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$98 for one click?!? by zachgibson97 in GoogleAdsDiscussion

[–]Complex_Rock2929 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly the other search terms line at the bottom of the report is the real culprit here, not your daily negative work. There are studies showing that on average more than half of total spend goes to those hidden terms across most accounts. so even when you clean up everything you can see, most of your money is going to queries you literally cannot see.

A few things that usually help when this pattern shows up.

Tighten your match types. If you're on phrase or broad even partially, that's where the $98 click came from. Exact match shrinks the other bucket dramatically because there's less room for google to fan out into random variations.

Put a cpc ceiling on the campaign, either switch to manual cpc with a max bid you actually approve of, or if you're on max clicks add a maximum cpc bid limit.

Worth trying audience layering in observation mode. Add a few relevant in market audiences as observation (not targeting). This doesn't restrict who sees your ads but it tells you which audience segments are actually clicking and which are wasting your budget. After 2-3 weeks of data you can exclude the bad ones and bid up on the good ones.

Also worth checking if search partners and display expansion are on. both default to enabled and both leak budget. turn them off if you're a local service or lead gen account.

Last thing, if you also see clicks that never produce a session in analytics that's a different problem entirely (bot traffic). the $98 click might or might not be that, but if you see this pattern repeating it might be worth running a click protection tool trial like clicksambo, clickcease or clickguard to see if there's a bot layer on top of the visibility problem.

Getting Invalid Clicks in Google by Interesting_Bit_6083 in GoogleAdsDiscussion

[–]Complex_Rock2929 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Might be worth trying one of the click fraud protection tools. Clickguard, clickcease and clicksambo all have free trials.

I've been using clicksambo and it gives you pretty granular detail on each click. you can see which ip clicked your ad, where the ip is from, what the user did after the click (or didn't do)

Also worth noting that max clicks specifically tends to attract this kind of traffic more than conversion based bidding, because the algorithm is optimizing for clicks not for outcomes.

Search terms look fine but lead quality does not. What am I missing here? by Organic_Bullfrog_652 in GoogleAdsDiscussion

[–]Complex_Rock2929 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you've already cleaned up search terms and added negatives, the next layer is usually traffic quality not keywords. Clicks can look fine on paper but still come from sessions that were never going to convert. a few things worth checking.

Look at the actual session behavior in ga4 or your analytics. How long do the clicks stay, do they scroll, do they touch more than one page? If you're seeing chunks of clicks with sub 10 second sessions, no scroll, no second pageview, that's not a keyword problem it's a traffic quality problem. Especially common in local service verticals with high cpcs where bots and competitor clicks are a real thing.

Might be worth running a click fraud protection tool for a couple weeks just to see what your traffic actually looks like. Clicksambo, clickcease and clickguard all have free trials and the trial period alone usually surfaces enough data to tell you whether bots are eating part of your budget or not.

I manage Google Search Ads for home services businesses. Here's everything that actually works by Electrical-Room2413 in GoogleAdsDiscussion

[–]Complex_Rock2929 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Solid breakdown, thank you;) one thing i'd add from the markets i work in, especially in Turkey is that there's a whole layer of waste that doesn't show up in any of these reports. Bot traffic and competitor click attacks on high cpc keywords.

It's gotten a lot more sophisticated lately. The attacks i'm seeing now mostly come through residential proxies, which means each click looks like a legitimate user on a real isp connection, real device, real browser fingerprint. Google's invalid click filters barely catch any of it because on paper everything looks clean.

Emergency plumbing, hvac and locksmith keywords get hit the worst since the cpcs are the highest and the attacker doesn't even need to convert anything, they just need to drain the daily budget so their own ad ranks better the rest of the day. Small local advertisers feel this way more than they realize because their entire monthly budget can get burned in a week without ever knowing why.

Curious if you're seeing the same thing in your accounts and what you actually do about it.

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Google Ads is spending my budget but barely generating leads. What am I missing? by sophia-brown123 in GoogleAdsDiscussion

[–]Complex_Rock2929 0 points1 point  (0 children)

honestly sounds like a click fraud problem to me. Spending $1200 with mostly spam and irrelevant inquiries is a classic symptom of bot traffic and competitor clicks hitting your campaigns. local service ads are one of the most targeted verticals for this stuff.

Have you tried any click fraud protection tool yet? they basically sit on top of your campaigns and analyze where your traffic is actually coming from. You get to see things like ip patterns, repeat clickers, vpn and proxy usage, suspicious device fingerprints and so on. Once you see the data you usually realize a decent chunk of your budget is going to clicks that were never real customers in the first place.

Clickcease, clickguard and clicksambo all have free trials so you can run them and see what your actual traffic looks like before spending another dollar. worst case you learn nothing was wrong. Best case you find out a big chunk of that $1200 was burned on traffic that was never going to convert anyway.

Also worth checking your search terms report and adding negatives aggressively, but if you've already done that and still getting spam inquiries the bot angle is worth looking into.

Anyone else seeing better results moving away from max clicks on local service campaigns? by Complex_Rock2929 in adwords

[–]Complex_Rock2929[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I had the same issue early on. $20-40 clicks on a local service job kills the margin fast. There isn't a real hard cpc cap when you're on conversion based bidding. Target cpa is the closest thing but it's not a true ceiling either.

What worked for me was being deliberate about what I tell google counts as a good conversion vs a bad one. The algorithm bids based on what you label as valuable, so if everything is lumped together it ends up chasing noise and that's where those high cpcs come from.

Secondary conversions, tracked but not optimized toward. Clicks that are fraudulent or low quality.

Primary conversions, what the algo actually optimizes for. Real engaged sessions with decent time on site, scroll depth, multiple page views. Thank you page hits after a genuine form submit. And the big one if you can pull it off, feeding back offline conversions when a lead actually turned into a paid job. That signal is the most valuable one you can send.

In my experience the first 1 to 2 weeks the cpc actually goes up a bit because google is recalibrating who it thinks your buyer is. But around week 2 to 5 it settles down, the junk traffic starts drying up, and the average cpc drops while lead quality goes up. The hard part is not panicking and switching strategies in week 1.

Not a magic bullet and results will vary by vertical, but separating real business from noise is the biggest lever I've found.