Opus GrowthForumSearch, Performance Max, bidding, negative keywords and account audits.
Pinning gets recommended a lot, and I'm not sure it helps as much as people assume. Pin a headline to position 1 and the system has fewer combinations to work with, so you get…
Say you're running a store with around 30 purchases a month and wondering whether to set a target ROAS yet. The usual advice is to wait for 50 conversions in 30 days, but plenty…
Ad schedules for B2B services are an old manual-bidding habit, and with Smart Bidding as the default I'm not sure they still earn their place. The algorithm already sees hour and…
Branded search looks great in the report and means less than it seems. If you already rank first organically for your brand name, a paid click often just replaces a free one, so…
Brand first or type first in Shopping titles? The usual advice is brand, then type, then the key attribute, like "Acme Trail Running Shoe Women Waterproof 9". Others say the…
For a local service account, Google Ads defaults to "presence or interest", so people who've searched for or read about your city can see your ads even when they're nowhere near…
The usual advice for Google Ads experiments is a 50/50 split so you get a clean read, but with only about 30 conversions a month that test can take a quarter to tell you anything…
Picture a store with around 40 SKUs, a mix of cheap accessories and a few higher-ticket items. PMax is already live and pulling most of the conversions, so the question is whether…
A client's e-commerce account had purchase, add to cart and begin checkout all set as primary, and Smart Bidding drifted toward cheap add-to-carts. Spend climbed while purchases…
Say you've got a store with around 400 apparel SKUs and feed titles like "Women's Black Cotton Relaxed Fit Crew Neck Short Sleeve Summer Tee", and someone on the team wants to cut…
Take a plumber's Google Ads account that reports 40 calls a month as conversions, where a chunk of them last under 15 seconds. Wrong numbers, people hanging up at the hold…
Picture a store with 400 SKUs and margins anywhere from about 12% to 60%. One ROAS target across the whole campaign starves the high-margin products, while the low-margin…
Honestly, I'm not sure separate exact and phrase campaigns earn their keep anymore. Google has been loosening how close a match has to be for years, so the old argument for…
Say you swap a lead import from form submits to qualified calls, or fix a purchase tag that was double firing. Smart Bidding has been learning from the old signal for months, and…
A daily feed refresh leaves a gap that causes real trouble. A product sells out at 2pm, the feed still says in stock until the next morning, and the ad keeps sending clicks to a…
A lot of accounts attach one shared negative list to every Search campaign, and it looks tidy right up until it causes trouble. A term that's junk for one campaign can be exactly…
I'd turn search partners off by default, especially on smaller accounts. Google blends them into the same campaign, so the overall CPA can look fine while a chunk of spend goes to…
Pinning in RSAs splits people. One camp pins the brand name to position 1 and the CTA to position 3 and calls it control. The other says every pin removes combinations the system…
I keep going back and forth on how wide to draw the radius for a single-location plumber. Say the shop sits in a town of 200k with a few suburbs around it. A 10 mile radius covers…
Take a store where about 20% of orders come back within 30 days. If you import gross purchase revenue, Smart Bidding is learning from money the store never keeps, and it will…
Search partners are still on by default for a lot of Search campaigns, so the keep-or-kill question keeps coming up. The case for keeping them is volume. Partners add impressions…
Say a store has a campaign at 6x ROAS on a handful of products, and the owner wants to triple the budget this week. My instinct is to push back, or at least not do it all at once.…
AI Max worries me on small budgets. Say a dental clinic turns it on for a Search campaign. Google widens matching beyond your keywords and pulls in queries it considers close,…
Take a home goods store with 4,000 SKUs using the title template "Brand, Product Type, Key Attribute". The case for brand first is that Google weighs the start of the title…
Cutting ads overnight and pushing budget into business hours is old advice, and with Target CPA or Maximize Conversions I'm not sure it holds anymore. Smart Bidding already uses…
Clients keep asking whether a change worked, and most of us answer with a before/after chart. The problem is that the month before and the month after rarely look alike.…
I'm setting up a broad match campaign on a modest budget and trying to work out how much pre-launch blocking it really needs. The usual advice is to load a long negative list…
Take a store with around 200 SKUs, mostly in one category, and a PMax campaign that's already spending well. The usual advice is to keep a Standard Shopping campaign running next…
For people running several Search campaigns, where do you put the negative when you find a wasted search term? I see two camps. One adds it to a shared negative list and attaches…
The call duration threshold for local service accounts gets argued a lot, and I think both extremes cause problems. Short calls are full of wrong numbers, hang-ups, and people…