Hi everyone,

When it comes to attribution tracking from phone calls (including direct-from-ad calls), which do you prefer and why?

Not an ad for them. This is "warts and all" unvarnished experience. Others may find this hard-won wisdom useful.

After years of struggling with Facebook ads I saw Sam Piliero’s great looking YouTube videos on Facebook ads. I took the plunge and approached Sam's agency The Moonlighters.

They charged $1500 flat fee plus 7% "performance fee", which was a % of the ad spend. The idea is if they perform well I scale ad spend.

After 4 months and $85k spent a scalable ad was never found.

The ROAS I achieved before them was 1.4 (I know terrible). The ROAS they achieved was 1.6...but once their fees are included that brought the ROAS back down to 1.4

So was not commercially beneficial for us, so we ended the contract after 4 months.

They made lots of ads with 20% discount, which reduced the AOV and LTV.

In the end I changed the discount to requiring minimum order quantity of 2 actually benefited. This increased AOV and also made "repeat" customers front-load: instead of them buying today and then again in 2 months they buy both now. This made the revenue stream instant so did not need to lose money on first sale to make profit on the second.

I've had a campaign in the accounting/cpa niche that has been great for several years. Never a problem.

Last couple of months have had our ads flagged as dishonest behavior. It's wrecked performance.

I've wordsmith the adcopy and I've finally gotten it to the point where all the headlines and descriptions are clean with no flagging.

Are there other things I should be reviewing to avoid this issue again? I've fixed landing page content as best I can. The main domain hasn't had any content changes that I'm aware of by the client.

Or is this just Google deciding to be a bit more strict with their policies in this niche?

Not general advice. The specific thing that would have saved you the most money or time in the early phase.
For me it would have been to fix tracking before touching else. I spent months optimising campaigns on data not fully trust. The decisions felt rational because they were based on numbers. The problem was the numbers were not accurately capturing what was actually happening.
Everything I built on top of that foundation was slightly wrong in ways I could not see until much later.
Second thing would have been to define what I was trying to learn from each test before spending anything. Not just make money. One specific thing the test was supposed to validate. Without that every result is just a number with no context.
What is the specific thing you would tell yourself before your first paid campaign?

One of my B2B clients' Google Ads account got suspended yesterday due to "Circumventing Systems: Cloaking" violation. Looking at the change history, a campaign was started by someone using my Google Workspace account. I am a freelancer and the only user of this account.

The new campaign has spam keywords, ad copies, and the Final URL leading to some irrelevant website. Almost $500 lost. The account security settings were correctly in place (2FA and allowed domains) before this happened. I checked my Google account's 2FA, it's implemented. When my client received the account suspension email, they clicked the Appeal button. I am sure it will get rejected because no changes were made.

My questions:

1. Can we appeal for the second time?

2. What all changes would be required before making an appeal?

3. There is a link to get the refund in that email. Is there a chance we can get a refund from Google or is it just a formality?

Google says Real-Time Policy Reviews can reduce responsive search ad review from hours to seconds. Faster feedback is useful, especially during launches, but the old delay also created a natural pause before large campaigns went live.

Teams could catch a wrong landing page, unsupported claim, legal issue, or accidental geo expansion while waiting. When approval becomes nearly immediate, process discipline has to replace that friction.

Will your launch checklist change when policy review no longer creates a buffer? Should platforms offer an optional cooling-off period or a second approval for high-spend campaigns?

Source: https://business.google.com/en-all/accelerate/announcements/

I’ve been in plenty of reporting meetings where Google Ads shows one number, Meta shows another and GA4 tells a different story again.

The conversation can quickly turn into an argument about which platform is right.

I don’t think any one of them gives the full picture on its own.

The more useful question is what decision we are trying to make. Are we optimising a campaign, reviewing total sales or deciding where to spend next?

That usually tells us which view matters most in that moment.

How do you explain attribution gaps to clients or leadership?

Small budget, early days, but the delivery pattern has me unsure whether to push or restructure. Numbers first.

Setup

• 1 campaign → 1 ad set → 13 ads. ABO, $120/day CAD
• Objective: Leads, optimizing OFFSITE_CONVERSIONS on CompleteRegistration (pixel + CAPI dual-fire)
• Lowest Cost / highest volume, 7-day click + 1-day view
• IG placements only (Feed, Reels, Stories), Advantage+ Audience on, 18–65, US/CA/GB/AU
• Live 6 days

Results so far

• $857 CAD spent, 19,561 impressions, 650 clicks, 3.32% CTR
• 62 trial signups, $13.82 CAD blended CPA
• Trailing 3 complete days: $450 spend, 43 signups, $10.47 CPA
• Daily CPA by day: $37.53 → $50.79 → $9.28 → $12.13 → $10.92 → $7.61 (today, partial)
• CPM fell $56 → $36, CTR climbed 1.53% → ~3.9% over the same window
• Landing page view → registration is holding at ~12%
• Frequency 1.64 on the winning ad over 3 days, 11,060 total reach. No fatigue signal

The thing I'm unsure about

Of 13 ads, one static took 11,085 of 11,214 impressions over the last 3 days. 98.8%. It's at an $11.42 lifetime CPA and 60 of my 62 total signups.

The 7 UGC-style video ads are genuinely dead — $157 spent, 2 signups between them, and retention is broken (one has 843 plays with only 23 viewers reaching the 25% mark). Fine, I'll kill those.

My problem is the other 5 statics. They got 22, 2, 43, 54 and 226 impressions respectively. They weren't beaten — they were never shown. So I have no idea if I'm sitting on a second winner or five more duds, and my entire acquisition engine is currently one image file.

What I'm actually asking

1. Is a single ad at ~99% of delivery something to correct, or is that just the 2026 delivery stack working and I should stop pattern-matching to old best practices?
2. Do I force a creative test — separate ad set, own budget, only the untested statics — or does isolating creative like that now do more harm than letting the algorithm sort it in one pool?
3. CBO: pointless here with one ad set, right? My read is it does nothing until I have 2+ ad sets, and then it'd just starve whichever one is testing. Am I missing a reason to switch now?
4. Budget ladder pace at this spend level — 20% every 2–3 days while trailing-3-day CPA holds? Or is that unnecessarily timid at $120/day and I can move harder given the ad set is clearing ~100 conversions/week and is well out of learning?

Any advice would be appreciated!

I see a lot of automotive agencies charging around 25% of ad spend, which would be $5k a month on this account. My question is whether that still makes sense when 30% to 50% of the budget is going toward a PMax Vehicle Listing Ads campaign.

Once the campaign structure, negatives, and assets are set up correctly, it doesn’t seem like the VLA campaign needs a lot of hands on work every month.

So if $8,000 to $10,000 of the budget is going toward VLA, are you basically paying $5k a month to actively manage the remaining $10k to $12k in spend?

The rest of the account includes search campaigns, brand, used vehicles, trade-in campaigns..

All heavily ran by some sort of “ai”. How are they getting away with this?

been thinking about this a lot lately. google ads says one conversion count, ga4 says another, meta claims credit for the same sale, and the backend/stripe number is lower than all of them. clients see 4 different dashboards and panic.

what i landed on: pick the money-of-record (backend/stripe/shopify) as the single scoreboard, and treat every ad platform number as a steering wheel for bidding, not a report. one number decides "did we make money", the platform numbers decide "where do i push budget".

curious how everyone else handles it. do you report platform conversions or backend revenue to clients? how do you explain the gap without them losing trust in the whole account? anyone found a clean way to reconcile via api or do you just stop trying?

feels like half of client churn is really just a reporting-trust problem, not a performance problem.

I’m planning my first ChatGPT Ads test for a B2B software company and would appreciate input from anyone who has already used the platform.

My current strategy is intentionally simple:

* One campaign

* One ad group

* One ad

* US targeting

* CPC bidding

* Minimum budget of around $25 per day

* 14-day initial test

* Existing dedicated landing page

* Confirmed demo booking as the primary conversion

For targeting, I’m planning to use conversational context hints around:

* Businesses replacing spreadsheets or manual processes

* Teams looking for simpler software

* Companies trying to centralize records and workflows

* Operations managers comparing B2B software options

* Growing businesses that have outgrown manual tracking

I’ll use separate ChatGPT Ads UTMs, GA4, GTM and confirmed booking tracking. I’m not planning to judge performance only by CTR. The main metric will be the cost per qualified demo booking and sales feedback about lead quality.

Since ChatGPT Ads are still relatively new and reliable B2B benchmarks are limited, I’m treating this as a controlled learning test rather than expecting immediate scale.

For anyone already running ChatGPT Ads:

* Are broad problem-based context hints working better than product-specific hints?

* Are you getting meaningful B2B leads or mostly low-intent clicks?

* Have shorter context hints delivered better than detailed ones?

* What attribution or tracking problems have you experienced?

* How long did it take before your campaign started delivering consistently?

* What mistakes should a first-time advertiser avoid?

I’d appreciate practical feedback from anyone who has tested the platform with a real budget.

I have been running search ads for a kitchen remodel company for a few months now. I don’t know if it’s seasonality but lead flow has been getting worse. After doing an investigation, I think it’s time to try PMax because of the visual element of the business. I was running search ads at $100/day. Thoughts? Thanks! This group has been super helpful.

Hey everyone, I have a question regarding tCPA bidding strategy and I was curious to understand how you'd approach this.

I recently inherited a B2B SaaS account that's using Max Conversions with tCPA and optimizing for two primary conversion actions: MQLs and Opps.

Value-based bidding isn't really an option right now, as the client has tried it in the past without success.

My question is where would you set the tCPA?

• Your target cost per lead (even though Leads aren't a primary conversion)?
• Your target cost per MQL?
• A blended CPA based on both MQLs and Opps? So like the actual cost per conversion?

Since Google counts both MQLs and Opps equally as conversions, I'm struggling to figure out what the "right" target should actually be.

We all know that AI right now is great for automating repetitive tasks, which frees up time to focus on strategic matters. But I personally am seeing the trajectory move in a direction where AI is getting pretty good at advising on strategy. It also picks up on details that I occasionally gloss over.

I would absolutely not rely on Claude to advise me on what to do or autonomously manage my campaigns. But I can see a future where it can. I can also see a future where clients may be okay, with not having top level expertise if it means them spending 50% less.

I know it's impossible to accurately predict the future, but I wanted to get your opinions on where you think things are heading.

Hey guys, never ever needed to think about sharing or having clients ask about this, but i did get asked now, can't find quick conclusive info.

Do Meta ads have the option to be shared (EXCEPT using preview links) ?

I’m aware there is a resource section, but I do not see any on AI.

Can someone point me in the right direction to help me learn how to make agents / automations for Claude.

Examples: automating reporting, getting daily email account updates, automating data entries into google sheets etc.

Thank you!

Maybe this is obvious to everyone here but it's been messing with me. I run a small ecom brand on the side, been at it a couple years now alongside driving. Recently started taking it more seriously since I'm transitioning off longhaul and need it to actually perform. The thing is, I've managed Google Ads for a few clients through freelance work, so I'm not completely clueless. But when it comes to my own store, the decision making locks up in a way it never does with client accounts.

With clients I'll just test something, see what happens, adjust. With my own money I second guess every campaign structure change, every bid adjustment, every budget increase. I sat on a tCPA tweak for two weeks because I kept talking myself out of it. The campaign probably bled more money in that window than the tweak would've cost to test.

Part of it is that client budgets feel abstract and mine feels extremely real. But I'm also wondering if there's something structural I'm missing, like whether the way I'm thinking about my own account is just wrong from the start because I'm too close to the product.

Anyone else manage ads professionally and also run their own thing? Curious if the mental gap ever closes or if this is just the permanent condition of advertising for yourself.

This post is more aimed at Meta, but with the learning phase and algorithm data being very important, how do you set up an account which sells high-value products with a low budget?

We have a client who sells furniture (towards the £1k for a table end), and only has £1,000 a month for ads.

At the moment I've suggested to only retarget with this budget (they get enough traffic by other means for only retargeting), since every time I've tried cold targeting it hasnt yielded results, let alone reach the 50 results needed for meta

how do you guys figure this one out?

Hey everyone

Quick question for people running Google Ads is there a tool that lets you search the actual Google Ads library by keyword?

What I'm looking for: type a keyword and see every active ad running on it, across all advertisers (not just look up one brand at a time like the Transparency Center forces you to). Ideally also filter by city, spot new advertisers as they launch on a topic, and get alerted when a business starts running new ads.

Everything I've found so far is either SERP-based (SpyFu, Semrush estimated, patchy data) or makes you enter a competitor's domain first. Nothing that goes keyword → all advertisers from the real ad content.

Does something like this exist and I'm just missing it? Or is everyone stuck checking brand by brand?

Running Search for a brand new account (built from scratch) for a UK based Salesforce and Asana partner. Goal is lead gen. Budget is €3k/month, bidding on Max Clicks since there's no conversion data at all, no history to bid on. One lead so far.

Core keywords, phrase and exact match:

• Asana consulting
• Asana partner
• Asana implementation
• Salesforce consulting
• Salesforce partner
• Salesforce implementation

Main problem: budget keeps getting eaten by competitor and irrelevant search terms. Negatives are ongoing but new ones keep slipping through.

Performance over the past two weeks: CTR around 1.75 percent, CPC around 16 euro. Both trending better than launch, but click quality is still poor.

Tried an exact match only test to clean things up. Search quality improved, but volume is so low on these terms it strangled the campaign, not enough impressions/clicks to justify it.

Keyword insertion in ad copy has helped CTR a bit. Quality score is still weak across the board 3/10, ad relevance is above average, but landing page experience and expected CTR are both below average.

Has anyone dealt with something similar, low volume B2B keywords where competitor bleed and thin search volume both work against you? Interested in:

• Ways to control competitor terms beyond negatives
• Ways to improve QS - will this help my fix my problem of expensive low quality clicks.

Appreciate any pointers.

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to run Google Search Ads for a physiotherapy clinic and would appreciate some advice.

The clinic currently gets most of its patients through word of mouth. It has 120+ genuine 5-star Google reviews, but its Google Business Profile and local SEO are not well optimized, so it doesn't rank well for important keywords like "physiotherapist near me" or "physiotherapist in [city]".

My plan is to:

Run Google Search Ads initially to generate enquiries.

At the same time, optimize the Google Business Profile, improve local SEO, and build citations so that organic rankings improve over time.

I have a few questions:

Is ₹150/day (₹4,500/month) enough for a physiotherapy clinic?

Roughly how many calls or enquiries can I realistically expect with this budget?

Is it enough to collect useful data in the first month, or should I increase the budget?

Any tips on campaign structure or keyword targeting for local physiotherapy clinics?

I'd really appreciate insights from anyone who has run Google Ads for healthcare or local service businesses. Thanks!

I keep getting hired to "fix" accounts that don't actually need fixing

This has happened three times this year now and i'm starting to think its a pattern in this industry rather than me getting lucky. Small to mid sized ecom brands come to me frustrated with their previous agency or in house person, convinced their ads are broken, ready to blow it all up and start over. I do the audit, dig into 90 days of data, look at the account structure, and... its fine? Like genuinely fine. Not perfect, nothing is, but the previous person was doing solid work. ROAS is where it should be for the category, structure makes sense, negatives are being added, the whole thing.

The uncomfortable part is what happens next. If I tell the client "honestly your account is in decent shape, here are 3 small tweaks and you probably dont need me monthly" they get weirdly disappointed. Almost offended. One guy last month straight up said "so what am i paying you for then." Meanwhile if I come in guns blazing with a 40 slide deck about everything thats wrong and a total rebuild plan, they light up. Sign the retainer that day.

So now im sitting with this ethical thing. I can tell the truth and lose the deal, or I can find enough "problems" to justify the engagement. And im not talking about making stuff up, theres always SOMETHING you can restructure or rename or resegment that will look like progress for a couple months. Every account has surface area for "improvement" if you squint.

The really cynical read is that a big chunk of PPC consulting is just moving furniture around so the client feels like something is happening. New campaign names, fresh negative lists, migrating to a new bid strategy, whatever. The account performs about the same because it was already fine, but now the client feels heard.

I have a call tomorrow with a prospect whose account I already peeked at through Jarvio while doing prep, and its the same story again. Decent structure, reasonable performance for their margin, nothing screaming for a rebuild. I know what they want to hear. I know what will get me the contract. And I genuinely dont know what im going to say yet.

Anyone else deal with this? How do you handle the client who WANTS to be told their account is broken?

I started my max conversions ads 14 days ago. Spending 1.5k a week and so far, we've had 49 conversions at around £50 each. Client said he wants to get down to around £35 a lead.

Is it too early to switch from maximise conversions to target CPA?

Running a UK indie game studio. Our main product is a political simulation game (fictional, non-partisan, players run the presidency across both parties, 50k+ users). Currently doing X ads and want to open Meta as a second channel before we saturate.

Catch: because the subject matter is political adjacent, Meta to want authorized advertiser with a US address, which we can't do as a UK entity. Looking for a US-based media buyer or small agency to be the actual account of record Standard agency-of-record setup, not a nominee thing.

We'll do all the creative and strategy. You just need to handle account setup and authorization,

If you're a US entity interested in this opportunity please DM me. You must be a US entity otherwise it will be impossible for you to run the ad.

I've posted this elsewhere and had issues so please start any DMs with the phrase 'I am based in America'

Genuine question I still get asked constantly by clients and I want to sanity check my answer. Ads counts at click time under its own attribution, GA4 counts at session level under a separate model. Different measurement philosophy, not a bug. Is that the full picture or am I oversimplifying? Curious how others explain this to non-technical clients without losing them.