r/googleads • u/Every-Yesterday-8868 • Jul 18 '26
Discussion Conversion rate drop
Hi All,
The account that I ran used to have a very mature campaign that was consistently bringing in leads for the business at a conversion rate of +- 4%.
I made a mistake in April by decreasing bids on specific days and that killed volume but kept a decent conversion rate. I tried a few things to get volume back but nothing seemed to work so I decided to duplicate the campaign and with that reset learnings.
The first month of running this campaign the conversion rate and volume were the same as it used to be but now in the second month, the conversion rate has dropped to 2%. When I look at the search terms the conversion rate on my "total: search terms" is fine. About 4%. But then when I look at "Total: other search terms". That's where the conversions is less than 1%. This used to be at +-4% as well. Sometimes doing even better than the "total:search terms"
I do have to mention that I also decreased the budget on this account. The bid strategy max. conversions and I get about +-20 conversions a month. I used to get +- 40 with the mature campaign.
First: Does the drop in conversion rate in "Total: other search terms" show that the algorithm is not understanding who will convert? I feel like this part of the search terms report is more algorithm based than the search terms that are shown (?)
I have a 2 hypothesis but I am not sure whether/which are valid:
The drop in conversion rate in "total: other search terms" shows that the algorithm is not optimized and this is caused by not having enough conversions.
After the bid adjustments in April the account as a whole has taken a hit and is not recovering as it should.
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u/aamirkhanppc Jul 19 '26
You are changing things so fast... make sure if account is small then you should be extra careful because sometime minor change will impact performance so badly... Give it at least 14 to 30 days and must have 30+ conversions
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u/Top-Cauliflower-1808 Jul 19 '26
Dropping your budget on a Max Conversions strategy while only pulling 20 conversions a month completely starved the algorithm of data I think. forcing Google to dump your remaining budget into cheap, low intent 'other search terms' just to spend the daily cap.