Looking to hear from others currently running campaigns on ChatGPT.

We have, in recent weeks, gained access to OpenAI Ads. Our company has put a small amount of dollars towards testing the platform.

Following roughly the same sentiment we would follow on other platforms, we are running with Page Viewed conversions as our Conversion goal (just for now as we see the quality of traffic being sent over).

However, only 70.2% of clicks get recorded as a Page Viewed conversion. I figure this would be misclicks or people who couldn't load the page and gave up - fine.

The more concerning part to me is the variance of Page Viewed Conversions to GA4 metrics between each ad group we are testing (all one campaign with same tracking parameters).

Ad Group A has GA4 reporting at 97.2% of what Open AI is reporting for Conversions (Awesome!), Ad Group B shows 63.5% representation, and Ad Group C only records at 39%.

I have QA'd all ads using a Pixel Helper to ensure that the Page Viewed conversion is firing, and it is indeed correctly attributing on my tests.

Is anyone else experiencing such discrepancies? Let me know your experience so far.

We're looking at using popular Hollywood memes among others in our reddit ads. Anyone done this and know if it's kosher? Or does Reddit take it down immediately?

I've been getting this flag recently across all of my accounts in August and was wondering who else is getting them? When I try to view more information about the limited delivery, it doesn't recommend any new keywords, any expansion, it doesn't even recommend broad match (not that I would turn it on).
Are we actually limited or not and is there anything you have found to help this issue?
I've done a lot more keyword research and added some for volume, but still don't understand why I've never seen this flag until recently. It's just odd, since it's not being limited by budget or anything else notable. Lmk what you think!

On Microsoft ads, I have tons of bot sites named syndicated search partners basically stealing money from me. Everyone who clicks from these “websites” are obviously not interested via clarity, it it seems they don’t even know why they got on the website.

Can I just completely turn it off?? Or does Microsoft just require you to let them steal money from you.

I don’t want any syndicated search partners, all I want is sites and select traffic.

I already went thru the grueling process of turning off audience network via support- another scam, but is this just Microsoft spitting in my face?

I know you can add website exclusions, but I have and new names keep popping up. Like why in the everliving fck does Microsoft do this man

Hi all, I am an early-career Google Ads specialist at an agency and wanted to know whether people still use seasonality adjustments in the age of automated bidding?
The team used them during BFCM last year and saw huge success in our campaigns. I have never used them personally. I was thinking about testing using them for Labor Day and just saying the day before, of, and after Labor Day anticipate a 3% increase in CVR... does this seem wise?
That % is based on YoY data, not just a number out of pocket.

I am uncertain on using them thought after the tROAS update and how much it affects that.

Do you use seasonality adjustments during big sales like this? Labor Day, Memorial Day, BF, CM, etc?

Hi Team,

I am working through a Performance Max Shopping campaign and it seems that the information provided by the Google Merchant Center has been completely pushed aside for the Performance Max's AI capabilities. The Product Ads are not going to the Products' landing pages, but landing pages that AI believes is best. The Product Ads are not utilizing the image from the Google Merchant Center, but the images provided within the asset itself.

I'd like to make sure that the Product Ad I'm providing utilizes the image, landing page, and information provided by Google Merchant Center. Is this attainable? Has anyone done anything to make sure they are providing the right information? Thanks!

I'm paid specialist in an agency with around 20 accounts to manage that has a mix of Google, Bing and Meta. While I understand the required depth in the business and numbers to manage the account, I feel very overwhelmed to manage all accounts, attending so many weekly meetings and managing direct client communications. I always have some things or other miss out on strategy. Plus a lot of other moving parts in my personal life such as two kids under 5, side hustle and more.

How are agency specialists in this sub are keeping up with the workload efficiently?

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for some advice from people with real experience running Meta Ads for e-commerce.

I've been running campaigns for my store and I'm trying to understand what I'm doing wrong. The campaigns are spending, but the reach, CPM, CTR and overall delivery are significantly worse than what I've seen in previous campaigns.

I've already gone through the basic troubleshooting and I'm looking for someone who can take a look at the campaign structure, targeting and performance data and help me identify what could be causing the issue.

I'm not looking for someone to manage my account or a generic “hire an agency” answer. I mainly want an experienced second opinion on the data and strategy.

If anyone here has experience troubleshooting Meta Ads for e-commerce and is willing to take a look, I'd really appreciate it.

I run a one-man garage door repair business in the Atlanta area. I handle the calls, scheduling and jobs myself.
I’m considering spending $50/day—about $1,500/month—on Google Search Ads targeting a small 15-20mile area.
For other owner-operators:
What daily budget works for you?
What’s your average cost per qualified lead and booked job?
How many jobs are you getting per week?
Is $50/day enough, or should I start higher?
Are you running Search Ads, LSA, or both?
I’m looking for real numbers from garage-door or similar home-service businesses, not agency sales pitches.

Client is a VAR that resells Computer Aided Manufacturing software for CNC machining. One campaign. AI Max on for one week, then I shut it off. Nothing else changed in that time.

The campaign was targeting the name of the software they sell

Week with AI Max on: 955 distinct search queries. 72% of reported spend went to stuff that had nothing to do with the product.

Some of what it bought:

• anderson europe gmbh (German woodworking machinery company)
• houfek a s (Czech woodworking machinery company)
• free cam software for cnc
• cnc software free download full version
• autocad software

Week after turning it off: 30 distinct queries. Every one of them had the software name in it. Nothing to block.

tCPA was on the whole time and there were a couple hundred negatives already on the campaign. Didn't matter. You can't write a negative for "anderson europe gmbh" before you've seen it show up.

Couple things if you want to pick at it: Google only shows about half the actual spend in search terms so those percentages are of what's reported. And I dumped a bunch of negatives on the campaign partway through that second week, though the queries in those last two days look the same as the first five.

AI Max is such a waste of money. Every time I test it the results are the same, just so much irrelevant traffic.

Recently started TikTok ads for my client, received 50 conversions on TikTok in August, but when looking at GA4, a big fat 0 conversions.

We are also running Meta and Google ads, could GA4 be attributing the conversions to other channels (assuming people don't make the purchase via the TikTok app)?

Weirdly, we're also getting a similar problem with Meta where it only says 10 conversions on GA4, compared to 600 on Meta.

Anyone got any ideas?

Hi Redittors

Is anyone else having this issue with Google Ads Passkeys when trying to create a new ad account or client campaign?

After I click 'I am not a robot', it normally popups up to verify myself by a Google Phone Prompt and selecting one of three matching numbers. However, after doing that it, this time it prompts me to create a passkey which I have already have many setup on multiple devices.

I did remove the windows hello fingerprint passkey I was successfully using for the last 12 months or so to see if a new windows hello fingerprint passkey would solve the issue, and every time it asks me to 'approve' the new passkey, which I do, but then takes me to a scan a QR code which never works on any device - just hangs trying to connect with another device.

I have tried other admin MCC logins with same result, and a 2nd computer also.

Any ideas?

Sorry for the long post, but I am extremely worried about my job

I run Google Ads for a website design and development agency in the UK, and I'm trying to figure out what happened to the campaign. I have not done anything other than adding negatives that should be negatives and changing TCPA.

This is the performance I've had:

Campaign 1 – Manual CPC

Feb 2025 — $1,751 / 7 conv / $7.58 CPC / $250 CPA
Mar 2025 — $1,600 / 7 conv / $12.70 CPC / $229 CPA
Apr 2025 — $2,745 / 11 conv / $11.68 CPC / $250 CPA
May 1–21 — $907 / 4 conv / $11.93 CPC / $227 CPA

Then I switched it to Target CPA.

Campaign 1 – Target CPA

May 22–31 — $1,162 / 6 conv / $7.45 CPC / $194 CPA
Jun 2025 — $1,830 / 8 conv / $10.70 CPC / $229 CPA
Jul — $4,682 / 23 conv / $11.83 CPC / $204 CPA
Aug — $2,546 / 17 conv / $11.02 CPC / $150 CPA
Sep — $9,327 / 45 conv / $13.03 CPC / $207 CPA
Oct — $8,611 / 47 conv / $13.93 CPC / $183 CPA
Nov — $4,901 / 21 conv / $14.01 CPC / $233 CPA
Dec — $4,099 / 18 conv / $18.55 CPC / $228 CPA
Jan 2026 — $7,179 / 29 conv / $15.37 CPC / $248 CPA
Feb 17–28 — $3,159 / 13 conv / $16.99 CPC / $243 CPA

Then I duplicated the campaign.

Copy of Campaign 1 – Target CPA

Mar 2026 — $10,086 / 49 conv / $15.96 CPC / $206 CPA
Apr — $7,180 / 35 conv / $15.78 CPC / $205 CPA
May — $6,620 / 29 conv / $16.63 CPC / $228 CPA
Jun — $8,315 / 33 conv / $18.16 CPC / $252 CPA
Jul — $6,443 / 28 conv / $17.27 CPC / $230 CPA
Aug — $5,028 / 16 conv / $18.49 CPC / $314 CPA

My CPA is getting worse, and if I lower the TCPA I am not getting interactions.

August was particularly bad at $314 per conversion.

I'm still getting conversions, so it's not like the campaign suddenly stopped working. But the cost of getting those conversions is worrying, and I am afraid I might lose this job. Tomorrow is a new month, and I want it to start on a good note, or I am in deep trouble

Even the quality of the conversions has declined, even though I am feeding it offline conversion data. The quality score of the keywords is the same as before

If you were looking at this account, what would you check first?

Would you try to bring CPC down, even if that meant getting fewer conversions, or would you leave CPC alone and focus on improving the conversion rate/quality of the traffic?

And would you keep working on the existing campaign or consider rebuilding it?

I'd appreciate any honest opinions from people who have managed similar lead-gen campaigns.

Hi Guys,

Need some advice, as the title says my account got compromised after I was going through business bank account this morning and saw an unusually high charge.

Logged into the account to find some filthy bastards had loaded 5-6 scam campaigns with $1k + daily budgets.

Immediately called Microsoft and did the password change etc added MFA on top of my email code and they have set the account to inactive while they investigate.

We have been with Microsoft Ads for at least 4 years and never had an issue until this.

Needless to say I changed banking and other major account passwords.

My bank wants to reverse the payment but I’m worried this will crush the account indefinitely.

So should I let them finish the investigation first and hope for a refund? (They said 5-10 business days to “investigate”) while I sweat it out.

Thanks!

Hello, my site FB fan page were complain tome about my site not working etc, one of them show me one of pop-up pages redirect him to these spammy google search results to they click on the first one, I ignore that complain first though it may be left over code from CloudFlare cache from previous pop-ups i use before, today i use 4g proxy check my site on google after i click on my-site link it immediately redirect me to their ads--

I didn't know or notice this behavior before today I trusted them and the cheated me and cause my site to lose ranking on google FK these cheaters

Hi everyone, I (30f) have been doing ppc since 2016. I started off at an agency as a junior and worked my way up to PPC Strategist for 3.5 years and then landing my first remote job. Since then I have worked for 2 agencies and one in-house ppc job.

In my previous job I was a PPC team lead and I had a lot of flexibility with regards to creating the creatives for meta, working with the dev team to create landing pages that are optimised for PPC and conversions.

I started to feel like I didn’t have anyone to spin ideas off or learn from because a lot of the team were juniors.

Anyways, in June an agency owner reached out to me on LinkedIn and asked if I would be interested in some part time work. I did the intro interview, the technical interview and an assignment and got the role.

While I was working for this company part time, I was also working for my previous role. ( both employers were aware of this)

Within the first week of working part time for this company, they offered me a full time role. However I had to give my previous role 1 month notice to wrap up and handover the accounts first. So I spent the next month working part time, and closing off my contract with previous employer. The month went really smoothly and the agency consistently told me they were very happy with my work. I was assisting them with reporting, campaign set ups and a couple of clients calls to walk the clients through their campaign performance.

When the month was over, I started full time and left my previous job. Then things suddenly changed drastically. I was given a new set of accounts that were under a white label partnership with this agency that consisted of 2 sales people outsourcing ppc accounts. On my first day, I was given a walk through of the accounts and then warned several times by my colleague and manager that the white label clients were extremely tricky to deal with and that their expectations had to be managed carefully because they were sales people.

Each week, we would have a meeting with the white label agency to go over the accounts and from the get go, I could tell there was a significant amount of tension on the calls.

The calls became something I would dread every week, sometimes they would be multiple times per week. In addition to that, every day I would get questions from them with very aggressive tones suggesting that there were issues with the accounts that were being missed. I tried my best to audit each account and ensure all the conversion tracking was set up, campaign structures were set up well etc.

If there was a slight dip for a day in one of the campaigns, we would have to get on a call or I would have to write a long detailed explanation as to why there was a dip in results. On top of this, a lot of the clients were seasonal accounts (AC, grass installation, outdoor lighting) which had hit their peak in summer and were now normalising. The one campaign in the AC account had a 102x ROAS during peak summer and eventually slowed down to a 69x ROAS. The other agency could not fathom the dip in results due to seasonal demand dying down and kicked up a huge fuss. They ended the contract and were unhappy with the results. Right after that, I was let go from my company because of the fact that they lost the white label partnership.

I feel extremely deflated and depressed as not only have I been let go, which is the first time for me. But, I am being blamed for the agency losing a white label partnership of about 11 accounts.

My confidence has been knocked drastically and I feel so deflated and afraid to apply for new positions now that this has tainted my resume.

I'm having a serious problem with Google Merchant, and I'm honestly on my last legs here. Out of nowhere, my Merchant account was flagged as Misrepresentation. We run a small, family-owned furniture business (https://www.dkohome.cl), that's big enough to have it's own Ads and Merchant account.

On mid August, we got blocked. No reason was given. Just misrepresentation. Our team started working on what it might be, checked multiple guides, we found some outdated things within our return policies (a warehouse that had an old address, no legal person posted in the website), and sent out an appeal.

It was rejected.

We started going hard at the fix again, added a whole new section in our footer with legal info, contact info on the first page and updated ALL of our legal and return policies. We updated our store info in Merchant as well, so everything would say the same, even up to the same punctuations.

It was rejected again, no reason given, just rejected after a manual review. 

I'm now on cooldown, and I'm scared. A third denial might block us. Our website is not outdated, our offer is modern, and we don't lie. We don't claim to be number one, we don't say things that aren't true. We've ran out of guides, checklists and even an MCP connected to both my APIs and Merchant/Google MCPs connected to Claude say everything's fine. But this same "fine" got rejected twice.

Is there any way to know what exactly is making my appeals to be rejected? We seriously don't know what to do. The only communication are either Emails that send automatic replies and there's no option to ask to an actual person.

Please help, I'm scared and frustrated. I don't know what I should do. 

My worry with billboards is the channel gets credit for demand that was already converting through search and social. Last touch won't tell me anything useful, and a before and after read gets muddied by seasonality. What I want is a real incrementality test, holdout markets or a geo split. Has anyone structured that properly for out of home, and what did the read look like?

Running a DTC skincare brand, and we hired an agency last month to build our affiliate program from zero. New account on a network, they handled publisher recruitment and setup.

Program's been live 5 weeks. One sale attributed to an affiliate the whole time, and it was a self-referral from someone clearly chasing the signup bonus.

Commission budget is $1.5k a month, set on the agency's advice based on "industry benchmarks."

Stuff that's bugging me:

1. Our brand name is misspelled in two coupon listings they personally approved, on sites with decent traffic.
   
2. A job-board site somehow got approved as a publisher and is generating clicks. Not conversions.
   
3. Roughly a third of budget is going to one cashback platform. Lots of clicks, almost no add-to-carts.
   
4. Asked why so much traffic was routed there. Answer was average session time looked good. Not sales.
   
5. Every time conversions come up they blame tracking on our end, but we've fixed everything flagged and nothing's moved.
   
6. The account manager's weekly emails read like one AI pass with the numbers swapped in, same three sentences every time.
   

I ended up checking some of this myself in Admitad's dashboard, just to see raw click-to-order per publisher since I didn't fully trust what was being sent over. Numbers matched. We'd looked at CJ and Impact.com before picking this network too, for context.

Is this just what month one normally looks like, or is this the point where I start asking harder questions.

Day 1: $37 CPM, 1,884 impressions (fast and cheap delivery of impressions - what I was thinking was normal)
Day 2: $87 CPM, 386 impressions (first sale)
Day 3: $91 CPM, 603 impressions
Day 4: trending $118+, barely any delivery

USA broad audience geo. Purchase campaign. Adv+ placements. Pets product.

From day 2 onwards delivery of impressions became slow - like it was pacing them out - knowing it was going to be fewer and more expensive impressions.

The trajectory is completely wrong. Day 1 felt promising, now it’s getting more expensive every day. And it creates this impossible chicken-and-egg situation - you need conversions to bring CPMs down, but you can’t get conversions when CPMs are so high that $50/day barely buys any impressions.

Page converts above average when traffic actually arrives. The problem isn’t the product or the creative. It’s that delivery is getting slower and more expensive by the day.

Most people talking about “new pixel” launches - were you running on an established BM/ad account? Or everything brand new from scratch?

For anyone who’s genuinely started with all three layers cold - did this stabilise? How long did it take? Or is this just broken?

I've been noticing on a lot of my accounts, that somehow by default, the avg cpc column is unchecked. I didn't do it since I am VERY interested in what my cost per clicks are so I always annoyingly have to go back in to modify columns and check avg cpc. Is there a reason google is "hiding" this from me? Does this happen to anyone else? The only thing I can think of is they want us to hyper focus on cost per conversion or ROAS or something else as cost per clicks have been going up up up. On a similar vein, can't they just cut cost per click? Or has revenue dropped so much with AI stealing traffic and data that they feel they have no choice?

But I digress.

Anyway, thoughts?

We were reviewing a lead gen account where Google Ads looked healthy enough. Conversions were coming through, CPL was fairly steady, but sales kept saying the lead quality had dropped.

We checked the campaigns first, but nothing really explained the gap.

It only started making sense when we compared the Google Ads conversions with the CRM.

Every form submission was being counted as the same primary conversion, whether it became a qualified lead, went nowhere, or was just poor quality.

At that point, Smart Bidding wasn’t really the issue. The signal was.

The harder question is what you do next.

If you have plenty of form submissions but only a small number of qualified leads, do you keep the higher volume signal, or switch to qualified and offline conversions even if Google has much less data to work with?

How are people here handling that trade-off in lead gen accounts?

Running paid for a mid-size ecom brand. Monthly spend is healthy, creative team is good, and I am still leaving money on the table because of something completely unglamorous.
We can produce a new ad concept in two days. We can get a matching landing page live in eleven to fourteen. So every test we run is either a good ad pointed at a generic page, or a good ad that waits two weeks.

The eleven to fourteen days is not anyone being slow. It is a brief, a design queue, a dev ticket, a QA pass and a deploy window. Every step is "reasonable". The sum is absurd relative to the thing being produced, which is one page with a headline, some copy, three images and a form...

What this does to the account is worse than it sounds. It means we systematically under test the page and over test the ad, because one is cheap to change and the other is not, so we have very well optimised ads pointing at pages nobody has ever iterated on.

For people running similar spend, how did you get page velocity up. Did you build a template system, take it in house, something else.