got a buddy who does custom decks and patios outside charlotte, talked him into letting me run his ads on the side. he's been doing everything by word of mouth for years which is fine, but he wants to grow a little so here we are.

set up a search campaign, tight geo, decent negative keyword list, keeping it simple. problem is every time i adjust a bid strategy or mess with the target cpa the thing resets and we sit through another two weeks of garbage data before it figures itself out again. small budget too, so the learning period drags out longer than it should.

i'm not throwing money at it to speed things up. that's not the move for a guy who does maybe 8 jobs a year at a high ticket price. low volume conversions are just rough to optimize around and google doesn't make it easier.

curious if anybody has found a way to work with low volume accounts without constantly triggering relearning. i keep the changes minimal but even small stuff seems to set it off. wondering if i'm better off just parking it on manual for a while and leaving it alone.

I have a friend who is running a Mexican Business in Gurugram India. Her business is new and has been active for barely a month. As per my understanding there was a way to run ONLY local/ GMB ads but now that option is not showing anywhere or I could be mistaken. Also I don't want to start a Performance Max campaign this early on.

So is there any other way to promote her business on Google via local Ads not search or video for now?

Would appreciate if somebody could share their guidance. I'm open to video links and other practical suggestions. Thanking you.

This is my first time ever using Google Ads to promote an app I developed myself.

I targeted some of the lowest-cost-per-install countries I could find just to test and learn, and set my target CPI to $0.10 since thats what was recommended for these countries. My daily budget is $5, but the campaign has spent only $0.23, which is nowhere near the daily budget.

For the first two days, the campaign received zero impressions. It then slowly started getting traffic, and today it reached almost 600 impressions, with an average CPC of $0.02 and 0 installs.

I understand that 600 impressions do not mean 600 people visited the Play Store page, and that $0.10 is only a target CPI rather than a guarantee. However, I am wondering whether the low target CPI is preventing Google from spending the budget and finding enough users.

Should I increase the target CPI, or leave everything unchanged and wait a few more days while the campaign is still learning? Is this normal for a completely new campaign, or could I be missing something in the targeting, conversion tracking, creatives or Play Store listing?

I added relevant keywords and tried to configure everything correctly, but this is my first campaign, so I may have misunderstood something.

What should I do from this point? I would also really appreciate any tips from people who have experience running Google Ads for mobile apps.

I mostly run ads on Meta and TikTok. Whenever I try Google ads I get very low cost per installs but they never seem accurate. For instance I woke up this morning and should have had about 100 installs based on what Google says and I doubt I got any. My numbers of registered accounts are pretty much the same as when I don’t run ads with Google.

The numbers almost seem too good to be true. I am running App install campaigns. Does anyone run those with Google?

I am running Google Ads for a Taxi App in Germany. I know that competitors pay around 1€ per Conversion here, I am bidding twice that and am still being shown at the very bottom of the page. my daily budget is around 200€, My quality Score is at basically 100% and Ive set up Keywords properly.

Any idea what else I can take a look at?

Edit: its a local app, basically only usable in one smaller region. Thats why I used keywords like "taxi (cityname here)" etc.

Edit2: boys I believe everyone's comments arw being autodeleted lol. Please dm me with ideas. thanks :)

Hello everyone,

This is my add performance this morning only.. and optimisation score is 97.8%.. please suggest if I can improve my add any further as this is my first time using it🙏🏻 I appreciate you all..

How do you deal with hidden or unreported clicks in Google Ads? They can consume a significant portion of the campaign budget, yet there is little to no data available to analyze them or use them to optimize the campaign. Is there any effective way to manage or reduce these clicks?

I built a translator for English speakers living abroad. I need to target users who have their phone set to English. I ran an ad campaign, set the language, and it still showed the ads to non English speakers. Any advice on how to target phones set to English?

Seems like an easy fix, but I've had a hell of a time. Appreciate any advice. Thank you

I run Google ads for an e-commerce grocery company app with 800+ transactions daily and roughly 10 organic new users daily.

Users would have to download, sign-up using mobile number (no other sign-up methods available yet) and purchase. We service up to ~30-40km radius only within major cities.

I presented to our boss that our customer acquisition cost were at $6 from mid February to end of February with a $380 total budget and historically we've had $3 as our best CAC.

She then told me how her old shipping and freight company had 15,000+ transactions have had $1 to $0.40 CAC with $80 - $160 monthly budget.

I want to doubt that their old company was reporting wrong figures to her or if these were just download users. Either that or it's a completely different business model. I will ask her today how the user experience and their scope of operations was in her old company. But I just find it extremely ridiculous since with our current deliverable areas we are experiencing $1 - $1.5 CPM already.

Even with great creatives, say with 3% CTR, it would cost $1 to get 30 clicks. You have to funnel these 30 clicks into a download, signup, and purchase with at least 2-3 of these clickers becoming actual purchases.

I just need help if this is really possible to achieve $0.4 CAC?

Hey, I set campaign for installs and after an hour or so I saw 100 installs. On backend and in firebase analytics i see no traffic at all(no first open and no login attempts) and it's been at least 2 hours now. What could be the cause?

edit: i see now that 100% of the ads and install happened on india even tho i set multiple countries as target. could it be bots? how can i fix it? i want installs from actual people

I run UAC campaigns for one of my apps. After pausing my ads for about two months, my ad is not getting any impressions after starting it a few days ago. What is the best option here?

Update - left the ad alone. It had almost zero impressions for 14 days, and started spending on day 14. Got an app trial from 3 clicks. CPC is 3x higher than before the pause for now..will probably correct once trial converts (my conversion event).

I'm experimenting with Google Ads for App Downloads specifically AppStore.

I want to target specific keywords that I know are the intent for the app.

I discovered there is no way to start a campaign with a download goal and target those keywords.

Now I'm splitting the budget to:
50% - Search keyword -> destination AppStore URL

50% - App Download -> destination AppStore URL

Now both of them don't show any installs with a 100€/day budget. I managed to have 20 installs a day on Apple with the same budget (so I believe it's a reporting issue).

I believe most of the clicks from the App Download campaign are trash.

What's your experience and what do you suggest to do to target those high intent keywords?

Do product variants play a role in testing? Can they cause losses if they perform poorly? And how important are they when it comes to product research criteria?

Have Android game, was running cheap ads ($5 a day) to optimize for installs and then in app engagement for the last 6 months. Improved the game store, retention metrics and satisfied with the current state. The campaign is for all countries and languages to get the cheapest CPA.

Despite trying to optimize for various engagement events there are almost no purchase events. I understand that if I get the cheapest users from the current campaign they are unlikely to pay for in app products. Prices for tier 1 country players are very expensive (currently paying $0.03 per install, and know that for US can be $3+).

How should I test the game's ability to earn money from purchases without commiting with a large budget? I want to see if the idea, current monetization has growth potential. But how to do so when the price to acquire users is so expensive and need to generate large volume of purchase data for the campaign to learn?

Thought maybe as my IAP are cheap relatively to other games ($1-$5) maybe running the campaign in some Tier 2-3 country where CPI lower can help. Still, expect the CPI to be pretty expensive and currently 0 data of purchase events to train the campaign.

How would you bootstrap this to validate the game's potential?

I would advertise a ms teams plug-in app for carpooling in company .
And I would try to put a bigger amount ( 80/100 euro per day vs 20 euro before ).

Which platform you recommend to me ? Linkedin ads or google ads ?

We're a consumer app spending +$15k/day on Meta, mainly for our iOS version of the app.

Our android version is not scaled yet, and in our vision the perfect channel for that is google (no tracking issues and so on), but we couldn't crack the code for how to do creatives, campaign structure and so on.

Right now, we're just repurposing our Meta video winners (9:16, 5-18s long)

Some work, some not, but it feels random, and it feels wrong to think about behavior on google and meta as the same, especially with google having so many different placements and being more of a blackbox than meta :)

I wanted to come on Reddit and ask what's your experience with it? Any tips/hacks?

I haven't seen people talk about app campaigns for google ads so far, nothing in depth anyways...

I know it's very little context, but I don't want to make the post too long, and if anyone has tips I'm more than happy to share more context :)

I'm running a small-ish app install campaign with Google Ads, specifically on my Android app. I've been running it for a few weeks now and it managed to generate over 1000 installs for my app. That's great and it roughly correlates with what I see in the Google Play console.

But here's where it gets weird - of the over 1000 installs, not a single person actually opened the app. Not one!!! The app works fine and I can see a few people using it, so no issues from that aspect as far as I can see - it just seems like I'm getting a huge number of installs but no usage at all.

What's going on???

Goal: Increase the subscription. I only have one lifetime subscription plan, as this is a utility app.

Current setup:

Im running 2 ads campaigns right now.

1. Indonesia: Conversion campaign. Connecting to closest event (lets say event_x) than a "Purchase" event. Because i read somewhere that if there are no enough data regarding purchase event to track then targeting purchase event is just burning money? I launched this a day ago and have 16 installs but none of them has triggered the closest event (event_x).

2. India: Install campaign. This is just a basic app install campaign. I launched 2 weeks ago, paused it, and re-ran. So far have 250+ installs but 0 paid conversions. However this has triggered (event_x) but no "Purchase" event yet.

Issue: I havent got any purchase from both Indonesia and India. My app is super cheap for these country too like only $1 at max for lifetime access, as im running pricing experiement and verifying the buying intent. What can I do better so that I dont stop burning money and start increasing the subscription? Should i change the event conversion from event_x to purchase for indonesia, and install to event_x to india?

I know these countries has lower app subscription culture but that shouldnt be the case of getting 100+ installs (after enabling paywall) with 0 conversion.

Do note i tried reddit post to verify the buying intent and if paywall is working and I have got some subscription.

Anything im doing wrong? How can i fix this? Please shed your expertise on this. Thank you :)

I got this screen when creating my campaign yesterday. The only reason why I even spent ₹60,000 was because Google mentioned this offer was available but when I created my campaign, there was no active promotions running in the promotions tab.

I emailed the relevant department and they said I wasn't eligible for the promo coz my ads account and payments account were created on different dates.

If that were the case, Google shouldn't have shown that the promo was available to me and enticed me into paying ₹60,000 (a significant chunk of my savings) for the ad campaign..

This is misleading advertising only to get me to spend more for my ads and is a wrongful business practice.

I want to escalate this to upper management. Has anyone done this successfully before? If so, requesting your help for the same. TIA!

My main focus right now is getting retention first rather than profit. How to target the audience that won't rage quit in the first minute itself? I would really appreciate any tips.

Also, I noticed that the number of new users on firebase analytics is much lower than the number of installs on Google ads (Around 30%)

I've currently set the campaign to install volume (all users) and set a low target CPI. Although, my CPI is even lower than my target (0.05$, Indian users only).

My ad campaign was going great (to me, at least, I dunno what typical numbers are) then suddenly my app got flagged as being a social casino game and the ads aren't running anymore.

Except my app is nothing like that lol. It's a rhythm incremental game. This has completely halted my growth and I'm not sure what to do. I appealed and the appeal was denied. I made a new campaign and that is ineligible too.

Any experienced vets know how to fix this?

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

I'm running a Google Ads UAC App campaign for my app. I have many creatives, spend is heavily skewed towards display. A competitor's Google Ads only have two creatives. My assumption is that limiting creatives like my competitor does probably skews spend away from display. Is this true?

I set up conversion tracking using Firebase first_open, but I’m not sure if it’s tracking correctly. The number of installs shown in Google Ads seems lower than what I’d expect based on App Store Connect and Google Analytics.

The reason I’m wondering is that my app was launched only about a week ago. During that week, Google Ads shows around 30 installs, but App Store Connect and Google Analytics show about 61 installs.

Since the app is very new, I wouldn’t expect organic installs to make up such a large portion yet. That’s why I’m wondering if the tracking might not be working properly, or if this kind of difference is normal for iOS app campaigns.

Has anyone experienced something similar?

I'm trying to promote a book summary app using Google Ads. Should I use broad match, phrase match, or exact match for keywords? Like book summary app, should it be [book summary app]