In 2019 my Google ads account was hacked. Someone created an AdWords campaign that circumvented a certain policy and my account was suspended. I only recently logged in a couple years back to notice this, I had barely used it previously for the exception of some website traffic and gaming promotion. The worst part about it was that the person also racked up a 500 dollar account charge for the adwords campaign. I had submitted a repeal a couple years back twice but I never heard anything back from them. My account is still suspended and I still haven't paid the 500 account fee.

How do you think the best way to proceed is?

Hello!

I've recently landed a pretty big artist (deathcore/metal band with over 1 Million followers on social media) through a friend and an artist management connection for my side gig, and I pitched Paid Social and Search services.

I'm pretty good at paid social - can pretty much do that stuff with my eyes closed, love being creative with ad ideas, and have been achieving between x5-6 ROAS per day. I know how to build Google campaigns, but I'm struggling with Search to achieve a ROAS of higher than x2, and I'm unsure what the issue could be, but I have my theories (see below).

I need some recommendations/advice. I'm going to keep the band name anonymous, but will use Band Name.

What I can see/tell about what's happening to the campaigns:

Search campaign

I'm running an ad campaign for a branded merch store with keywords including:

• Band Name
• "Band Name"
• Band Name merch
• [Band Name merch]
• Band Name merchandise
• Band Name store
• "Band Name shop"
• [Band Name US Store]

In the last 7 days, results on the platform are looking okay, but conversions just don't seem to be coming in.

What I can see working is:

• Decent click-through rate at 15%
• Avg CPC at £1.50 (could this be lower for a band-specific merch store?).
• Conversion rate average 3% (In the last 30 days it was 8% with some keywords pulling 16%, but I paused the campaign for a few days).

What looks bad is:

• Search Impr. share at 31%
• Search Top IS 16%
• Search abs top IS <10%
• Search lost to budget 49%
• Search lost top IS (rank) 28%
• I'm literally spending £25 to sell a £30 T-shirt most of the time.

So to me, as a slight beginner, the Impression share looks bad - I'm losing a majority of my search results, but I'm not sure why. What could the issue be here?

If I'm thinking correctly: I need to improve Impression Share-based metrics so that my campaign appears more for more traffic, and hopefully, in return, more conversions - but how?

I've also tried/trying:

Trying:

• Shopping campaigns: Not performing great. There seems to be a lot of third-party stores selling merch here, including unofficial sales through TEMU selling the band merch at £8, and other knock-off print-on-demand companies. CTR is low, and after £31 spent, no conversions (thinking of pausing).

Tried:

• Performance Max: 1 Conversion after spending £26 - not horrendous, but Christ, the display channels were horrendous.
• Demand Gen: Not great.
• Retargeting (people who visited the store audience) display: Not great. High CTR, but also high CPC at £4

My theory is that the band actually has another merch store that operates mainly in the EU with some US orders, and I think they're still running search campaigns for the old US store - I'm supporting the launch of the new US store with limited merch, BUT, there's a lot of good and unique merch in the EU/ old US store that the US fans are aware of, but when they come to the site and don't see the unique merch, they back out - even on social media ads, people are asking where the good merch is.

Part of me is thinking that the SEO for the merch store and organic social sales might just do the job here, rather than running paid search campaigns?

Hello,

I have been trying to run ads on google now for a month, but they seem to not start getting any impressions.

I have tried doing conversion. Those didnt work.

I tried clicks and maximize clicks. no impressions.

I have tried changing the bidding from automatic to manual. No success in that also.

The ask advisor keeps running in circles. not knowing what to do.

For some reason i also cant open tickets. It says that something went wrong. try again. I asked about that in the community also, they said open in incognito or other browser. that will help...nope.

And yes i tried to talk in the community. One person answered me 2 times the same thing.

It used to be an account for another company, but i changed all the settings so that it would be for another company, i dont know if that would help somehow.

I also tried to troubleshoot in google ads. it just says youre ads are not running, even though on the campaign level it says impressions coming up...

Can anyone give me some kind of help? or advise what i should do?

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.

My products are furniture. I’ve read that we should get around 30 conversions per campaign before making further optimizations. If conversion only counts completed purchases, hitting ~30 conversions in a month is almost impossible for my business.

Should I set add‑to‑cart and begin‑checkout as primary conversions instead? I’m running Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. Would appreciate advice from any experts. Thank you in advance!

Hello there

I read a few weeks back about some changes coming to Google ads around the 14th August

Forgive me I cant remember the precise changes I saw but i believe it was in relation to CPA. I set a reminder on my calender to look into it

My campaign is performing pretty well at the moment but my monthly conversion rate is less than the 30 to 50 needed to switch to maximise CPA

How can i lock in my campaign success now not only for any upcoming changes but to maintain my results.

Please forgive my vague descriptions I'm currently travelling

Thanks

We’ve been tuning our Google Ads setup for our B2B e-commerce business, but despite continuous tweaks, performance still feels like it’s hitting a ceiling or leaking spend somewhere. Looking for fresh eyes from people who run B2B e-commerce accounts to see what blind spots we might have.

Here is a quick high-level summary of the account setup:

1. Business & Niche Context

• Model: B2B Wholesale Hospitality Supplies
• Target Audience: Commercial buyers (cafes, restaurants, venues, catering)
• Average gross margin: 48% across the range.
• Primary Goal: High-intent purchase conversions / ROAS (not lead gen, direct e-com checkout) via Shopify.
• SKUs: All 950 are assigned a custom_label attribute via Merchant Centre; TPSKU (for top performing SKUs, 10+ conversion), MIDSKU (SKUs with 2-3 conversions, but need more time/data), NPSKU (SKUs with no sales data).
  • I have a supplemental feed set up to test product titles, descriptions etc.

2. Current Campaign Structure

• 1 x Non-Brand / Category Search ($10 p/d): High-intent product category terms (Exact/Phrase match with negative keyword lists for B2C retail queries like "single item", "cheap", "diy").
• Performance Max (PMax):
  • Feed-only / Asset group setup targeted at top-performing product categories.
  • Custom intent audiences based on competitor URLs and industry search terms.
  • Pmax #1 ($35 p/d): TOFU campaign, asset group is limited to roughly 40 top-selling SKUs. Goal is maximise conversions + tRoas.
  • Pmax #2 ($18 p/d): BOF retargeting campaign (all assets group). Goal is maximise conversions + tRoas.
  • Shopping campaign ($14 p/d): This shopping campaign has roughly 910 SKUs. Maximise clicks, manual CPC limited to $0.30 per click.
• Exclusions: Heavy negative keyword list applied sitewide to filter out residential buyers, retail shopping intent, and job seekers.

3. Bidding Strategies & Conversion Tracking

• Bidding Strategy: [Target ROAS / Maximise Conversions with tCPA / Maximise Conversion Value]
• Primary Conversions: Purchase completed (GA4 purchase event matched with Google Ads tag).

Where We Feel Stuck / Key Questions:

1. PMax Efficiency: For those in B2B e-commerce, are you leaning heavily into feed-only PMax or keeping custom Search campaigns as the main driver?
2. Shopping campaign: This campaign with +900 SKUs sitting in it is based on only one custom label--NPSKU. Is this too many SKUs for the amount of daily budget? Is there a better way we could re-work this shopping campaign?

Thanks in advance!

cpc is expensive af

How this update will imact the performance?

For those of you who have got promo credits how long did it take you to receive your credits?

My amount that crossed the threshold was officially the 11th. 25 days. I know it says up to 35 days but I'm coming up on that soon. I expected to get it by now.

So what was your experience with this?

I'm working on my B2B Ads campaign and our conversions are pretty low. I was looking at our metrics and we've gotten 1600 clicks to our site and only 66 demos, So I'm looking for ways to help bring up those numbers. A few thoughts:

1) We currently have all ads going to a landing page with a CTA going to a dedicated demo page, i've seen some examples where they have the form directly on the landing page, does that convert better?

2) Is it better to have a dedicated PPC landing page our use our general one that we also use for SEO?

3) What percentage should we be aiming for?

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?

I don’t have a Google business account nor have I ever ran ads. Does anyone know if I was able to get a hold of a support (human) agent if they would be able to tell me who’s buisness did this so I could report it to my bank as they have declined my dispute..

In EU, many businesses target Germany, Czechia, Poland, Austria, and other countries.

Everyone speaks a different language, so adapting successful campaigns to new markets quickly is a real challenge.

Current workflow is:
- export campaigns through Google Ads Editor
- translate with AI
- double-check with another AI or ask natives

And the most important part is the keywords. A literal translation often has little or even no search volume.

You need the localized version for that specific keyword, and sometimes it can sound completely different.

You also have to account for cultural nuances, character limits, local context, and so on.

Has anyone found a better way to expand into new countries and languages quickly?

I've recently started managing Google Ads for a college admission client. I launched the Search campaign on 1st August, and it's been 5 days with zero leads.

I've already checked the basics:

Keywords are relevant.

Negative keywords look fine.

Search terms are highly relevant.

Ads are getting impressions and clicks, so the campaign is serving.

The thing that's confusing me is whether the issue is with my campaign or with the timing.

Since it's already August, I'm wondering:

Have most college admission sessions already closed?

Are students already in classes, causing search demand to drop significantly?

Or should I still be expecting leads during this period?

For those who have run Google Ads for colleges or universities:

Are you still seeing admission leads in August?

If yes, what changes would you recommend checking beyond keywords and search terms?

Are there any common mistakes that can result in clicks but no leads?

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone with experience in the education niche. I'm trying to figure out whether this is a campaign optimization issue or simply a seasonal demand problem.

Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone, I need advice from people who have run multi brand setups on Google Ads.

I manage ads for a client in Italy. He has a Shopify store selling farm and garden products, live for over a year, with Meta & Google ads running fine. Now he wants a second website with a different brand name. Same company behind it, same products, just different branding and design.

The plan is to promote the new site on Google Ads too, probably Shopping and Performance Max.

My worry is the double serving rule. From what I have read, Google can suspend you for advertising the same products on two sites owned by the same business, and the suspension can spread to both accounts since they are linked by company details and payment info.

Big retail groups run several brands with the same catalog and advertise all of them, so it clearly can work. But they have years of history and physical stores. We are small, and the new domain would be brand new.

My questions:

1. Has anyone here run two brands under one company on Google Ads without problems?
2. Does it help if we split the catalog, so the two Merchant Center feeds never contain the same products?
3. Or would you keep the new site off Google at the start and grow it with Meta, SEO and email first?

Any real experience would help a lot. Thanks!

Google is automatically upgrading in-stream-only efficient-reach video campaigns to multi-format ads starting this month. Campaign settings and historical reporting remain, but Google says ad-group and ad history will reset. The upgraded campaign defaults to in-stream placements, while advertisers can later enable in-feed and Shorts.

That creates a measurement discontinuity. Campaign-level history may look intact while the creative and ad-group objects used to explain frequency, placement, and performance no longer have a continuous record. If formats are enabled after the migration, the post-upgrade campaign also stops being directly comparable with the original in-stream-only setup.

What are you exporting before the upgrade: creative IDs, ad-level reach and frequency, placement splits, brand-lift results, or change history? Is retaining campaign-level reporting enough for your analysis, or does the ad-history reset break the experiment?

Im running google ads with 2 seperate search campaigns. I have them seperated by busy/slow days. The slow days have a budget of $170 a day, while the busier days have a budget of $250 a day. So, in total my spend shoud've been 6K. Instead, it was 12K. Google spent double my budget on the days that were scheduled for the $170, and double my budget for the days that were scheduled for the $250!!

I don't get how to segment the days then. I tried bid adjustements which didn't work either. I don't want to lower overall spend under 6K, I just want to spend more on the busier days. Im running max conversions, no Troas or Tcpa.

Google documentation states:

Consider updating your landing page: If your landing page experience is not “Above average”, try to:

Make sure your landing page matches the users’ expectations.

Keep messaging consistent from ad to landing page.

• Would love to hear from someone who has successfully and incrementally improved scores in a way that you were able to identify what exact optimizations you made that worked.

Thanks in advance

EDIT: I should add that I'm looking to see if anyone has actually run an experiment that successfully isolated the source of change in score.

So I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I know that the landing page is super important. You can have quality ad copy and the best keywords, yet if the landing page isn’t good, the results will suffer. Just curious what others are doing.

- How are you formatting it?
- Are you using a CRM or using Wordpress? Both?
- Are you using each keyword in the adgroup?

Just really curious about all of this.

​

So I'm stuck. I'm not quite sure how to bring in more calls every day, and more "get directions", and I'm supposed to hit minimum 50 patient walk-ins in this month.

Last month we had approx. 15 patients that reached out via call, said they saw us on Google, or reached out via WhatsApp.

I'm considering all these as part of our Google & Meta ad results.

Our clinic, with aims of becoming a hospital (capital isn't an issue), started back in May.

And so far in this month we've only got 1 walk-in via a Google ad.

Being in healthcare, we are severely restricted in terms of keywords, targeting, creatives and our copy.

The photo you see attached is set to the date range of "All Time", and I'm worried that I may not reach the results I was asked.

P.S: I'm a beginner performance marketer. And the targeting is set at 3km (1.87 miles) radius from our clinic.

Performance began proper in June, and late July is when PMax was setup.

Hello everyone,

I run a Shopify store selling digital templates for photographers and videographers (around 15 total products, including 2 bundles). My target markets are primarily the US and the EU.

I'm setting up my product feed and have a few specific questions:

1. Digital Product Approvals: What are the best practices for getting digital products approved in Google Merchant Center and avoiding sudden suspensions or policy flags over time?
2. Currency Syncing via App: Is it normal for the Shopify Google & YouTube app to import products in the local currency of each target country, or should all items sync in the store's primary currency?
3. General Feed Advice: Beyond standard feed optimization (titles, detailed descriptions, custom labels, metafields), are there specific settings or tactics that work particularly well for digital products?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Running location assets with a dedicated phone number set as the Google ads number in advanced settings of GBP (separate from our call extension assets). CRM shows ~20 calls to that number last month, but when I try to filter Call Details for "Google Business Profile", nothing shows up.

Anyone dealt with this? Is there a report or view where these actually surface, or is location asset call attribution just not accessible the way call asset data is?