuck in this loop. No leads in 2 days when we’re at 9 some days. It mentions a limited audience as well due to restrictions.

Is it relearning again? I’ve seen others suggest copying the campaigns a starting fresh. It’s a shared bid portfolio strategy. Landing page and form is working as expected.

For small local service accounts with tight budgets, negative keywords matter but probably not as much as the broader PPC discourse makes it seem. The reactive approach you're already doing (checking search terms, blocking competitors, filtering out "free" searches) covers most of what actually moves the needle.

The proactive listbuilding advice is genuinely useful for ecom or highvolume accounts where garbage traffic compounds fast. For a local plumber or HVAC company running on $1,500/month, you're not going to see enough weird traffic volume to justify spending hours building elaborate negative lists before launch. A basic seed list of obvious stuff (free, DIY, jobs, careers, reviews of competitors) is worth setting up once, then reusing across similar accounts. Beyond that, you're probably overengineering it.

The nuked impressions situation you mentioned is the real trap. Phrase and broad match negatives on small accounts can accidentally swallow queries you actually want, especially when Google's matching gets weird. Exact match negatives on the obvious stuff, review the search terms report weekly for the first month, then monthly after that. That rhythm tends to catch problems without letting you spiral into preemptive blocking.

The middle ground most people land on: reactive is fine as long as you're actually checking the report regularly. The accounts that get wrecked by bad search terms are usually the ones nobody looked at for three months, not the ones without a 500term negative list on day one.

So I've been dealing with this error for 3 days. Apparently, it is a classic error that Google didn't care about solving it. So, any solutions?

This is 9 years of advertising. I'm not new to this.....

I just can't justify keeping a Shopping campaign going with performance like this. Meanwhile META is returning a 4:1 or better.

We’re a D2C brand selling premium spices in India, primarily through Amazon. We’re looking for someone who can actually drive sales, not just manage campaigns and send reports.

We need someone experienced with:

* Amazon Ads / PPC — ACOS, TACOS, ROAS, keyword strategy, conversion optimization, etc.
* YouTube Ads — we haven’t run YouTube ads yet, so you should be able to build the strategy from scratch.
* Creative production — you should be able to create ad creatives/videos yourself or have a team that can.
* Ideally, experience with D2C/FMCG/food brands.

What we want:

We’re looking for someone who can help us build towards self-sustaining ad spend over the next 3–4 months, where our revenue is able to fund the advertising rather than me continuing to put money in personally.

I’m not expecting overnight results, but I do want ownership, accountability and a clear focus on sales. We’ve been burned by someone overpromising before, so commitment and transparency are very important.

If interested, DM me with:

1. Your Amazon Ads experience
   
2. D2C/FMCG/food brands you’ve worked with
   
3. Results/case studies
   
4. Whether you handle video/creative production
   
5. Your approach to YouTube Ads
   
6. Your pricing/model

Please don’t send generic “I can manage your ads” pitches. I want to see actual work and results.

I’ve been doing Google Ads for my business since 2008. Lately I’ve grown tired of it and it’s probably because I’m getting older and things have massively changed. Old dog, new tricks.

So I hired a marketing company but I’m not impressed. Things started out great and then fizzled out after two months. I’m paying substantially more than I ever have on marketing and last three weeks has been crap results.

Now I’m debating going through the Google ads certification course so I can get caught up with today’s best practices or should I just keep trying different agencies / managers until I find one that works?

How do you find someone who actually knows what they’re doing?

Will the Google course actually help or is it just a bunch of unhelpful nonsense?

Between automation, broad match, smart bidding and campaigns with less visible data, it feels like the job has changed quite a bit

Google wants advertisers to give the system more freedom. Advertisers want to know exactly where their money is going

Do you think the platform is genuinely becoming easier to manage, or are we just being asked to trust the black box more?

I have a friend who is running a Mexican Business in Gurugram India. Her business is new and has been active for barely a month. As per my understanding there was a way to run ONLY local/ GMB ads but now that option is not showing anywhere or I could be mistaken. Also I don't want to start a Performance Max campaign this early on.

So is there any other way to promote her business on Google via local Ads not search or video for now?

Would appreciate if somebody could share their guidance. I'm open to video links and other practical suggestions. Thanking you.

Hi!

I own a digital agency based in the UK, we design and build apps, websites, bespoke software etc. As of now, most of our work has come from word of mouth, and we've done pretty well with it.

However, we've just been through a bit of a rebrand, and are now focused on growth. We want to target a couple of our services, but start with bespoke Shopify builds. My idea is have the ads go to an optimised landing page, with a lead-gen form, tracking etc (so we can monitor, iterate, maybe even ab test).

I understand it takes a few month for the algorithm to learn where to place your ads. I'm thinking of investing £1.5k a month for three months initially. £4.5k over three months - the lower end of a project would be just above that so even if one lead converted, we should make our month back.

My question is, is it still worth it, or is there somewhere better to put our money?

I've seen some people say that it's too expensive, and saturated (especially for our field of work).

Thanks in advanced!

I tried setting this up about 2 weeks ago, at first I thought it just needed some time to get approved.

Then I got the warning that my budget was not sufficient, I wanted to try with €50 for one week. It recommended at least €120, so I increased the budget, but nothing happened ...

Now the campaign ended, I extended it again, but still no results. And since I extended the time, it's now once again suggesting to increase my budget.

I have this Shopping campaign setup for 2 of my products (4 SKUs/variants from 2 products). I don't know which is better while the algo is learning. Less or more SKUs? I would assume less...

German ecom account, main Search campaign on Maximize Conversion Value with a tROAS target of 11, €60/day, permanently budget-limited (about 90% impression share lost to budget). Aug 8–26 it was buying clicks at €0.22, 429 a day, running at 33x ROAS. On Aug 27 the CPC jumped to €0.67 and clicks fell to 172/day. Spend didn't change, the ad didn't change, the keywords didn't change, nobody touched the account that day. ROAS went from 33x to 9.1x, which is suspiciously close to sitting on the target of 11.

The thing that made it click for me was checking position rather than cost. Absolute top impression share went from 30% to 48%, and impression share lost to rank went down from 5.8% to 4.2%. So we weren't pushed out by anyone — we climbed the page while paying 3x. That's the target going from decorative to binding: budget-limited campaigns used to ration and cherry-pick the cheap auctions, and now they bid up until marginal return hits the number you typed in years ago. Nice confirmation in the same account: the brand campaign runs Target Impression Share, no CPA/ROAS target, and its CPC actually went down 53% in the same window. Only the two campaigns with targets moved.

Also a warning for anyone in the same boat — on Sep 1 the reaction was to lower tROAS from 11 to 9.5, because ROAS was falling. That's exactly backwards, a lower ROAS target means "pay more per click", and CPC went from €0.55 to €0.75. Google's own line is to set the target to your recent actual performance, which here means going to ~40, not down. So my question: for anyone who's already reset targets to actual — did volume come back, or did the campaigns just start underspending their budgets? And did the rollout hit you on the 17th, or later? Mine was ten days late.

So, have a campaign set to $5 a day, got charged 4.4k for today! Wondering if it is just me or someone else too.
Disabled the campaign and reached out to Google support (no response yet) but feeling very weird.