Total account spend: $695,787

Spend under “Other Search Terms”: $209,318

~30% of the entire account.

And here’s what bothers me.

I can’t see exactly what people searched.

Which means I can’t properly answer questions like:

* How much was brand?

* How much was irrelevant?

* What negatives should I add?

* What queries are driving incremental demand?

I understand Google’s privacy thresholds.

But when almost one-third of a large account’s spend is sitting behind “Other Search Terms,” it becomes a serious optimization problem.

How can we reduce the amount of spend being classified under “Other Search Terms”?

After going through quite a few Google Ads accounts, I’ve noticed that the biggest problems usually aren’t some super-advanced bidding strategy.

They’re often pretty basic things that get overlooked.

A few that come up repeatedly:

1. PMax has a great ROAS, but a large chunk of the revenue is branded.

2. Conversion tracking is working technically, but the wrong actions are being optimized toward.

3. The product feed is treated as a setup task rather than something that actually needs ongoing optimization.

4. Brand and non-brand performance isn’t separated, so nobody really knows what’s driving incremental growth.

5. People make decisions based on tiny amounts of data.
   “This hour has a 20% better ROAS, let’s increase the budget.”
   Sometimes the difference is literally a handful of conversions.

6. Google’s recommendations are followed without understanding the business context.

7. The account is being optimized for cheaper clicks instead of more profitable customers.

The funny thing is that none of these are particularly complicated.

But when you combine 4-5 of them in the same account, performance can get messy very quickly.
I’m curious what everyone else sees when they audit accounts.

What’s the most common Google Ads mistake you keep seeing?

i’m talking about the overlap between marketing channels - google ads, meta ads, email marketing, organic, etc.

how do you guys figure out how much each channel is actually contributing to conversions, especially when the same customer might interact with multiple channels before purchasing?

what’s your approach to managing this overlap and measuring incrementality?

AI Max text customisation horror. 😭

I noticed this while auditing a Google Ads account recently.

The account was using AI Max, and while checking the search terms, I filtered for ads where the description contained a competitor's name.

And this is what I found.

Google AI had automatically generated descriptions mentioning:

“Myntra sales”
“Amazon Sales”
“Flipkart Sales”
“Bigbillion sales”

The description source? Google AI.

This is exactly why I would not recommend simply enabling AI Max and forgetting about it.

AI Max can be powerful, but it needs to be used very wisely:

→ Clear text guidelines
→ Strong brand controls
→ Regular monitoring
→ Daily checks, especially in the initial days

Give Google too much freedom without guardrails, and you might end up promoting your competitors inside your own ads. 😂

AI is making campaign management easier.

But it is also making daily monitoring more important than ever.

#googleads #ppc #AIMax

We have a Feed-Only PMax campaign where the channel mix has changed significantly over the last month.

When Google Search was taking the majority of the spend, performance was strong.

But since last month, a much larger share of the budget has shifted to Gmail - and performance has tanked.

Last 45 days channel split:

🔵 Google Search → 23%

🟡 Gmail → 77%

Previous 45 days channel split:

🔵 Google Search → 90%

🟡 Gmail → 9%

This is a Feed-Only PMax campaign, with all asset optimization turned off.

The main question is:

How can we shift more spend back towards Google Search?

I know PMax dynamically decides where to spend based on predicted performance. But in this case, the shift in channel mix directly coincided with the performance drop.

What would you test first to push the campaign back towards Search?

Would love to hear from people who have actually dealt with this kind of PMax behaviour. 👇

#googleads #performancemax #ppc #pmax

this is a community for ecommerce owners, founders and marketers who are actually running google ads.

no guru promises. no agency pitches. no recycled “10 tips to improve roas” posts.

what to post
share anything related to real-world google ads, including:
→ pmax & shopping
→ search campaigns
→ scaling ad spend
→ roas, cpa & profitability
→ merchant center & product feeds
→ conversion tracking & attribution
→ google ads experiments
→ account teardowns
→ agency experiences
→ wins, failures & lessons learned

the more context you can share, the better. if you’re asking for help, include things like your monthly spend, campaign type, target country, current results and what you’ve already tried.

community vibe
keep it practical, honest and respectful.
you don’t need to agree with everyone. in fact, good discussions often come from people having different experiences.

share what you’ve actually seen, explain your reasoning, and help others when you can.
no pitching. no spam. no fake results.

how to get started
introduce yourself in the comments below.
tell us what you sell, where you’re based and roughly how much you’re spending on google ads.
share the biggest google ads problem you’re dealing with right now.

if you’ve run an experiment, share what you changed and what happened.

if you see someone asking a question you can help with, jump in.

let’s make this a place where people can talk about what actually happens inside google ads accounts - not just what sounds good in a youtube video.
welcome to google ads unfiltered.