Opus GrowthForumSearch, Performance Max, bidding, negative keywords and account audits.
Take a small family law firm with about $2,000 a month. LSA charges per lead instead of per click, and the Google Guaranteed badge does a lot of the selling, so the cost per lead…
There are two camps on this one. Some say put the sale price in the feed and let the sale annotation do the work, so the ad shows the discount and the bidding sees the real price…
Search Partners is on by default in most Search campaigns, and the usual case for keeping it is cheap extra volume. My concern is what it does to bidding. Smart Bidding optimises…
Take a plumber who wants ads running around the clock because emergency searches happen at 2am. The catch is what happens after the click. If nobody answers until 8am, you're…
Pinning gets a lot of hate in responsive search ads, mostly because it cuts down the combinations the system can test. I think it makes sense when you have a real reason, like a…
Picture a Shopping campaign for a store where people tend to compare for a few days before buying. On day 3 you've got two sales and a CPA that looks awful, and the urge is to cut…
Take a store with about 2,000 SKUs where the feed titles are just the supplier names, something like "Acme K3 Pro 512GB Black". Shopping and PMax match queries against those…
Take a fashion store with around 400 SKUs where Performance Max keeps pouring most of the spend into a handful of bestsellers through product pages. One fix is pointing the final…
I keep going back and forth on DNI versus a single static number for local service businesses. DNI swaps in a tracking number per visitor, so you can tie each call to the keyword…
Splitting PMax into three campaigns by margin tier only pays off if each one gets enough conversions to learn on its own. Bidding is set per campaign, so a 3x target on the 15%…
Google's Recommendations tab is a mixed bag, and most people either apply everything or ignore it completely. My take is that most suggestions are safe to skip by default, but a…
Say a store does around 30 orders a month and wants to move from Maximize Conversion Value to Target ROAS. Their last 90 days averaged 420% ROAS, so the obvious move is setting…
Emergency services are a good example of this. Take a plumber running Search ads around the clock on a flat budget. A lot of the late clicks come from someone with a burst pipe at…
Every January someone asks whether to pause or loosen Smart Bidding during a dead stretch and restart it later. My instinct is to hold, because pausing throws away the learned…
A lot of lead gen accounts mark a form fill, a phone click, a newsletter signup and a pricing page visit all as primary conversions. Smart Bidding then treats them as roughly…
Say a store sells phone accessories at 60% margin next to large appliances at 12%. One tROAS target across the whole feed either starves the appliances or overspends on accessory…
The usual advice is "one" for leads and "every" for purchases, and I'm not sure it holds for every form. Take someone who submits a lead form, then comes back a day later through…
How do you all handle call tracking for a local service site? Take a plumbing business with Google Ads, a website and a Business Profile. The usual setup is a forwarding number on…
Most PMax accounts split asset groups by product category because it mirrors the catalog tree and looks tidy. The problem is that bidding doesn't care about categories. PMax…
Every week someone posts that their CPA doubled and asks whether to pause the campaign. Often the last three or four days just haven't converted yet. With e-commerce and a short…
How big does a tCPA change have to be before you treat it as a new strategy? Say a store has a tCPA of 40 and the client is fine with fewer but more expensive orders, so you want…
Anyone running Local Services Ads alongside regular Search for a plumber or HVAC business? LSA charges per lead instead of per click, and the lead is tied to a call or booking…
Stores with repeat buyers keep going back and forth on what the purchase conversion should send to Google. One camp says first-order revenue, so tROAS optimises for the customer…
Auto-apply is where Google's recommendations get messy. Depending on the type, it can raise budgets, add keywords, add responsive ad assets, or change bidding targets, all without…
Picking the primary category on a Google Business Profile looks like a minor form field, but it changes more than most people expect. Say a dental clinic does general dentistry,…
Take a dental clinic where most leads come through a booking form that already collects email and phone. Enhanced conversions hash that first-party data and match it back to…
Take a fashion store where 30% of orders come back. If you send gross order value, Smart Bidding optimizes toward revenue that partly never sticks, so reported ROAS looks better…
Plenty of accounts have auto-apply on without anyone ever deciding that. Then a budget bump or a broad match keyword shows up that nobody asked for. Google calls these changes low…
Location targeting in Google Ads defaults to people physically in your target area, but the "interest" option is still sitting in advanced settings, and people keep arguing over…
Google Ads defaults location targeting to "People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations." For a plumber in Austin, that means someone in Dallas reading a blog post…