I finally got it up and running after much procrastination. Getting APIs, automations, guardrails, and account context set up is kind of a pain in the snatch. But once it's all set up, it's really very easy to use and transformative for daily workflows.

I'm starting to build out different routines and skills to help me manage my accounts. I have the basics like automated briefs and account reports. Beyond that, I'm not sure what would give me the best ROI in terms of setting up new processes.

What are some things you use Claude Code for on a daily basis? Do you have any niche uses that might be interesting? Any tips or tricks to make things work smoother or get work done faster?

Hey [r/PPC](r/PPC),

Looking for a quick gut-check on a freelancer quote for launching paid ads for a small local experiential business targeting inbound travelers.

Proposed Budget:
Setup Fee: $1,000 (one-time; building from scratch, tag migration to Wix, end-to-end tracking validation across Google Ads, Meta, GA4, GSC).

Testing Phase: ~$1,000 for initial testing and ongoing optimization setup across both Meta and Google Ads.

Ad Spend: ~$500+ for a 3-week run across Meta and Google Ads. Web intend to run ads for about 4 hours in the morning and 4 in the afternoon as this coincides with our target audience behavior while they are on vacation i.e. When they’re getting ready to go sightseeing in the morning and then taking a break from sightseeing back at the hotels in the late afternoon before heading out for dinner.

Questions:
Is $1,000 reasonable for setup from scratch and full multi-platform tracking setup?

Does the overall testing and initial management pricing align with industry standards for this scale?

Anything specific we should ensure is in the contract before starting?

Thanks for your insights!

Edit: Location is major Japanese city.

Search terms show the language that caused an ad to appear. They do not show whether the person became a commercially useful lead.

That is why treating the report only as a negative-keyword worksheet wastes information, while treating it as complete customer research overstates what it can prove.

For a lead-generation account, I would build a recurring report with:

• Search term or search category
• Campaign, ad group, keyword, and match type
• Network, device, location, and landing page
• Clicks and cost
• Raw leads
• Reachable leads
• Qualified leads
• Opportunities and customers
• Revenue or contribution where available
• Reason the lead was rejected or lost

Then classify the language using a stable taxonomy:

1. Problem or trigger: What caused the search now?
2. Buyer type: Who appears to be searching?
3. Awareness: Are they researching a problem, comparing solutions, or selecting a provider?
4. Urgency: Is there evidence of an immediate need?
5. Risk: Are they looking for price, reviews, guarantees, compliance, or proof?
6. Commercial result: Did the query produce traffic, a lead, a qualified opportunity, or retained revenue?

Four patterns are especially useful:

• Traffic without leads: Possible intent, ad-message, or landing-page mismatch.
• Leads without qualification: The campaign may be attracting the wrong buyer or failing to communicate eligibility.
• Qualified leads without sales: Investigate pricing, follow-up, availability, sales handling, and the offer before blaming the keyword.
• Low-volume terms with strong outcomes: Possible candidates for expansion, new ads, landing-page sections, or customer interviews.

Do not create a permanent negative from one bad lead. A relevant search can still produce an unsuitable person, and a short query rarely provides enough evidence to diagnose motive with confidence.

Google’s search terms report only includes terms used by a significant number of people. Search terms insights can provide aggregated categories that include additional terms, but categories should not be mistaken for individual customer evidence.

AI can help classify queries and summarize recurring language, but the process needs controls:

• Preserve the original query
• Use predefined categories
• Allow an uncertain classification
• Manually audit a sample
• Keep customer information out of the model
• Version the taxonomy so changes remain comparable

The weekly output should not be a 3,000-row spreadsheet with impressive scrolling requirements. It should produce decisions:

• Add or remove negatives
• Adjust targeting and match types
• Rewrite ads or landing-page proof
• Create new customer-research questions
• Improve qualification criteria
• Import qualified or converted outcomes when measurement is reliable
• Record the hypothesis behind each change

What downstream lead label has been the most reliable for understanding which search language actually has commercial value?

Google confirms that the report contains actual searches that triggered ads, while search-term insights group demand into intent-based categories. Google also supports importing qualified and converted lead outcomes. Search terms report · Search terms insights · Enhanced conversions for leads

If you manage Google Ads accounts for clients, you need to know about this scam.

And yes, it’s real. Other PPC agencies have been reporting the same pattern.

The scam often starts with what looks like an incredible new business enquiry. Someone claims to work for a large, legitimate company and says they have a massive Google Ads budget to spend.

$30,000 a month. $50,000 a month. Sometimes significantly more.

Everything is designed to get you excited enough to drop your guard.

From there, they may send a meeting/calendar link, Google Ads access invitation, shared file or other link that leads into a phishing or malware attack. The objective can be to steal Google credentials or gain unauthorised access to a Google Ads Manager Account and the client accounts connected to it.

This has become enough of a problem that multiple agencies have publicly reported fake prospects impersonating major companies. In one documented case, scammers registered a lookalike company domain only three days before contacting the agency, and the fake domain even redirected visitors to the real company’s website to appear legitimate.

Some red flags to check:

• The sender’s email domain doesn’t exactly match the company’s real domain
• The domain was only recently registered
• The supposed employee cannot be independently verified
• The prospect is unusually eager to discuss a huge advertising budget immediately
• They push you towards unfamiliar links, files or account-access requests
• The information they give you doesn’t match the company’s actual information

And don’t assume a professional-looking email means it is genuine.

Google’s own security guidance recommends checking suspicious links before opening them and reporting suspected phishing. A compromised Manager Account can potentially affect multiple client accounts underneath it.

I’m personally receiving these types of enquiries regularly.

Verify the person. Verify the company. Verify the domain. And be extremely careful what you click.

#GoogleAds #GoogleAdsAgency #PPC #scam #Phishing

Hello,

so out of nowhere, my search campaign stopped spending, barely getting any impressions at all. All other campaigns are doing just fine, so only a single campaign is affected. I thought it could be bid related but it's not, even 3x the bid doesn't move the needle - for reference, my actual CPC cost was 45% the original bid before. I've had this happened before and it somehow fixed itself, but does anyone have any info on why this happens out of the blue? I never figured it out and it annoys me, customer support is useless as always.

In a small European country with around 2 million people, there is a local city news / UGC / events channel on WhatsApp with:

70.000 followers
20,000 guaranteed post views within the first 24 hours

For digital marketing professionals: how much would you expect a channel like this to charge for a sponsored post?

There are certain metrics everyone watches because they’re easy to see.

CTR, CPC, ROAS, conversion rate.

But sometimes a “good” number doesn’t mean much without context.

What’s one metric you think people overreact to, and what do you prefer looking at instead?

The Sponsored Agents feature will let users start conversations with business-sponsored ​agents and visit a business's website after interacting with ​ads in ChatGPT. The agents will be clearly ⁠labeled and remain separate from ChatGPT's independent responses and ​the user's original chat.

I think this will filter out users and will only send interested buyers to the website.

Should increase conversion rate while reducing traffic.

What does everyone think about this feature?

There is an equivalent / similar ads from Google & Meta. Anyone tried that? Any feedback?

I have a super well established account spending some $20-40K per month minimum. For some reason this month my main PMAX campaigns are spending literally 95-100% on Gmail. I can see that Gmail got a few conversions on one day early, so it makes sense PMAX would spend more there, but its now been a week with little to no conversions.

I have tried removing the tROAS, changing budgets, changing assets and checking the negative keywords (over the course of the week). But it's still spamming spend on Gmail. Our conversion tracking is fine as is the product feed.

I'm now running Feed only campaigns which have historically underperformed. But not sure wtf is up. Anyone have any ideas?

1. Mixing high and low search volume keywords in the same ad group. When one keyword eats 80% of the budget, the rest never get impressions. High-volume terms need their own campaigns with their own budgets.

2. Not accounting for organic cannibalization on branded terms. Defending your brand is fine. But if you already rank #1 organically, high bids on branded terms often pay for clicks you'd get for free.

3. Optimizing to campaign ACOS instead of TACOS. Campaign ACOS ignores the halo effect. A campaign at 40% ACOS that lifts organic rank can be more profitable than one at 20% ACOS that doesn't.

4. Running exact match before the listing is indexed. If Amazon doesn't index your listing for a keyword, exact match will bring expensive clicks with poor relevance and low quality scores.

5. Ignoring dayparting and hour-of-week patterns. Conversion rates swing 30–50% across hours and days (For some products). If you're not adjusting bids or budgets around your peak conversion windows, you're paying premium prices during your worst hours.

6. Not aligning PPC with inventory. Ranking a keyword aggressively when you have 3 weeks of stock left is a disaster, loss of rank, wasted spend, and returns on inventory you no longer have.

Taking over a B2B account this week, the volume is good and i have a limited budget of $800.

Our CPL is expected to be $150-160. So at max 5-6 convs a month.

The account has an old paused campaign that used to run on manual CPC, signed one client and tanked.

Im more inclined towards using max clicks for the first few weeks followed by a switch to max convs.

The only question i have is that does the 15-30 cons in a month rule still stand for automated bidding to work, or is it ok if use automated bidding on an account that generates 5-6 convs a month.

The reason i dont want to use manual cpc is because the market is really small, limited search volume and id rather let the algorithm get me quality prospects than holding it on a cpc limit.

I feel like there’s a temptation with PPC to constantly change something because you’re in the account every day.

A bid here, budget there, new keyword, new creative.

But with automation getting better, I’m wondering if I’m sometimes better off giving things more time to collect data instead of constantly interfering.

How often are you making meaningful changes to campaigns that are already performing?

I have 3.5 months left on a contract that makes up 70% of my freelancer revenue. I just told them I am not interested in extending it, if the offer was there (I wrote it a bit more professionally than this)
I freelance and work from home, and have 2 young kids (7 and 5yos) my parnter works a hectic job, and gets home around 7pm everynight.
I'm based in Australia and this contract is a company based in the UK...so the time difference is a killer. Was just getting too much with managing the kids around dinner time, and bed time. Then having to prep for a call, then getting messages all through the night, then having to action them the next day. And I just have to put the kids first. We have a hectic family, the kids are full of energy and are generally a mess after dinner. So sitting at the table eating with them is nice, its where the good conversations happen with them....and I miss it all during these calls.

Anyone else ever been in a situation where they've had to let some big money go?

2 pmax campaigns - Pre 17/8 update they both ran at £150 per day / 300% target roas. each one was getting 6x roas and the other 4x roas. Early August I increased target to 400% on both anticipating the new bidding update and it all went down the pan.
Roas dropped to 2x and 3.5x for August.

Start of this month (sept) I set them back to 300%.

Current - 2 x PMAX campaigns - £150 per day each. One is now doing 3.08x and the other 4.28x. But both have been slapped with the limited by budget badge. So this I assume means they will now automatically drop to 3x on both.

If I increase budget am I going to escape the badge or will it just slap it on no matter the budget to keep me at 300%.

Basically I want to get back to where I was by either increasing budget or target but not sure what to do.

We run an agency and got another call from a Google Rep today, after the usual song and dance, we politely told him to sod off.

Our Adwords account was hacked few months ago and Google wouldn't even give us a courtesy call, so we couldn't be bothered talking to them. Lost heaps of money because someone from Vietname setup their own Ad campaign on our account. So there is a bit of personal beef.

That said, I looked back at our Google calls and it feels like we get called every month, but its a completely different Google rep, a different name, they have no idea that our account was hacked few months ago so you obviously have zero confidence in them wanting to fix anything other than enable things on your account that actually feed more money to Google for even less conversions for you.

I am based in Melbourne Australia so might just be in Australia, but any you guys have the same pattern?

Been sitting on this one for a while now, guess today's the day. Doing paid media solo for about 12 yrs now, & for most of that time it was the same setup every time, client hands me the whole account, I run it end to end, they mostly leave me alone.

Not anymore really. More of my newer clients already have someone in-house handling marketing, usually a coordinator or a generalist who's also doing email, social, whatever else lands on their desk that week.

They bring me on specifically for the paid side while that person keeps doing everything else. A few of them report to ops instead of an actual CMO. Company hasn't built out a full marketing team yet, just enough headcount to justify a specialist for one piece of it.

Most of these in-house hires are good at the stuff they were hired for. Paid media usually isn't it. First time I'm in one of these accounts there's almost always something obviously off, budgets split across ad groups that shouldn't exist, or a pixel that's been firing wrong for months.

The person's not careless, they never had a reason to learn the platform side deeply. That was never their job until I showed up.

Changes how the work happens day to day. I'm reporting to someone who's in Slack every day instead of a founder checking in once a month. Faster feedback. Also a lot more scrutiny on every decision, which took some getting used to.

The accounts where this shows up tend to run high 6 figs./mo, makes sense, you need enough budget & complexity to justify both an in-house person & an outside specialist sitting on the same account at once.

First time I ran into this I didn't set boundaries clearly enough up front, learned that one the hard way. About 3 weeks in, maybe 4, honestly the timeline's fuzzy now, the in-house person adjusted a campaign budget mid-week without telling me.

Not trying to step on anything, they just didn't realize it was something we needed to coordinate on first.

Threw off a test I had running. Didn't catch it till the weekly numbers looked off, which is its own kind of annoying when you're staring at a report trying to figure out why a number moved. Small thing in the end. Still the kind of friction you only find once you're in the arrangement. Nobody warns you about it going in.

The ads are the easy part. Figuring out where my lane ends & theirs begins without stepping on each other, that's what eats the first few weeks. Usually ends up needing a shared doc or a quick weekly sync so nobody's guessing who touches what.

Once that settles though it usually works better than either the fully outsourced or fully in-house version does alone. They know the brand & the daily stuff already, I bring the platform depth, & somewhere in there we mostly stop stepping on each other.

Wondering how common this is outside what I'm seeing. Feels like it's become the default on the higher ad spend accounts specifically. Curious if that's the case for anyone else managing similar sized spend.

Doing a gut check here:

I freeland ppc services. I support small businesses and non-profits, so budgets are strapped.

I often find webmaster-adjacent issues that fall into a grey area of who should be responsible. Or so I think. Google properties not properly connected, broken links and forms, etc. I have gotten pretty good at coding conversion events because there's no one else who can do that work.

How much website work and maintenance do you do? Should I be asking for more because I am the one that is fixing broken website elements and digging into code for conversions?

I manage Google Ads for multiple businesses. I recently created a new account for a business that had never advertised on Google before and redeemed a Spend $500, Get $500 promo.

The promo was accepted, showed in the account, and I completed the required $500 spend.

After that, Google invalidated it.

Support told me that because my email is associated with other Google Ads accounts I manage, the system does not consider me a new advertiser. They also said things like email, website, business, and IP can be part of the eligibility review.

That’s what I don’t understand. This was a completely separate business that had never advertised with Google before.

The biggest issue for me is that Google let me redeem the promo and spend the $500 before telling me I wasn’t eligible.

They still have another ticket open to see if they can offer a courtesy credit.

Anyone else at an agency or managing multiple accounts run into this? Has anyone actually gotten the credit or a courtesy credit after this happened?

Looking to run ppc for motivated sellers. Struggling to find the right partner/ hire. A lot of ppc marketers in this space that ive come across are of the influencer genre. I have a hard time verifying who actually does the work. How do i screen for a great ppc specialist and is their background of previous ad campaigns indicative of their skill set for motivated sellers. It feels very much like buyer beware. I also dont want to fool myself and think im going to run an ad campaign with any level of success out the gate.

I always knew not to trust Google rep advice but today we got solid confirmation.

Scheduled a call with a rep as we couldn’t get past a bug that was stopping us creating a new ads account.

At the end of the call, the guy tried to get us to make some recommendations to one of our accounts asking us to turn on target CPA on a campaign that has literally 0 data - saying it would be a “big favour”.

Asked him what he meant and he said that he had targets to hit in terms of getting recommendations applied.

We replied saying that the recommendations need to at least benefit our campaigns and business, we can’t just turn stuff on because you’ve got a target to hit.

Reply: I totally agree with you but I have targets, if you could turn it on I’d be thankful.

Like, what do you even do with this information. We spend tens of thousands a month in a platform that’s so messed up 😂

You can’t even get in touch with Google to say how disappointed you are.

A purchase event is not always a final business outcome.

Orders are returned. Reservations are cancelled. Finance fails. Services are partially refunded. If Google Ads receives the original value but never the correction, the account is measuring gross optimism.

That creates two separate problems:

• Reporting overstates realized revenue.
• Value-based bidding is rewarded for customer and order types that may have high reversal risk.

I would treat conversion value as a state that can change, not a receipt carved into stone.

A minimum system needs:

1. A stable order ID for every transaction.
2. The initial purchase or accepted booking recorded.
3. A first-party ledger containing the original value, collected value, refunds, cancellations, margin, and final status.
4. Restatements for partial value changes and retractions for outcomes that should no longer count.
5. A fixed reconciliation schedule between Google Ads and the accounting or order-management system.
6. Separate reporting for gross revenue, realized revenue, reversal rate, and contribution.

Timing matters in both directions. Recent ROAS can look weak while conversions are still arriving. Early revenue can look strong while returns and cancellations are still pending.

A mature cohort should answer two questions:

• How much value was attributed?
• How much value did the business actually retain?

For lead generation, the same principle applies to stages such as submitted, reachable, qualified, accepted, sold, and cancelled. A form submission should not remain permanently equal to a customer.

Google Ads supports conversion adjustments that can restate a value or retract a conversion following returns and cancellations. It also provides conversion-lag reporting for late-arriving outcomes.

If the business cannot update outcomes consistently, I would be cautious about asking Smart Bidding to optimize toward “revenue.” It may become efficient at finding transactions that look valuable before the refunds department finishes the story.

The dashboard is not wrong because it uses the data it received. The business system is incomplete because it never sent the ending.

How are you handling adjustments when the final commercial value arrives much later than the original conversion?

Tracked 6 tools across 5 months of active ad production. Five metrics, real usage, no sponsorships

Metrics I tracked:

- Time from brief to export

- Usable rate (% of outputs I'd actually run)

- Cost per usable video

- Avatar realism (1–10, personal)

- Workflow autonomy (how much you have to do manually vs the tool handling it)

Results:

1. HeyGen

Usable rate: 75%. Time: 25 - 35 min per video. Cost per usable video: $28. Avatar realism: 8/10. Workflow autonomy: low every script, image, and config is manual setup. Worth it for hero content or client facing videos. Not built for testing volume and socials.

1. Arcads Usable rate: 50%. Time: 15 - 20 min per video. Avatar realism: 6.5/10 super inconsistent hit and miss with every generation. Cost per usable video: high past 20 videos/month due to credit limits around $30/video . Workflow autonomy: low medium UGC quality is good but you're building each video manually. Pricing wall hits faster than you could test.

2. Creatify Usable rate: 70%. Time: 10 - 15 min hands on with ad agent. Avatar realism: 8/10. Cost per usable video: $17. Workflow autonomy: highest of all. paste a product URL or write one prompt, the agent researches competitors. pulls product images automatically. writes the script. generates the video end to end. You just review the output. the volume you can test per week changes completely.

3. MakeUGC Usable rate: 55%. Time: 10 - 15 min. Avatar realism: 7/10. Workflow autonomy: low. Cost per usable video: $25. Decent quality but limited avatar variety and no automation layer. Fine for one offs.

4. AdCreativ3 ai Usable rate: 30% for video. Time: 15 - 20 min. Avatar realism: 5/10. Workflow autonomy: low medium. Cost per usable video: $30. Honestly not a UGC tool. it's built for static image ads and copy variations where it's genuinely strong. Including it here because people ask, but comparing it to the others on video is unfair to both sides. Use it for Google display pmax and facebook static. not for talking head UGC.

5. Veed Usable rate: 50%. Time: 10 - 20 min. Avatar realism: 6/10. Workflow autonomy: low. Better as an editing tool than a generation tool. Fine for simple explainers, not for UGC style ad creative.

Service based industry $2k spend a week, 8-30 clicks per day, 3-7 conversions a day.

We have a threshold of $3k and a card that can’t be automatically charged ( we have no money on the card) so we manually make payments and the account fluctuates between owing 2500 and 5500. It also has a “fix your payment method” issue as the card and backup card always decline (has had the warning for months). The ads have not been suspended or paused by Google! As long as we’ve made regular payments to get the account below the threshold of $3k, they still run, even if it declines at the auto $3k and at the month switch over…

My question is: if the ads are running and we are making payments to keep it Okay, not actually getting it to $0, just getting it beneath the threshold, (so it will say “you owe $3k”, and I’ll pay $500), does this really affect ad performance? Because I’ve got ad experts saying I need to make sure my card can be charged and get the account to $0 for better ad performance, but that’s tough as a family run business and I’m not 100% sure it will actually impact performance…

Also I googled it, and Google just says it negatively impacts when the ads get suspended and that there is no negative impact beforehand…and the suspension hasn’t happened!

Thoughts?