What's The Best practice to promote an app with Google Ads

Hello everyone,

I'm a paid media manager working at an industrial MRO distributor.

I recently joined the company and found that the Google Ads account is structured with a single Search campaign containing 11 ad groups, where each ad group represents a different product category (bearings, belts, hoses, etc.). The monthly budget is around $5–6k.

The issue is that while this setup works, it really limits our ability to scale. My sales director wants me to allocate more budget to specific product categories, but with the current structure I don't have enough control to do that effectively.

Right now, the bidding strategy is Maximize Conversions, and it's generating around 300–400 conversions per month.

My question is: if I split these product categories into separate campaigns, should I keep using the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy for the new campaigns?

Just came across Google's latest announcement, and this feels like a pretty big change.

Google is gradually retiring standalone Display campaigns and moving everything into Demand Gen.

Here's the timeline:

• May 2026: Google recommends creating Demand Gen campaigns instead of Display.
• January 2027: You won't be able to create new Display campaigns.
• Later in 2027: Existing Display campaigns will be migrated automatically.

Google says this will bring more inventory (Discover, Maps), better creative options, and improved reporting. They're even claiming 24% lower CPA and 19% higher conversions in one case study.

I'm curious how this will play out in the real world. Display has always been great for placement control and specific targeting, while Demand Gen leans much more on automation.

What do you think? Is this a genuine improvement or just another push toward Google's AI-driven campaigns?

Looking for advice from anyone who's navigated a Google Ads account lockout after a security incident.

Short version: my account was compromised about a month ago (unauthorized campaign created, admin access stripped). I reported it immediately and have been through support hell since - 7+ case numbers, one rep who promised a response in 3-4 business days and then went silent for two weeks, phone/chat support that just transfers and disconnects.

The kicker: internal case notes I've seen state the account "was restored after a security investigation." I still can't access it at all.

The actual blocker seems to be a bug in their Account Access Request Form - the Customer ID field is a dropdown that only shows accounts your current login can already see. Since my access was stripped, my real account never shows up, only a brand new empty shell account that Google auto-generates every time I log in while locked out (I've seen this happen more than once, different empty CID each time).

I've submitted ownership verification exactly as instructed (domain TXT file method) and flagged this dropdown issue explicitly in the request, but nothing's moved.

Has anyone actually gotten through this specific scenario, restored-but-inaccessible, form can't reference the real account? What finally worked? At this point I'm not looking for money back, just to get back into an account I legitimately own.

please help..

I run a small business in Australia that provides branded gifts and products primarily to business customers (think promotional products, but a bit more upmarket). Have had some success in the past with niche campaigns, but due to market dynamics demand in those spaces has dwindled. Looking to set up a more sustainable always-on approach and struggling, would love thoughts.

$270/day across 2 search campaigns. Quote-based business so conversions are offline uploads: a hard "quote request" (a few a month, valued) plus a micro conversion for engaged leads (about 1-2/day, small values, uploaded server side). Conversion tracking is in place and verified.

Max Clicks worked at launch. CPCs $2-4, CTR 8-11%. But it happily buys any click that matches, so a large chunk of spend goes to weak/B2C intent even behind 300 negatives.

Switched to Max Conversions and it flatlined. Under 30 impressions a day, campaigns fully eligible, ads approved, keywords fine. Added a tCPA anchor ($150-250) and serving came back, but impression share sat at 10-22% with 80-90% lost to rank, then Google flagged all campaigns budget constrained while only spending half the budget. Removed the targets on the theory the bidder would spend to budget. Flatlined again within a day.

So: with targets it barely serves, without targets it doesn't serve at all, and Max Clicks serves plenty but low quality, usually outside ICP. We've reverted to Max Clicks with slightly higher CPC caps and adding bulk negatives while our micro conversion accumulates, planning to try Max Conversion Value once we have 15-30 valued conversions per month.

Questions:

1. Is the "budget constrained but underspending" behaviour on tCPA a common thing? It seems like the pacer suppresses auction entry rather than spending.
2. Has anyone found a bidding state between "buys junk" and "won't serve" at 5-10 conversions a week?

Thoughts welcome - seems we're a bit stuck between google needing more signals to run smart bidding, and the only method to give it signals providing poor ones.

Instead of depending on Google Ads I am planning to l launch Google Ads Retargeting campaigns.

In retargeting I am planning to retarget the audience of my competitors “product page” or “add to cart” page.

Need more insight if anyone use this retargeting strategy.

I recently did a bulk change to about 15k SKUs product type. About 4K of them have change to the new product type in merchant centre but the remaining 11k have stayed at the old product type.

It has been 48 hours without anymore updating and I’m wondering if this something that may be stuck?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Google Ads August 17 update: the Bid Target Adjustment Tool completely messed up the campaign and put it into bid strategy learning.

What happened was I opened the Bid Target Adjustment Tool to check what options I have for my shopping campaign regarding the upcoming August 17 change. It was originally set to tROAS, but I clicked on "maximize conversion value" from the drop-down menu. Well, I shouldn't have done that because it automatically saved the change.

Even though I didn't click the save button afterward (the done button).

And after that, it put a campaign that is more than half a year old - and shouldn't be in learning mode anymore - straight into learning mode.

What are my options?

I reverted it to the original settings in the change history using the undo button, but the learning mode label stayed on it.

im getting a decent amount of clicks but i dont have my google business profile verfied and i dont have any reviews yet. only 4 of the clicks ended up being lead forums, 2 ended up booking jobs. I know i have to either fix my landing page, or get my google business profile verified and get some reviews to improve my odds of a forms fill out but i still feel like i might be spending to much for pressure washing ads. any help would be greatly appreciated

I have some campaigns currently on Max Conversion bidding strategy. How will the August 17th Google ads update will impact to this type of campaign? or will it only impacting campaigns with tCPA or tROAS only?

I received this today. Does anyone have any idea of this. How to do that for my Shopify website?

How do you feel about the August 17th Google ads update to how CPA & tROAS will work?

Many of our competitors have 24 hours listed and they probably are not. Does Google verify it?

I have an ongoing issue with WooCommerce and Google Merchant Center - we are syncing our products with GMC using the official Google for WooCommere plugin which apparently uses the Content API to sync product information.

This is all working except for there constantly being 5-15 products in our 1000+ product catalogue that are marked as dissapproved in google merchante center -> products -> needs attention due this error: "Product page unavailable"

This is very frustrating because often it's some of our top performing products being disallowed. Now we have never been able to reproduce this issue and it rotates between product / not always the same products. I have never been able to catch an actually unavailable product page as these pages are perfectly accesible on my machine always.

However google seems to constantly be flagging a fraction of my catalogue as unavailable which is beyond frustrating as it affects our ad performance and sales through them. What I have to do is almost daily go into merchant center and manually request a website check - after which it will say that all the issues are resolved or maybe 1-2 remaining products are still saying "Page unavailable" however then quickly after a couple of hours the unavailable product pages start creeping up again until the next 12 hour reset and I can manually check again.

This seems to be some very frustrating technical issue with their crawler maybe timing out or who knows what - but whats most frustrating is the lack of accountability from google merchant team when trying to raise this issue.

Also there is simply no way to debug or reproduce this issue to see what is triggering the crawler to flag a page as unavailable - as google does not provide logs or diagnostics for these pages being unavailable. I just can't see a way to raise this issue and escalate it with google ads/merchant center to finally resolve it once and for all. Our xwf Google Stratagist just says they can't help with anything at all Merchant Center - and the chat is a joke.

​

I want to learn google ads and work with it, i study economy at the college, can be a good part time work ? I am planning of do some courses this summer. How much can i earn with it? ( for me 600 euro at month would be good)

Hi, I am Khushal, solo founder of Vivaahli (a simple marriage biodata maker website)

- I initially created 3 events (start biodata, start checkout, purchase) and assigned them to respective categories in "Sales" section of "Goals" tab
- Since each category requires one primary action, I made all 3 as primary and gave the rest two (apart from purchase) value of 1
- Now it worked fine except the reporting was messed up as those 1 unit actions were being counted
- So I made the rest two secondary actions, upon which the dashboard says "Action misconfigured" it apparently needs one primary action per category, so I shifted both into purchase
- Since the volume I get is extremely low, and google ads entered a learning phase and with almost no purchases, and no other primary actions the ads didn't run well
- So I decided to make "begin checkout" primary as well, and Google recommends giving primary actions some value so I again gave it a value of 1
- Now my traffic is optimised for people who all come all the way to checkout, begin it but do not complete payments :((((
- So confused as to what is the best way forward here

I’m about to give up on Google Ads and my business.
I recently started an e-commerce business and launched my Google Ads campaign on 28 June. I started getting impressions and clicks the same day, and I had my first conversion the following day. My daily budget of $50 was being fully utilised, and I was making a sale every two to three days.

Unfortunately, my impressions and clicks have dropped significantly, and Google is no longer spending my full daily budget. For the past two days, it has only spent around $31 out of my $50 budget. I also haven't had a single sale in the past 7 days, whereas I was previously getting one every few days.

I'm using Smart Bidding with Maximize Clicks. The only recent change I made was updating my conversion tracking to count purchases only. Previously, it was also tracking actions such as Add to Cart and other engagement events, so I changed my conversion goal to completed purchases only.

Other than that, I can't remember making any significant changes that would have affected the campaign.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Is this normal after only 20 days of campaign data? Could Google still be in the learning phase, or is there something else I should be looking into?

I'm honestly feeling discouraged and am close to giving up on Google Ads. Any advice or insights would be greatly appreciated.

We are an automotive paint supplier that has recently listed our spray cans online. We custom make these cans to OEM paint codes.

Currently we have 15,000 different codes uploaded.
I originally ran a Pmax campaign. It worked well for about 4 days and then completely died. (Partly my fault I didn’t have dynamic conversion value set up. So it thought every conversion was worth $1)

Tried running another and got heaps of traffic but no conversions at all. I also tried a google shopping ad but haven’t seen anything.

I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction for the best way to run ads for something like this where there is so many different items.

Secondly what is a good starting budget?
1 can sells for $33 but we had several sales in the first campaign for over $250

Should we just be directly people to our website and setting them up to search their paint code from there?

Thanks in advance

Hi All. I got into this issue because I wanted to limit my exposure to YouTube network for my app campaigns. I removed all videos from it to see how it would shift but I noticed it started doing impressions on YT again a day later. I could not find anywhere in the UI what was being shown.

Only after using their AI chat tool it eventually gave me some unlisted YT video links like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OKjocrVWRA

Again, this was not visible anywhere in the UI. App Campaigns do not have an option to disable this either apparently. I contacted support and they told me it's a great feature but if I don't want it to run I can add my own content and then it probably won't run at all or nearly. They also said if I really didn't like it they can make my Account Manager contact me within 72 hours to talk to me about turning it off. I don't know who my Account Manager is but no one contacted me, even after a couple times I complained about it, it's been basically a month.

Does anyone know if there's any way to turn it off? I eventually added my own content and I don't think these are generated anymore (not that I would see that anywhere) but it's really terrible how little control a user has within an App Campaign..

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to launch my first Google Ads Search campaign for a local B2B signage and banner printing business in Texas. Since I have a limited test budget, I want to make sure my strategy is airtight before I hit "publish".

I would really appreciate your expert eyes on this structure:

The Core Strategy & Value Prop

Instead of just competing on "cheap printing," our angle is Business Visibility. We are targeting local SMEs (cafes, auto shops, clinics, retail) who are struggling to get foot traffic. Our promise is to help them get noticed with complete storefront packages, not just selling them a single piece of vinyl.

Landing Page & Conversion Setup

Above the Fold: A clear form offering a "Free Signage & Visibility Consultation".

Quick Contact: A floating WhatsApp button for instant B2B chats.

Tracking: Both the form submission (redirects to a Thank You page) and WhatsApp clicks are tracked as primary conversions via GTM and GA4.

Speed: Page loads in under 3 seconds on mobile.

Campaign Settings & Budget

Network: Search Network ONLY (Display network disabled).

Goal: Lead Generation.

Budget: $15/day (Test budget).

Schedule (The Golden Hours): Running Monday - Friday, 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (targeting business owners during working hours).

Bidding Strategy: Maximize Clicks with a Bid Cap of $5.50. (Keyword Planner shows top of page bids for our niche range from $6 to $9. I capped it to avoid blowing the daily budget on 1-2 clicks).

Campaign Structure (3 Ad Groups)

AG 1 (Vinyl Banners): Keywords like custom banner printing, business banners and signs, 2x8 vinyl banner (Exact & Phrase match).

AG 2 (Advertising Flags): Keywords like custom feather flag, advertising flags for business.

AG 3 (Trade Show Displays): Keywords like custom retractable banner, roll up banner printing.

Negative Keywords List: cheap, vistaprint, amazon, welcome home (to filter out B2C and low-intent traffic), plus names of big box office supply stores.

Ad Copy (RSAs)

Using the state abbreviation TX in headlines for local trust (e.g., Custom Banner Printing TX, Complete Storefront Packages TX).

Focusing descriptions on our offers: Free project planning, brand launch packages, and fast turnaround.

Advanced / Extras

Location Assets: Linked to Google Business Profile to show our local address.

Retargeting: Setting up audiences in GA4 to capture cookies for future retargeting once we have more data.

My Questions for you:

Does the Maximize Clicks + Bid Cap strategy make sense for this daily budget, or will Google throttle my ads too much?

Is there any obvious B2B Negative Keyword category I might have missed?

Any other red flags in this setup?

Thank you in advance for your time and feedback!

Hi All,

The account that I ran used to have a very mature campaign that was consistently bringing in leads for the business at a conversion rate of +- 4%.

I made a mistake in April by decreasing bids on specific days and that killed volume but kept a decent conversion rate. I tried a few things to get volume back but nothing seemed to work so I decided to duplicate the campaign and with that reset learnings.

The first month of running this campaign the conversion rate and volume were the same as it used to be but now in the second month, the conversion rate has dropped to 2%. When I look at the search terms the conversion rate on my "total: search terms" is fine. About 4%. But then when I look at "Total: other search terms". That's where the conversions is less than 1%. This used to be at +-4% as well. Sometimes doing even better than the "total:search terms"

I do have to mention that I also decreased the budget on this account. The bid strategy max. conversions and I get about +-20 conversions a month. I used to get +- 40 with the mature campaign.

First: Does the drop in conversion rate in "Total: other search terms" show that the algorithm is not understanding who will convert? I feel like this part of the search terms report is more algorithm based than the search terms that are shown (?)

I have a 2 hypothesis but I am not sure whether/which are valid:

1. The drop in conversion rate in "total: other search terms" shows that the algorithm is not optimized and this is caused by not having enough conversions.

2. After the bid adjustments in April the account as a whole has taken a hit and is not recovering as it should.

#google #googlemarketinglive #googleads #googleai

Are AI-driven ads actually reliable? Why do the keywords recommended to me always seem so broad and unreliable? I suppose the AI ​​still needs a long time to learn.

I run an exterior cleaning company and would like to market with ads but I’m not sure what I should do between google ads or meta ads. Was wondering what people in here have experienced with and which one fits better for service based business

Why is google so annoying and always mix things up and aglomerate all kind of settings, i remember it when it was clean and easy ..

I added 1 campaign and it totally screw me over, it linked all my 6 property each other, so all websites was sharing data

So campaign goal was linked to all my others analytics tags....

Does anyone encounter this....

I removed all code, from the website and removed the campaigns, but why it linked all does anybody knows? I think there's glitches as they try to implement too much Ai everywhere....

I probably made a mistake somewhere, but I'm certain that when I first set up the campaign and tags, I never assigned multiple properties to the same tag.

Because of that, I ended up with hundreds of 404 errors. My book website was receiving traffic for pages that never existed because Google was somehow sending visitors to URLs that belonged to a completely different property, like my car website.

At the same time, all of my other properties suddenly showed almost no traffic, even though I hadn't touched the Analytics code on any of them. So how can a Google tag mess things up this badly? That's the part I still don't understand.

And I didn't use AI - im talking when I enabled campaign AI max

Hey everyone,

I am setting up my first Google Ads Search campaign for a bookkeeping client (a friend of mine) in Australia and would appreciate some advice from people who have managed local service campaigns with a similar budget.

The client has submitted their business documents for advertiser verification. Google says the review may take three to five business days. Is that a normal timeframe for a new account, and is that even necessary? Like should I have just gone with Individual account rather than Business?

Here is the campaign setup.

* Budget is A$50 per day

* One Search campaign with one ad group

* Brisbane and the Gold Coast are the only target locations

* Other states have been excluded

* Search Partners and Display traffic are disabled for the initial launch

* A dedicated bookkeeping landing page is being used

* The only Primary conversion is a completed consultation form

* The form, server response, GA4 lead event and direct Google Ads conversion tag have all been tested successfully

* Account level and campaign level negative keyword lists are in place

* The campaign uses exact match only

These are the eight keywords:

[bookkeeper brisbane]

[bookkeeping services brisbane]

[bookkeeping services gold coast]

[bookkeeper gold coast]

[bookkeeper near me]

[bookkeeping services near me]

[bookkeeper for small business near me]

[bookkeeping service near me]

My thinking is that the near me searches show very direct hiring intent. I am less certain whether I should give the city based service keywords the same priority with such a small budget.

Would you launch all eight together, or would you pause or bid lower on `[bookkeeping services brisbane]` and `[bookkeeping services gold coast]` until the stronger near me terms have collected data? I understand that the city terms still have commercial intent, so I do not want to remove useful traffic before the campaign has even started.

The other decision is bidding. Keyword Planner shows low range top of page bids beginning around A$6, while some high range estimates are close to A$40. With only A$50 per day, one expensive click could use most of the budget.

Would you start this with Manual CPC, Maximise Clicks with a maximum CPC limit, or Maximise Conversions even though the account has no conversion history?

If you would use Manual CPC or a Maximise Clicks limit, what initial maximum CPC would you test for this market?

I am mainly looking for the reasoning behind your recommendation and what you would monitor during the first couple of weeks. Thanks.