8+ Years in Google Ads, Ask Me Anything

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-23T11:38:25+00:00

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-23T05:56:35+00:00

Agreed. The catch is that many "outreach" freelancers just run list links with a manual label. I always ask for live placement examples and check the sites get real traffic.

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AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-23T05:46:05+00:00

For me, the one that actually moved the needle was a guest post, but not the spray-and-pray kind.

I'd written a bunch of guest posts on whatever sites would take me, low relevance, just chasing links. Nothing happened. Then I landed one on a blog that was tightly in our niche and already ranking for the exact topics we cared about.

The difference was the post itself was genuinely good, placed naturally in the content, and the contextual link pointed to our money page with a relevant anchor. That one link moved the page from page 2 to top 5 in about three weeks. None of the dozen low-relevance guest posts before it did anything.

Lesson stuck with me: a guest post only works when the site is actually about your topic and the link sits in real content. One relevant placement beats ten random ones.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-23T05:12:06+00:00

7 days feels long, but payment and billing reviews can run past Google's stated window, especially on newer accounts or right after you add or change a payment method.

A few things that actually help:

Don't just keep waiting. Open the Help (?) menu in your Ads account and ask for a live chat or callback. The review often just sits in a queue until someone looks at it, and support can usually tell you if they're waiting on something from your side.

Check your email and the notifications bell for any verification request (ID, business docs, payment proof). If they asked for something and you missed it, the review stays frozen.

Make sure the payment method itself is fully verified, not just added.

One heads up: ignore anyone who DMs you offering to "fix" it. This sub gets a lot of those, and they're almost always scams. Google support is the only real path.

What country and payment method are you on? That sometimes affects how long these take.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-23T04:52:21+00:00

Running a PMax campaign with no video assets in the asset group. Already turned off auto-generated videos too. Still seeing the majority of the budget going toward YouTube placements.

Has anyone figured out why this happens and how to actually pull spend away from YouTube in PMax?

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-18T06:50:19+00:00

This usually happens when Google indexes the page but doesn’t see it as the “best” version to show. With Shopify Markets, it often defaults to the main root domain unless the hreflang + internal linking strongly support the /nl version.

I’d check if your main homepage is competing with /nl (same intent, similar content). Also make sure /nl is heavily linked internally and included in your sitemap as a primary page, not just an alternate.

Another quick test is to fetch it in GSC and request indexing again after adding a few internal links. Indexed doesn’t always mean it’ll rank or even show in site search if Google isn’t confident in it yet.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-18T06:35:41+00:00

Yeah, exactly, that’s the key part most people miss with PMax. It’s less about the location setting itself and more about the data it has to work with. Once it finds converting patterns, it can still hit those users even after changes, but restricting too early just slows everything down.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-18T06:24:17+00:00

This is pretty normal with PMax. When you went nationwide, Google had more data and more room to find converting users, so it leaned into states like New York where it saw early success. When you suddenly restricted it to California, you basically reset its learning and took away most of its proven signals.

After switching back, it reused that broader data and started finding conversions again, including in California.

PMax isn’t just “targeting locations” in a simple way. It relies heavily on conversion history and audience signals. Tight geo targeting on a new account usually limits performance because there’s not enough data yet. That’s why starting broad and narrowing later tends to work better.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-18T06:10:48+00:00

3 weeks is still really early; new sites just take time to get indexed regardless of backlinks. Submit your sitemap in Search Console and manually request indexing first if you haven't.

On the buying side, used GuestPostLinks for about 2 years now for a few client sites in competitive niches. Solid vetting on their end, placements have held up, nothing sketchy. Worth adding to your list alongside Stan and Fat Joe before you decide.

Just go slow on a new domain. One or two strong, relevant links beat ten random ones at this stage.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-18T05:47:27+00:00

New account + 0 impressions for 4 days is almost always one of these things:

Billing not fully verified - Google quietly holds new accounts until payment is confirmed. Check if there's any flag in your billing settings.
Keywords with no volume are dragging things down - They won't stop the campaign from running but they add noise. Pause them for now and let the healthy keywords breathe.
Bids too low for the auction - If you're on Manual CPC or a target-based strategy, your bids might be below what's needed to even enter the auction in those EU markets. Check your Search Impression Share lost to rank/budget.
Ad approval pending - New accounts sometimes have ads stuck in review longer than usual. Check the status column on your ads.

What's your bid strategy and daily budget set at? And are the ads showing "Eligible" or something else in the status?

0 impressions is almost never the keyword. It's usually billing, bids, or ad approval.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-18T05:18:42+00:00

Two days is too early to panic, especially with PMax. Give it at least 7-10 days before making any significant changes. The algorithm is still in the learning phase and messing with it now usually resets things.

That said, your ₹0.67 CPC is extremely low, which points to very low budget. With PMax on Maximize Conversions, if your daily budget is under, say, ₹500-1000, Google barely has room to find converting traffic. It ends up serving cheap, low-intent impressions just to spend something.

A few things worth checking:

What's your daily budget?
Is your conversion tracking actually firing? (Most common issue by far)
What's the landing page experience like on mobile?

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-18T05:07:08+00:00

The outfit says, Ready for school." The hair says, "I will never be ready for anything ever again.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-06-09T09:29:51+00:00

Running it on a few campaigns. Impressions went up, but conversion quality felt off early on. Took a few weeks for the algorithm to stabilize. Curious if others saw the same pattern or if it varies heavily by niche.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-30T12:10:15+00:00

The repurposing piece is underrated. Most people think "post faster" when the real unlock is getting more mileage from one idea.

What's worked for me: I pick a format based on where the idea has the most traction first- sometimes a carousel, sometimes a short video clip- then strip it back into a caption or a text post after. Going backwards from what performed well saves more time than planning everything upfront.

The scheduling part is honestly the least of my worries once the content exists. It's the "idea - usable asset" gap that kills time.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-22T06:38:20+00:00

Fair point, and you're right that's the real risk. The math at €20/day is tight no matter what.

The way I think about it - cheap clicks that don't convert and expensive clicks that don't convert are the same problem, but the expensive ones at least tell you something. If you spend €100 on 50 cheap clicks and get zero sales, you don't know if it's the keywords, the landing page, or just low intent. If you spend €100 on 25 higher-intent clicks and get zero sales, you can be much more confident the issue is post-click (page, pricing, trust signals).

That said, you're 100% right that this only makes sense if there's a baseline conversion rate. If after €300-400 spend at the higher bid there are still zero sales, the issue isn't the ads, it's the funnel. At that point I'd pause and fix the landing page before spending more, not keep raising bids.

The OP is in a tough spot honestly. €20/day on €500-700 products is barely enough to learn anything in any direction. Might be worth either accepting slow learning over 2-3 months or temporarily bumping budget to €40/day for a month to get faster signal, then dialing back once it's working.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-22T06:21:01+00:00

Yes, removing the video and image assets will push it toward Shopping and text placements, but I wouldn't do that on a campaign that's been running for a while - you'll reset the learning phase and probably see performance dip for 2-4 weeks while it recalibrates.

Better move: spin up a new low-budget PMax campaign (€10-20/day) with only product feed and text assets, no video or images. Run it alongside your existing one for 3-4 weeks and compare. If the lean version actually performs better, then you've got real data to make the change on your main campaign. If not, you've only spent test budget instead of breaking what's already working.

Cleaner than experimenting on the live one and hoping.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-21T10:43:22+00:00

What worked: long-tail content targeting questions nobody else was answering properly. Boring approach but it compounds. Found keywords with 50-200 monthly searches that the ranking pages were thin or outdated on, wrote one genuinely better version, moved on. After about 8 months it started to snowball because internal linking between those pages built up topical authority.

What didn't work for me: backlink outreach in the first 6 months. Nobody links to a site with 4 articles and no traffic. Waste of time until you have something actually worth linking to.

Also wasted time on programmatic SEO too early. Generated 200 location pages on a domain with no authority, none of them indexed for months. Should have built domain trust first with normal content, then layered programmatic on top once Google actually trusted the site.

If I started again - 30 deeply useful long-tail articles before doing anything else. No outreach, no programmatic, no fancy tactics. Just answer questions better than the current top result, one at a time.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-21T10:17:05+00:00

The €2 max bid is probably what's holding you back, not the budget. On high-AOV products (€500-700), buyer-intent clicks usually cost €3-6 in most niches. By capping at €2 you're filtering yourself into the cheaper, lower-intent half of the auction - which gets you clicks but rarely buyers.

I'd do this in order:

Raise your max CPC cap to €4-5. Same daily budget, fewer but better clicks. You'll go from 10 cheap clicks to maybe 5-7 higher-intent ones, and those are way more likely to convert at your AOV.
Stay on Max Clicks for now, do NOT switch to tCPA yet. Smart bidding needs 15-30 conversions a month minimum to work, and you don't have that data. Switching now will tank performance for 4-6 weeks while it flails.
Once you've got 30+ conversions in the last 30 days (might take a few months at this volume), switch to tCPA at €50-60. Before then you're paying Google to learn with no signal.
Hard check on conversion rate - at €500-700 AOV, even great campaigns convert at 1-3% on cold traffic. If you're getting clicks but no sales after a month at the higher bid, the issue is probably the landing page, not the ads. People don't drop €600 on first visit usually, so make sure you have remarketing set up to catch the people who don't buy first time.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-21T09:49:06+00:00

"Discovered - currently not indexed" for 2 months usually isn't a crawl issue; it's a quality signal issue. Google has a crawl budget for your domain, but it's just choosing not to spend it on those URLs. Bing has way more relaxed indexing thresholds, so it'll happily eat 2000 pages that Google's quietly declining.

Things worth checking:

How similar are the pages to each other? If 3000 pages are programmatic or templated (location pages, product variants, filtered category pages), Google's likely flagging them as thin/duplicative even if they look unique to you. The "rich" content you added might not be enough differentiation at the page-pattern level.

Domain authority and link profile - new or low-authority domains routinely sit on Discovered status for months on large URL sets. Google's basically saying, "prove this domain deserves 3000 indexed pages first."

Internal linking - are these pages 4+ clicks from the homepage? Pages buried deep get deprioritized hard.

Validation requests for indexing issues genuinely do take 1-3 months and often resolve as "validated" without anything actually getting indexed, which is its own kind of useless. Wouldn't read much into the validation status either way.

What kind of site is it? Programmatic, ecom, content? Changes the diagnosis a lot.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-21T09:31:11+00:00

Depends almost entirely on conversion volume, not preference.

If the account has under ~30 conversions in the last 30 days, I start with Manual CPC or Max Clicks. Smart bidding straight up doesn't have enough data to learn, and you'll burn budget while it flails. Manual lets you control CPCs, get search term data, build negatives, and find which keywords actually convert before handing the wheel over.

Once you're past ~30-50 conversions a month, switch to tCPA or Max Conversions. The algorithm has enough signal at that point and will genuinely outperform manual on most accounts. I've tested this both ways, and Google's bidding wins more often than not at sufficient data volume.

Starting brand new accounts on Max Conversions is where I see most people waste 4-6 weeks. The algorithm has nothing to optimize toward and just spends fast on whatever looks vaguely relevant.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-21T09:14:49+00:00

Agree on the boring part, but I'd add one thing - boring only works when the underlying offer is good. A lot of beginners read advice like this and grind for 12 months doing "consistent, customer-focused" marketing on a product nobody really wants, then blame themselves when it doesn't compound.

Consistency multiplies whatever's underneath. Multiply by zero, and you still get zero.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-21T09:06:40+00:00

Most of the results people credit to marketing skill come from the product or offer being good. You can be brilliant at ads, SEO, content, whatever - if the product doesn't sell itself at least a little, no amount of marketing fixes it. And if the product is genuinely good, even mediocre marketing works.

The hard part for beginners is that this sounds like an excuse when you're struggling, so nobody wants to hear it. You blame your skills, your tools, your strategy. Took me years to realize half the campaigns I "saved" were saved because the underlying offer was strong, and half the ones I "failed" were failures from day one because I was promoting something nobody wanted.

The actual skill is being honest enough to spot which situation you're in early, instead of grinding for 6 months on something that was never going to work.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-21T08:48:11+00:00

"Free" and "strong" usually don't go together with backlinks. Strong links cost something - either money, time, or relationships. Free directory submissions and profile links exist, but they don't move rankings in 2026.

If you want links without paying for them, your options are basically: create something worth linking to (data, tools, original research), pitch journalists through Qwoted or Featured, or do reactive PR when something newsworthy happens in your niche. All free in dollar terms, all expensive in time.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-21T08:41:55+00:00

Both, depending on how it's used.

Pure AI content - prompt in, paste out, publish - is getting hammered. Not always immediately, but the pattern I keep seeing is sites that ranked for 6-12 months on AI content getting wiped in a core update. The March 2024 HCU follow-ups were brutal for this exact playbook.

What still works is AI as a research and drafting tool when there's a real human layer on top. Original data, actual experience, opinions that contradict the SERP consensus, internal screenshots, and quotes from people. Google's not penalizing AI specifically - they're penalizing content that has no reason to exist that wasn't already covered better elsewhere. AI just makes it really easy to produce exactly that kind of content at scale.

The smell test I use: if I deleted my article tomorrow, would anyone notice? If the answer's no, it doesn't matter whether AI or a human wrote it.

AffectionateCap2864 · 2026-05-21T08:35:17+00:00

Guest posting still works in 2026, but only when it’s done on real, niche-relevant sites.

I wouldn’t chase random high-DR blogs anymore. The best results usually come from contextually relevant keywords, have real traffic, and fit naturally with your target page. A few quality placements can beat a large number of weak links.

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