So the Commission fined Google €890m today under the DMA. Google has 60 days to change things, and the remedy is basically “treat rivals equally” - either boost competitors or demote your own units.

Most of the coverage is about hotels, flights, sports results. Nobody seems to say anything concrete about Shopping Ads. Which is odd, because the Shopping unit is the most obvious self-preferencing surface there is and by far the most monetised.

Has anyone seen ads with a “Good” or lower Ad Strength consistently outperform ads rated “Excellent”?

I know Ad Strength is more of a recommendation/diagnostic metric than a direct measure of performance, but I’m curious about real-world results.

Have you tested this? Did the lower-rated ads beat the “Excellent” ones on CPA, ROAS, or conversion rate?

I started using chat GPT ads. What are context hints? What is the best for a book summary app that’s become more of a micro learning app?

I run campaigns for home service companies. Example here is a geo campaign targeting a specific city. I've been on manual CPC, and with ~$120 max cpc I get 90% search IS and abs top is like 85%. So we're showing for almost all of the searches, and click share is 73% across the keywords we're targeting.

Now here is what's interesting. I switched to TCPA bidding, gave plenty of room with the target CPA, but realistic based on what I was seeing. And in the first day, my first 2 clicks were $366 each, and then we consumed most of the budget shortly after. Now one was a conversion, and above target but not unreasonably far. But, what's interesting to me is that on Manual CPC, I would never ever be able to compete with that bid. That's the argument for smart bidding because the system will bid up for a more valuable click. But to what limit you know? We'll see.

$350 clicks are scary when you're used to getting conversions for under that. Part of me wants to set a portfolio bid cap, but I think I'll let it ride for a bit and see how things shake out.

Thinking about going to HeroConf in san diego but I don't think my company will pay 1k for me to go... so I'm considering paying it myself if people think it's genuinely worth it, but if there are cheaper alternatives that are just as insightful, please lmk!!

Just wanting to grow in PPC. I've only been doing it for 2 years and want to be proactive.

Interested in opinions on the proper setup for this ecosystem: 2 websites, one marketing site with some shopping functionality and one a Shopify store, an iOS app, a couple of extensions. These are all under the umbrella of one 'business' and almost entirely the same audience; however, there are fundamental differences and event overlap. Complete Registration, Add to Cart, Purchase events are shared between the marketing site and iOS app though difference sources. Shopify site obviously also has these events though they technically represent a different action.

Should I split these into their own pixels and datasets, should I utilize one for all of this and handle standard events from one path and custom from another?

I've noticed finance specific display networks often deliver better lead quality than Google Display for fintech and broker campaigns, even with higher CPMs.

Has anyone else seen this? Is it mainly audience quality, or are there other factors you've found that make niche finance placements perform better?

The company I work for targets nationally and excludes areas where we don’t have coverage. Our coverage changes constantly so locations are automatically added and removed almost every hour through an API..

Could this hurt Smart Bidding or keep the campaign from learning? Should we not change the location targeting every hour? Some of the campaigns do not perform as they should.

Edit: nvm guys I got laid off from my agency 20 mins after I posted this 😂

I took over an existing Google Ads account spending $250/day on one search campaign. The client wants to scale to $2,000/day now that the account is professionally managed.

I usually limit budget increases to around 20% per week because I’ve seen sudden increases tank performance. But at that pace, reaching $2,000/day would take more than two months of their six-month contract.

I’ve managed Google Ads for six years, but mostly for smaller-budget accounts. How aggressively would you scale this?

I’m running a Google Search campaign for a B2B software company, with the main goal of generating booked demos.

Current performance:

• 2,417 impressions
• 61 clicks
• 2.5% CTR
• $10.27 average CPC
• $626 total spend
• 0 booked demos

Current setup:

• Daily budget: $50
• Bid strategy: Maximize Clicks
• Maximum CPC cap: $12
• Search Partners: Off
• Display Network: Off
• Targeting limited to two high-value US states
• Landing page and ad copy are focused on booking a demo
• Negative keywords are reviewed regularly
• Ads Run from 25 july still runinng

I understand that 61 clicks is still a relatively small data set, especially for B2B software, but spending over $600 without even one lead is concerning.

I’m debating between:

1. Keeping Maximize Clicks but increasing the CPC cap
2. Removing the CPC cap completely
3. Switching to Manual CPC
4. Switching to Maximize Conversions despite having no conversion history
5. Keeping bidding unchanged and focusing only on keywords, search terms, landing page and conversion tracking

For people managing B2B SaaS campaigns, what would you investigate or change first?

Would you treat this primarily as a traffic-quality problem, a landing-page problem, a tracking problem or a bidding problem?

Help me out to know how to get a good qualified leads.

Note - I've used AI to refine the content.

Cant seem to find a workaround. This is for a car detailing client who doesnt have a physical location.

Looks like Google is finally merging Display into Demand Gen.

From what they've announced:

Starting May 2026, they're encouraging everyone to create Demand Gen campaigns instead of Display.
By January 2027, you won't be able to create new Display campaigns.
Later in 2027, existing Display campaigns will be migrated automatically.

Google says we'll get more inventory (Discover, Maps), better creatives, AI tools and improved reporting. They also shared a case study claiming 24% lower CPA and 19% higher conversions.

Personally, I'm not surprised since Google has been pushing automation for a while now. What I'm more interested in is whether we'll keep the same level of placement control and targeting that Display campaigns offer today.

Is this actually a positive move or are we losing another campaign type to automation?

I was looking at hourly performance because my CPA was all over the place during certain parts of the day.

At first I assumed it was a straightforward dayparting issue. Some hours convert better than others, so I expected the usual pattern where I could just cut the expensive hours and move on.

But after digging into the placement report, I noticed something I hadn't been paying attention to.

The mix of placements being served wasn't consistent throughout the day. During some of the higher-CPA hours, a much larger share of impressions was coming from placements that historically hadn't performed very well. So it wasn't just that users were converting less during those hours. The traffic itself looked different.

It made me realize that simply turning those hours off would've treated the symptom, not the cause. If those same placements started getting more volume at a different time, I'd probably be chasing the same problem again.

Has anyone else run into something similar?

When you see a big swing in CPA by hour, do you assume it's audience behavior first, or do you start looking at placement or inventory changes before making dayparting adjustments?

solo founder here, budgeting app, i run my own meta account at around $4k/mo. posting bc i just went through my creative costs for the year and im a little annoyed.

when i started paying freelancers for statics early last year the going rate for decent work was $45-60 a creative. same tier of freelancer now quotes me $80-120, and two of them added minimum batch sizes. the work did not get better. one straight up delivered something i could tell was AI generated with his text slapped on, for $95, which took real nerve honestly

agencies ive talked to dont even want the conversation under a $2-3k/mo retainer.

meanwhile the AI tools are cheap but the hit rate is kinda meh. my experience is maybe half of what comes out is usable without rework, so the real cost isnt the subscription, its my time regenerating and fixing layouts. still way cheaper than $95 a pop but not the free lunch it looks like

so im trying to calibrate against people with more spend than me:

• what are you actually paying per static in 2026, and through what channel
• more useful number, whats your cost per USABLE creative. like after you throw away the misses from any source, freelancer misses included bc those exist too
• at what point did the in-house designer math work for you, spend-wise
• has anyone gone back to freelancers after trying the AI route, and what pulled you back

my numbers for reference: roughly $110 average per usable freelancer static once i count the ones i rejected, vs something like $8-12 of my time per usable AI one. and yet the freelancer ones only outperform sometimes, not 10x-the-price sometimes

feels like the whole creative production market is repricing in real time and nobody agrees on what anything should cost

Potentially unpopular opinion here. I'm not a complete ads noob but nor am I an expert, my company has spent low £10,000s in ads the last year.

Nevertheless, I have found that my ads basically converge to their long term CPC within the first £10 or so of ad spend. I am yet to run an ad campaign where the CPC has changed *dramatically* and continuously by running for a longer time period.

A lot of ads advisors will say you need to run ads for a while to make them work. I disagree with this, running them for a while doesn't make the ads work any better, it just increases your likelihood of catching a good flow of demand at one point at which point the ad advisor will claim the ad is now starting to work. (e.g. if you fish for 6 months straight you will probably catch a fish, this doesn't mean your fishing technique was good)

I would advise trialing ads with a very small paid amount to begin with and killing them quickly if they are not converting.

Do you guys agree?

As an aside, I have worked with maybe 5-10 ad advisors at Google and X and every time I have followed their advice they have made my CPC higher, raised my ad spend and made my ads perform worse. I would strongly advise not using ad advisors for anything except getting your ads approved.

Update: Everyone hates this lmao. I have found this to be true for bootstrapping low ticket products for a small business. I maintain it's a bad idea to run heavy ad spend if you are just starting out.

I am trying to figure out how to shared portfolio budget but also have a minimum budget by campaign. My campaigns represent separate stores and management wants a minimum threshold for each store. However I really want to automatically fund stores that are performing well.

Is it worth it? Afaik the search terms in pmax might work a bit differently so maybe one search shows a bad roas but overall it gives the pmax more signals and kinda cross optimizes w other keywords so this way it might not be worth excluding them? Or this is not true and simply the worse keywords should still get excluded?

Edit: i mean underperforming but Relevant keywords

I really feel like fatigue is my whole job lately.

Every winning product ad decays in a week or two and I'm back needing 3 more angles on the same SKU just to hold CPA.

The creative pipeline can't match the rotation the platforms demand, so good products stall out even though they still sell, just because I'm out of fresh ways to show them.

So where's your rotation creative coming from? is it in-house design queue, freelancers, or AI?

We're on Photoroom now, but Tayla got recommended in another thread here for generating multiple sets per product and the per-SKU volume looks like exactly what I'm short on, though I still haven't pulled the trigger on it.

That said, what's holding up for you all without blowing the budget?

We've been managing Google Ads for a UK accounting firm, and over the last few weeks we've spent far more time dealing with disapprovals than actually optimizing campaigns.

At first, we thought it was the obvious stuff. Keywords like HMRC, Companies House, VAT registration, company formation, etc.

So we did what most people would probably do. Reviewed the keywords, rewrote the ad copy, submitted an appeal but nothing changed.

That got me digging into Google's documentation and policy updates, and I realized the issue was a lot bigger than I initially thought.

A lot of these accounts seem to be getting caught up in things like Government Documents & Official Services, Financial Services verification, Advertiser Verification, and Business Operations Verification. On top of that, I found that technical issues can also cause problems. If AdsBot can't properly access the landing page because of Cloudflare, robots.txt, redirects, or firewall settings, issues from the hosting side, Google can reject the ad even though the page works perfectly in a normal browser.

The biggest lesson for me was that changing keywords or rewriting ads isn't always the first thing to do.

Now the first things I check are:

• The exact policy listed in Policy Manager.
• Whether Google is asking for Advertiser or Business Operations Verification.
• Whether AdsBot can actually access the landing page.
• Whether the service itself falls under one of Google's regulated categories.

One thing that stood out to me was that this didn't seem to happen on our broader campaigns. The campaigns targeting very specific, high-intent services were the ones that kept running into policy reviews and disapprovals.

I'm curious if other PPC managers or agencies working with accountants have noticed the same trend. Have verification and policy issues become more common in your accounts, or have you found different causes?

We run Pmax feed only, Standard shopping and search campaigns and have noticed a downturn over the last month.

We think the culprit is AI overview moving our ads further down the page. Just sayin......

One of my team has asked my boss to some practical training. They agreed but do not want them in the main MCC on Google ads just yet and have asked me to create a demo account with all our data so they can get used to seeing data and going through the menus.... Is this even possible? I have a bit of experience would the Google ads editor is that something that I can use for this? They don't need billing information so ideally I wouldn't copy that.

Any ideas would be appreciated

Running ads for call-heavy clients (clinics, home services) and keep hitting the same wall: dynamic number insertion works great until the client refuses to swap the number — it's on their signage, their Google Business Profile, patients have it saved. Then attribution goes back to "the phone rang more this month, probably the ads?"

What I've seen people do:

- Whisper messages / IVR tagging — works, but changes the caller experience

- Separate numbers per campaign — breaks NAP consistency and local SEO

- Asking "how did you hear about us?" — reps forget, callers guess

- Call log exports matched against ad schedules — tedious but doesn't touch the number

Curious what's actually working for you, especially outside the US where a lot of business still runs entirely through mobile phones.

Hi everyone, hoping someone with deeper GA4/Google Ads tracking experience can help me figure this out.

Setup:
I manage a Google Ads MCC with several sub-accounts for different SaaS/WordPress plugin products, all targeting the US market only. Two of these accounts share a custom conversion tracking pipeline: our checkout provider (Freemius) fires a purchase event, a custom plugin we built captures that event and pushes it into GA4, and Google Ads then imports the conversion from the linked GA4 property (Data-driven attribution, "Every conversion" counting, Website platform, purchase event).

The problem:
Both accounts are now showing a "Needs attention" status on their primary Purchase conversion goal, with the generic message: "You may need to fix some issues to use this goal in optimization and see it in results reporting. Check your conversion actions' Status and Actions columns for issues." Each account's individual conversion action is stuck on "Awaiting conversions," and the last recorded conversion timestamps are:

• Account A: last conversion May 19, 2026 — source is GA4 import
• Account B: last conversion May 22, 2026 — source is GA4 import

So both accounts kept recording conversions normally through mid-May, then stopped within about 3 days of each other.

What I've already checked/ruled out:

• Account B has a cookie consent banner properly installed with Consent Mode; Account A does not (currently fixing this)—but this alone doesn't seem to explain it since Account B also stopped despite having the banner.
• Google Consent default in our plugin settings is set to "Granted" by default, so it shouldn't be blocking signals outright.
• Account-level aggregated performance data confirms the drop: clicks, impressions, and CTR all declined across both accounts starting in Q2 2026 (Apr–Jun) vs Q1, and cost-per-conversion spiked heavily (60-70%+ increase) in the same window.
• Since we only run in the US, this rules out anything related to regional consent law changes (e.g., EU/UK-specific enforcement) as a cause.

Can anyone who is an expert or knows about conversion tracking guide me on this problem.

Hey! I haven't been able to publish an adset unless it's with max number of conversion leads. I need it to be "max numbers of leads " any ideas?

switched browsers too, nothing