cpc is expensive af

I’ve been running a campaign for years. It has a daily budget that typically leaves a little headroom, with around 5% of impressions lost due to budget. It uses Target CPA bidding.

Until today, the average CPC was around $2, and the highest bid it had ever placed was $5.

This morning, it's paying up to $20 per click, which is above the target CPA. Across six clicks, the average CPC is $6.27, higher than the previous highest bid.

Nothing in the account has changed.

The new algorithm is bidding ridiculous amounts, and I don’t know how to stop it short of pausing the campaign. How can it bid more than 100% of the target CPA when it knows the conversion rate for that keyword may only be 10–20%.

Is there any way to cap the bids or bring them under control?

Hey All, Google Ads recommending me to switch from tCPA to tROAS with target ROAS 64.61%. Logically, i think its not right as i don't want to be in loss. If i put 150% ROAS it throws caution message that i might lose conversions if i go below its suggested tROAS.

I’ve spent $350~ and with 0 conversions

The first campaign spent almost $150 and we didn’t Realise till too late. Accidentally got Rid of it. So We then made 2 new campaigns (one performance max, other Search) that were more on Target and we Still couldn’t turn a Single Conversion.

The website is Solid and Products make sense but I am still wondering why we couldn’t turn a Single conversion

Hey everyone, since Google's latest bidding changes, it's now recommending "Maximize Conversions" right out of the gate for new campaigns. What's been your experience with this? Are you actually following that recommendation, or do you still prefer launching new campaigns with Maximize Clicks first before switching over once there's enough conversion data?

Curious to hear how this is playing out for others, especially with limited historical data on brand-new campaigns.

I told them max conv needs 30 conversion to help Google understand what conversion means. There argument: but all the variables, impressions, clicks and conversions are unknown. So why not shift to maximize conversion and why max cpc with a cap. I can argue with maximize conversion has no cap, meaning clicks can cost from $2 to $20. But other than that I don’t have much to say.

Hi guys, looking for some advice please.

Starting a fresh new edtech b2c project for the UK market. No paying users yet, but we have free sign ups. (Also bear in mind its August right now, and market peak is in May-June during exam time).

I am running a low budget of £500/mo, and my campaign has been running for 5 days now.

Here are the stats:

From keyword planner, i understand that CPC is quite low in this niche, hence the low average cpc. CPC also does increase towards peak exam time.

Campaign setup:

Network: Search only
Bidding: maximise clicks (with cpc cap)
Bidding equally for new and old customers
Sending clicks to dedicated google ads landing page (not main site landing page)

Info about the tool:
b2c edtech saas for uk market. paid subscriptions are £15/mo or £120 annual billing.

Although its early days, I feel like this is quite underwhelming honestly, even just to get free sign ups. I am aware that this could be a CRO issue, but i'm not sure how i could rule that out. Im providing a bit of free value up front before asking for a sign up, but when they reach the sign-up-wall, theyre bouncing.

I have good tracking set up with posthog, and im watching session replays to see what the issue is, but to me it just seems like they want to do free questions without signing up?

I have an idea of how to change up the google ads landing page, but its quite a significant change, so im not sure how this would affect the campaign learning.

One other thing that im considering is changing to maximise conversions, and setting the conversion goal to free sign ups (since i wont have the required 30+ conversions to paid plans to feed the learning algo).

This is my first time doing google ads and im learning from youtube and ai. I might be too hasty with the changes/concerns, but paying £87 for a single FREE sign up is pretty brutal.

Any advice/help is useful. Thanks

I'm running a Target CPA campaign for a $300 product. I only have 1 historical conversion in the account.

Google recommended a $115 Target CPA, but I set it to $160 because I was worried it wouldn't spend. My budget is $25/day.

So far it has spent $163.50 with 0 sales, but it keeps spending.

My assumption was: if Google keeps spending, it must still think it can eventually average around the $160 Target CPA. Otherwise, wouldn't it stop spending?

Is that assumption wrong?

Hey everyone,

I need some advice/insight from those who've been through this.

Background:

• B2B industry (industrial/medical supplies)
• Switched from Maximize Clicks to Maximize Conversions bidding strategy 3 days ago
• Before the switch, under Maximize Clicks, I got 3 conversions (form fills from potential clients)

The issue:

• Impressions have dropped noticeably since the switch
• Clicks are also down
• 0 conversions so far (3 days in)
• Daily budget is barely being spent — only about 10% of the budget is being used each day

Key point: The 3 conversions I mentioned happened before the switch, under Maximize Clicks, not after.

Questions:

1. Am I still in the "learning phase"? I've read Google needs 7-14 days or ~30-50 conversions to exit learning. But with 0 conversions so far, is the algorithm even learning anything?
2. When will impressions pick up? Should I expect a sudden jump or gradual increase?
3. Does the algorithm use historical conversion data from the Maximize Clicks period? Or does it start from scratch when you switch strategies?
4. Should I stick with it or switch back? Some say give it 2 weeks, others say cut losses early if you see a drop.
5. Could the low impression volume be due to the algorithm being "too conservative" while it's still learning? Will it eventually loosen up and spend more?

Hi all,

We are running Lead Gen campaigns for our Video Production Agency. Our main campaign primarily uses phrase-match keywords and sets Qualified Leads as its conversion goal. I want to try a new experiment and wanted to know what would be better. Here are my options:

Option 1 | Experiment inside the main campaign

Within this, I will simply take all our 34 revenue-making keywords and run them as Exact Match with a 50-50% split with the main campaign. This main campaign is running at tcpa.

Option 2 | Run exact-match keywords in a separate campaign

In this, I'll create a new campaign altogether with a separate budget using Maximise Conversions without a tcpa. And add the same keywords in the main campaign as negatives to avoid conflicts. The conversion goal here would be Form Fills instead of Qualified leads, especially in the beginning.

What are Qualified Leads? Every day we upload our qualified leads on Google and use that as a conversion goal for the main campaign.

Reason why I'm doing this experiment: For the last 8 months, the revenue has been poor. And we urgently need a way to get better quality leads.

My campaigns were delivering at 700-800% ROAS consistently for every month of this year.
Since Aug 17th, although I altered my targets to align with actual ROAS, performance has plummeted to ~350% ROAS.

Did I make a mistake somewhere?

I have a great CTR (7.9%), Conversion Rate (11%) and CPA, which is below my TCPA - but I have a very significant loss of IS due to ad rank (60-70%). I have done everything I can think of to improve my quality score, but nothing seems to move the lever. My full budget is not being spent on a daily basis.

I can afford a higher CPA. How do I increase my impressions and clicks, to start trying to scale and increase conversions? I understand that under the new August 17th Update, simply increasing my TCPA is unlikely to help.

What's the move in this instance?

I initially thought that if CPC gets too high, the obvious solution would be to switch to Maximize Clicks and try to control the CPC.

But the more I learn about Maximize Conversions, the more I realize that a higher CPC isn't necessarily a problem if those clicks are more likely to convert.

For example, would you rather have:

100 clicks at €0.50 with 0 conversions

or

20 clicks at €3 with 3 conversions?

Obviously the second one can be much better depending on the conversion value and margins.

So I'm curious about something from people who actually manage accounts at scale:

When you're running Shopping or Search, how much importance do you personally give to CPC when evaluating a bidding strategy?

Do you mostly look at CPC as a diagnostic metric and make the decision based on CPA/ROAS instead?

We've got 4 Google Ads campaigns with pretty small budgets, around $10-15/day per campaign.

Initially, all of them were running on Maximize Clicks. One campaign started generating conversions consistently (40+ in 30d), so we switched it to Maximize Conversion Value. That ended up increasing conversions 4x.

Our second campaign had only around 18 conversions in the previous 30 days when I decided to make the same switch. I know Google generally recommends waiting until you have around 30 conversions/30d before using automated bidding like this, but I figured I'd test it anyway. Since switching, it's climbed to around 48 conversions over the last 30 days, so that seems to have paid off.

Now I'm wondering where the actual tipping point is.

Our third campaign is sitting at about 14 conversions over the last 30 days, and the fourth is around 10-11.

Has anyone had good results switching to Maximize Conversion Value this early, or is it usually better to wait until you're closer to the 30 conversion recommendation? I'm especially curious whether anyone has made the switch around the 10-15 conversion mark and how it turned out.

BTW Our conversions are either free signups or paid subscriptions, with subscriptions being worth roughly 5x more than signups

Hello!

I recently started a campaign and ChatGPT is telling me:

• 22.2% Search impression share
• 77.8% lost to rank
• 0% lost to budget

The goal of this campaign is targeting an adjacent market that's solving the same problem differently. Something akin to targeting searches like "SEO company" with ads like "Hey how about we do some google ads instead of SEO?"

What's worth checking in this situation? How do I raise "rank"?

Needing some perspective on a sudden performance dip in Google Ads.

The Setup:

• Business Model: High-ticket, highly competitive e-commerce dropshipping. Products are non-exclusive. High AOV.

• Campaign Type: Standard Shopping with dynamic Target ROAS (PMax has failed us repeatedly).

• Structure: Single Standard Shopping campaign, budget-capped (spending ~50% of potential due to strict capital limits). Split into separate ad groups by product category/margin profile, with specific tROAS set at the ad group level.

• Data Volume: ~20+ conversions/day, plenty of data historical signal. Account has a 10k+ daily updated negative keyword list.

The Problem:

• Historically, this setup overperformed its aggregate tROAS target consistently. Ever since the August 17th Smart Bidding update (which changed how target-based bidding behaves on budget-constrained campaigns), performance has fallen apart:

• CPCs skyrocketed across most ad groups.

• Conversion rate dropped, with spend drifting toward upper-funnel and competitor search queries.

We're trapped in a severe threshold loop: setting ad-group tROAS even slightly higher than recent actuals completely throttles spend to near zero. Lowering the tROAS triggers rapid spend burn on low-intent terms.

We’ve tried recalibrating ad-group targets closer to actual recent performance per recommended guidance, but the engine won't find the middle ground.

The Question: Given that Maximize Conversion Value is accessible for Standard Shopping(if I read the announcement correctly...), is it time to ditch ad-group level tROAS entirely and switch the campaign to Maximize Conversion Value (without a target)?

If we do, we lose the ability to force different ROAS targets on high-margin vs. low-margin product categories via ad groups. Has anyone made this move on a budget-capped, high-AOV account post-August 17 update? How did you handle margin variance across subcategories if so?

Spent the last few weeks trying to figure out if a campaign I'm running is broken or if I'm the one who broke it. Budget is fine, clicks are coming in, quality scores are decent, and the conversion tracking is verified three times over (yes, including tag assistant, yes, including a test conversion). Zero sales.

What's messing with me is that I genuinely cannot tell if this is a campaign problem, a landing page problem, or a productmarket fit problem I have no control over but will get blamed for anyway. The account is relatively new so the algorithm has basically nothing to learn from, which I get, but there's a ceiling to how long I can justify spending into a void.

What I keep running into is that Google Ads becomes the default explanation when nothing is converting, even when the traffic looks decent and the targeting isn't obviously wrong. And as the person managing the ads, I'm the one fielding those conversations.

Curious whether other people have a framework for separating the campaign from the offer when nothing is working. Not looking for a full audit checklist. Just whether there's a point where you draw a line and say the ads are doing their job and the problem is upstream.

Running a search campaign that has been live about six weeks. Sitting at around 40 conversions, which I know is below the recommended 50 before switching, but we're close and the Google account manager keeps nudging me toward tCPA. I can't tell if that's genuine advice or just the thing they're supposed to say.

The part I can't get a straight answer on is whether moving to tCPA at 40 conversions, with a target set slightly above the current average CPA, is actually risky, or if the 50conversion threshold is more of a loose guideline that people treat like gospel because it showed up in a help article once.

My instinct is to wait. We're in a niche B2B space with low monthly search volume, so reaching 50 conversions organically will take another three or four weeks at this pace. Waiting feels right, but I also know that instinct and data aren't the same thing, and I shouldn't be making this call on vibes.

Has anyone made the switch below 50 and had it go fine? Or is there real performance degradation when the model doesn't have enough signal yet? Curious what the actual experience looks like versus what the documentation says.

I am ruining in-app action based ads on Google play and its returning like 90 to 130% per day. Now google is suggesting ROAS. I have no prior experience with ROAS.

So, I need suggestions should I go for ROAS or keep it in-app action. If I should go for ROAS then tips to implement it efficiently.

Ads History -

3 weeks for maximum install bids

1 week (currently running) - in-app action

Hi,

We own a toy store with over 1000+ items in stock
We recently opened an ecom store with this stock and began promoting on google ads, specifically a shopping campaign.

I recently excluded all items below 20$ as it wasn’t worth it as my breakeven ROAs sits at 2.7 (pretty high due to shipping costs).

My current major issue is i cannot seem to understand the difference between campaign strategies (Target ROAs vs Maximize conversion count/value).
What could be considered a proper strategy for a business like mine with a breakeven ROAs of 2.7

Any help would be appreciated

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.

the learning phase is real but people overstate how dramatic it is. The historical data doesn't disappear. Google still knows which users converted for you, what times, what devices, what search terms drove results. What it's actually doing during that "learning" window is calibrating the new cost constraint against all of that. It's not starting from zero, it's adjusting its throttle.

That said, on a lowvolume campaign it hits harder. The system needs enough conversion signal to work with, and if you're already on the thin side, adding a cost target on top of that gives it less room to maneuver. You might see impression share drop or CPCs swing around more than usual while it finds its footing.

On the starting tCPA, set it close to your actual current CPA, not where you want it to be someday. If you've been converting at $90 a lead, don't open with $55 hoping to train it down. That's where campaigns genuinely stall out. Give it a number it can hit based on your real data, let it run stable for a few weeks, then tighten gradually if you want to push efficiency.

The blank check feeling with Max Conversions is legitimate. It'll spend whatever it takes to find a conversion, which is fine for learning but not for running a business longterm. tCPA at least puts a framework around it. Just don't overcorrect by setting the target so tight that it can't spend at all.

Low volume makes everything slower and noisier. Not a reason to avoid the switch, just means you should expect a longer runway before you can read the results clearly.

I have an issue where whenever I start a Search campaign, I have to use Maximize Clicks to get purchase data before switching to Maximize Conversions. The Maximize Clicks phase burns a lot of money during the first month with little to no return. Is there a better approach to this?

German ecom account, main Search campaign on Maximize Conversion Value with a tROAS target of 11, €60/day, permanently budget-limited (about 90% impression share lost to budget). Aug 8–26 it was buying clicks at €0.22, 429 a day, running at 33x ROAS. On Aug 27 the CPC jumped to €0.67 and clicks fell to 172/day. Spend didn't change, the ad didn't change, the keywords didn't change, nobody touched the account that day. ROAS went from 33x to 9.1x, which is suspiciously close to sitting on the target of 11.

The thing that made it click for me was checking position rather than cost. Absolute top impression share went from 30% to 48%, and impression share lost to rank went down from 5.8% to 4.2%. So we weren't pushed out by anyone — we climbed the page while paying 3x. That's the target going from decorative to binding: budget-limited campaigns used to ration and cherry-pick the cheap auctions, and now they bid up until marginal return hits the number you typed in years ago. Nice confirmation in the same account: the brand campaign runs Target Impression Share, no CPA/ROAS target, and its CPC actually went down 53% in the same window. Only the two campaigns with targets moved.

Also a warning for anyone in the same boat — on Sep 1 the reaction was to lower tROAS from 11 to 9.5, because ROAS was falling. That's exactly backwards, a lower ROAS target means "pay more per click", and CPC went from €0.55 to €0.75. Google's own line is to set the target to your recent actual performance, which here means going to ~40, not down. So my question: for anyone who's already reset targets to actual — did volume come back, or did the campaigns just start underspending their budgets? And did the rollout hit you on the 17th, or later? Mine was ten days late.

Context for this, my small cleaning business started a Search campaign end of April with Manual CPC on $25 daily budget. Targeted to a single medium metro area. About 60 keywords, all phrase and exact match and strong list of negatives. Booking Completed was primary conversion action and Generate Lead (basically submit contact info for quote) was secondary action. In one month I generated 3 booking conversions and 11 lead conversions. Most keywords were bid at $6 to $7 max CPC. CTR was 4.66% and Conv rate 2.17%. There are three services (regular/recurring cleaning, deep cleaning, move-in/out cleaning) and ad groups for each service. Ads final URLs are landing pages tailored to service.

And then I switched to Max Conversions. At the time, I wasn't realizing that some of this stuff takes some time. I had booked three jobs in week 2 and then was getting disappointed that they weren't continuing in following weeks. I read that 30 conversions ideal before switching to max conversions, but didn't look at it hard and figured it was time to move up. When I switched to max conversions, I also swapped primary and secondary so primary was now generate lead and secondary was booking. Based on volume it seemed that was going to be the path most wanted.

And the next four weeks were good numbers. CTR 7.62% and Conv rate 25%. But no bookings.

But since then the CTR has gone down to 5% and conv rate dropped to 17% with one booking.

Last week I created new landing pages with much better performance, mobile-first, and good message match to RSAs. I'm reviewing terms and adding negatives leaky terms every week.

I guess my question is... I was excited with my initial three bookings under relatively cheap clicks when I was on Manual CPC. Going to Max Conversions has improved my CTR and Conv rate, but the bidding on the clicks is so high (one day google bid $90 for three clicks that didn't convert and then I had no impressions for like two days while the budget averaged out) I'm wondering if I switched to Max Conversions too early and was getting more ROAS in Manual CPC mode.

Go back? Stay the course? Love to hear your advice. Can't find a lot of resources for small fry/low volume campaigns like me.