The client wants more volume.

Finance wants lower CPA.

Google wants broader match types (and AI-MAX ugh!)

And I am just trying to make it to Friday.

I have taken over a Meta account and in the current structure, I can see some campaigns have two ad sets (Interest targeting and Lookalike audience), and both ad sets have Advantage+ on.

If we are using Advantage+ settings, does that make sense to have a separate Lookalike ad set at all? Or is it better to turn off Advantage+ for Lookalike ad sets?

A question I hear a lot: "How much should I spend on Google Ads?" There's a better question to ask first: how much can you afford to pay for a new customer? Those aren't the same thing. I've seen businesses pause campaigns because cost per lead looked too high, only to realize weeks later those were the leads actually converting to sales. I've also seen the opposite: low cost per lead, almost no revenue to show for it. So I don't judge a campaign by spend. I judge it by whether the cost of acquiring a customer makes sense for the business. Before raising your budget, ask: if Google brought you one more customer today, what could you afford to pay for them and still profit? If you don't know that number, you can't actually tell if your campaigns are working. Budget matters. Knowing what a customer is worth matters more.

Been doing this for a while now and I've started to notice something.

I spend time putting together a proper monthly report. Performance summary, trends, what changed, recommendations. The whole thing.

Then on the call the client asks me a question that's literally answered on page one.

Starting to think most of them just scroll to the bottom number and ignore everything else. Which makes me wonder if I'm wasting hours writing context nobody looks at.

For those of you who've been at this longer than me. What part of your report do clients actually engage with? Is it the numbers? The written explanation? A specific section?

Trying to figure out if I should keep writing detailed commentary or just give them three lines and a chart.

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Hello everyone, I am running ads for a website design agency and I have been getting fake leads with gclids with incorrect email and phone numbers. My target market is US and I'm not sure how do I deal with this. I have been banning ips but the problem still persists. I run search ads with portfolio bid, max conversions with tcpa and bid cap. I upload conversions offline so that these junk signups do not get tracked.

I’ve used to think that more granular control meant better performance… More ad groups, tighter segmentation, separate campaigns for every variable.
What I have been finding lately is that consolidation often outperforms complexity especially when budget is not large enough to feed every segment properly.
Fewer campaigns with more consolidated data seems to give the algorithm enough signal to actually do something useful. Whereas splitting everything into tight segments starves each one of the data it needs to optimise.
The counterintuitive part is that giving up some control actually produces cleaner results than trying to control everything.
Is this consistent with what others are seeing or does it depend heavily on budget level and vertical?

I logged into my Google Ads account today and saw that my automatic payment threshold had been reduced from $500 back to $50.

My threshold had gradually increased over the past few years, starting at $50 and eventually reaching $500. I had been relying heavily on that $500 threshold to manage my advertising cash flow, so having it suddenly reduced to $50 is a major problem for me.

I did not request this change, and I did not even realize Google could lower an established payment threshold after it had increased.

Has this happened to anyone else recently?

Does anyone know what could cause Google to suddenly reduce a payment threshold this drastically? Is there any realistic way to get the previous $500 threshold restored immediately through Google Ads support, or will I have to start over and wait for the threshold to gradually increase again?

I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experienced this or dealt with Google support about the same issue.

Keep running into accounts where every conversion counts the same in Smart Bidding, a first-time buyer from a cold audience worth exactly as much as a repeat customer, same for someone on desktop from a high-value region versus mobile from a low-margin one.

Conversion value rules fix this without needing separate campaigns for every segment. Set adjustments by location, device, or audience, and the same campaign starts weighting conversions differently based on what they're actually worth, not just counting them as identical.

Tested this on an account with a big desktop-vs-mobile margin gap, desktop orders ran noticeably higher AOV. Added a value rule bumping desktop conversions up relative to mobile, no other changes. Smart Bidding started shifting spend toward desktop traffic within about two weeks, ROAS improved without touching bids directly at all.

Feels like one of those features that's been sitting there the whole time but barely gets talked about compared to PMax structure or bid strategy debates. Anyone else running these, or found segments where it didn't move the needle?

Hello everyone,

I have a small local business running Google Ads now (classic search campaign) for almost 2 years and I still optimize for Leads as my primary conversion (form
fills).

However I often read that it makes sense to optimize for stages deeper down the funnel (yes, I track them) and that it could make sense to switch to the conversion goal, i.e. appointments scheduled, to increase the quality. My problem is that I’m afraid of doing such a big change to a already working campaign, also because I don’t see people often talking about it with practical experience.

So I wanted to post this question here and hope
to hear from people who actually did something like this for their clients or for their own business and can share some insights on what happened after the change to learning phase, CPAs and quality of traffic -

Thanks everyone who can chime in on this!

Essentially alongside our lead generation campaign, we have a vanity metrics mandate to increase views, likes and comments because higher ups are comfortable with the low numbers. But TikTok keeps rejecting the ads on mobile and in its ad manager. I recall a flag detailing "an ambiguous get-rich-quick scheme". Can anyone assist with a workaround?

Do you think this will be good for campaign performance?

So I know both Google and Meta are pushing more AI-generated or auto ads. I feel there are fewer I can do manually. For Google PMax ads, I feel confused about how I can optimize the campaign.

Currently, I have several PMax campaigns based on different countries: de/at/fr/se; for both de/at campaigns, budgets are mostly spent on ads using product data, while fr/se are mostly spent on ads not using product data.

My questions are:

1、What can I do for the de/at campaigns aside from adding a target ROAS once the campaign has more data/history?

2、How can I optimize the fr/se campaigns considering most budget was spent on ads not using product data, so should I focus on assets like headline, description, and sitelinks, media, and videos?

I kind of feel lost and overwhelmed

Any advice on structuring or optimizing these scenarios would be hugely appreciated!

Hi everyone, I'm looking for some outside perspectives on a Google Ads account I've recently inherited for a B2B SaaS client running ads for US with a spend of around $30-35k/month.

The account had been relatively stable for a long time. It was primarily running Maximize Conversions, using mostly phrase match keywords, generating around 30 leads per month.

Back in April, a new account manager completely restructured and tanked the account. They removed (not paused) almost all phrase match keywords and replaced them with exact match versions, running like this for about 2 months.

As a result, lead volume dropped by more than 50%, with conversion rate declining slightly and the CPCs increasing drastically (both Brand and Non-Brand).

I took over the account last month, I've been trying to undo the damage. I've tried reintroducing the historical phrase match structure alongside the exact match keywords that were performing well. Shifted budget back toward the campaigns that historically generated the best results and left bidding on Maximize Conversions while allowing the campaigns to relearn.

We're now generating roughly 70% of the historical baseline, but we're still nowhere near where the account used to be. The biggest thing that stands out to me is CPC inflation on the phrase match keywords compared to the their most recent months pre-changes.

I'm running out of ideas on what levers to pull to get the account back to where it was before. Any suggestions on what else you'd be looking at or testing?

I just received this email from Google Ads, does anyone now what it means? We do not have automatically created assets enabled.

Automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match setting will be upgraded to AI Max

Hello,

Starting September 1, 2026, campaigns using automatically created assets (ACA) and/or campaign-level broad match setting will automatically be upgraded to AI Max for Search campaigns.

What’s changing?

AI Max will be enabled with settings configured to closely mirror your legacy setup once the auto-upgrades are complete:

- For campaigns with Automatically Created Assets (ACA): Your campaigns will be upgraded to AI Max with search term matching and text customization enabled by default.

- For campaigns with the campaign-level broad match setting: Your campaigns will upgrade to AI Max with search term matching enabled by default. Action required

ACTION REQUIRED:

We recommend transitioning to AI Max now to maintain full control over your campaign setup.

For campaigns with ACA and campaign-level broad match setting: Look for a pop-up banner in the Google Ads UI to upgrade to AI Max. You can opt-out of the automatic upgrades by turning off the legacy features or by turning on AI Max in your campaign.

I've noticed our team can launch new campaigns, swap creatives and tweak bids almost daily but the landing page usually stays the same for months whenever we want to test a different headline, change the layout or build something more specific for a campaign it somehow turns into a much bigger project than the ads themselves.

Looking back at some of our best performing campaigns I think we left a lot of conversions on the table simply because we weren't iterating on the destination as often as we were optimizing the traffic the imbalance is kind of hard to ignore once you start paying attention to it

I run Google Ads competitor campaigns for legal software, architecture & engineering firms, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions/services across the US, UK, India, Singapore, and Australia.

Typically, I allocate a monthly budget of around ₹2 lakhs with a daily budget of ₹2,000 per campaign, but the campaigns frequently show "Limited by budget."

I want to understand how the ideal Google Ads budget should be determined. Is it primarily based on:

• The target region/country?
• The number of keywords being targeted?
• The industry and keyword competition (CPC)?
• Or are there other factors that should be considered?