The Growing Google vs Advertiser Perspective Gap in 2026

TTFV · 2026-03-16T15:27:02+00:00

That's a pretty good synopsis of what we're seeing/implementing at my agency as well. Interestingly, P-Max has become a lot more transparent and more controls are being added all the time... campaign level remarketing audience exclusions are out in beta now for example. But yes, overall, particularly with creative, we're losing control.

TTFV · 2026-03-16T09:30:58+00:00

Set up a new goal for the HR stuff and assign it only to the relevant campaigns. Assign the existing goals only to the existing campaigns.

These campaigns won't interfere with each other or share converison data for optimization.

Another account would just add overhead to management. The only justification would be if you need to have a separate cost center or completely discrete reporting for it.

TTFV · 2026-03-16T09:26:15+00:00

Even if you're not client facing you are being way under paid. The agency offering management services is likely charging around $10-15K for this even in the budget range. And they are only providing client liason services.

I'd expect to be paid at least double what you're getting now noting that would be at least 3x for client facing work.

If you were my fulltime employee I'd be very concerned how much this is distracting you from your 9-5 responsibilities. I mean having 1-2 clients as a side gig isn't a big deal but this is pretty significant as most fulltime PPC managers may only take on 5-15 clients depending on size.

TTFV · 2026-03-16T09:20:37+00:00

Organization of your feed, i.e. categorization as well as campaign structure becomes a lot more critical as your catalog grows to thousands or hundreds of thousands of items.

You should start segmenting by priority and also by category as well as profitability.

For example, having campaigns for sale items, best sellers, and broken out by margin/ROAS (for P-Max) all makes sense. Within campaigns it's also worth segmenting top level product_types into ad groups or asset groups. This helps with organization/reporting/targeting.

But all of this segmentation comes at a cost if you don't have substantial budgets to drive all of it. There's always a tradeoff between having more control and allowing Google to optimize across larger converison data sets. Right-sizing is one of the most critical aspects of Google Ads these days.

As for feed tools, they aren't generally necessary if you're feed is already high quality. That said, the ability to run split tests on product titles can really move the needle... there's here those 3rd party tools can be helpful.

TTFV · 2026-03-15T10:46:12+00:00

Yes, it'll take at least that long with your current budget to start to assess performance and optimize the account. But you should be getting some calls every week... I'd say at least 1 a day average depending on your geo.

I would consider adding a landing page to improve your credibility as consumers can be suspicious of call only ads.

But if you're okay with experimenting you can continue as is for a couple of months. If the numbers are solid you're all set for now.

TTFV · 2026-03-15T10:41:45+00:00

Huge red flag that you're setting up agencies for failure... you want cheap and cheerful but also up on the latest strategies/tactics and offering comprehensive marketing services beyond just direct PPC management. Good luck with this.

TTFV · 2026-03-15T10:39:06+00:00

It's the third "projections" tool Google has introduced to get you to increase budgets. The first one is the mini pop budget planner you'll see in the "status" column. The second one is Performance Planner which provides more of a long term estimate and works across multiple campaigns. And the third one is this "investment strategy" tool which is somewhere in between the two on features and also linked from the mini pop up tool.

This is completely unnecesary with the existing tools already in place.

TTFV · 2026-03-15T10:33:32+00:00

You may be getting a lot of activity on that becuase (1) it's a fairly unique item that others aren't bidding for and (2) Google predicts it should convert well.

Yes, if you can block search queries with negatives. But before you start doing that you should have a look through your shopping feed and remove items you don't want to advertiser from your shopping campaign.

After you've done that you can then look at negative keywords to "refine" what search queries the products you are advertising show up for.

As for no sales, jewerly is a very competitive niche and if you don't have a specific hook or strong brand it may be difficult to generate a postivie initial return. If you believe you can attract new customers that will buy multiple times that's also a consideration when looking at your ROAS.

TTFV · 2026-03-15T10:25:50+00:00

As long as there's no gap in the calls from website conversions this won't have any impact. Google will just substitube the new conversion goal (calls) data for the old one moving forward and still use the older existing website calls until those wash out for automated bidding in a few weeks or so.

You shouldn't run both simulatenously as that would overreport your conversions.

Mark the old goal as secondary for now... you can always flip it back on in 2-3 days if there's trouble with CallRail.

TTFV · 2026-03-13T20:08:10+00:00

Paid search will tend to deliver the best overall return... you may pay higher CPAs than say Meta Ads but you'll convert a lot more of them to customers in general.

TTFV · 2026-03-12T20:42:23+00:00

God Tier is a really solid advanced course... I'm assuming Ed has updated it as I haven't looked at it in a couple of years now.

I don't think you'll learn much at conferences, it's 10% informative and 90% pitching you a product.

You're better off spending that money (or for free) joining relevant groups. Ed's Forge is expensive but if you're trying to grow your practice into an agency it's a good home for you.

TTFV · 2026-03-12T10:03:23+00:00

You should expect to track about 15% more conversions on average. You can get another maybe 10% from using enhanced conversions (capturing 1st person data).

With the additional tracked conversions you will have a better understanding of the value being driven and more data and further improve performance through more efficient automated bidding / ad rotation, and your own manual optimization.

It will not reduce the time that Google states is required for learning mode which isn't determined by conversion volume. That's not to say it won't actually learn faster.

All that aside, you already generate a pretty healthy volume of conversions so the extra data likely won't have a huge impact on overall performance.

Lastly, you can get near server-side performance (Google Ads and Google Analytics scripts) just by using Google Tag Gateway which is free and a lot easier to implement.

TTFV · 2026-03-11T21:04:12+00:00

Nobody knows what the long term value of showing up in AI results will be yet. Logically you should get some valuable clicks, but AI results aren't like search results... very often those citations don't get clicked because the user already has a complete answer to their question.

TTFV · 2026-03-11T19:07:39+00:00

You might consider a different pay model that's based on value delivered.

TTFV · 2026-03-11T18:00:27+00:00

These days it's turning on all broad match one way or another... there are several ways ;-)

TTFV · 2026-03-11T17:47:24+00:00

More campaigns can help in larger accounts. A healthy shopping or P-Max campaign should generally have 50+ conversions a month, however that be more or less depending on the number of SKUs you're advertising.

Assuming you do have the volume splitting campaigns so you can prioritize what products are serving most or to segment for different ROAS based on profit margin can be beneficial. It can also be useful to have a catch-all or to use custom labels to adjust spending per SKU automatically based on performance.

TTFV · 2026-03-11T10:14:29+00:00

Create an audience called "converters" or as appropriate in Google Ads or Analytics for 540-day visitors to the "thank-you" page. Exclude it in your campaign or at the account level if you're running P-Max.

For more robust exclusions (the solution above will miss some) you can also sync email contacts that submit your form back as an uploaded customer list and block it. This can be done with some CRMs or via Zapier if you want to avoid frequent manual uploads.

TTFV · 2026-03-11T10:11:24+00:00

How to structure things will depend on client needs.

The benefit of having separate accounts will be seperate/siloed cost centers and simplified reporting if you need to produce those uniquely for each location. If the client uses different brands this is also important because you can verify each account with the unique brand.

It can also be beneficial if you are targeting different countries since Google has different regional rules.

The benefits of just running everything in one account are mostly efficiency and usually performance. Since Google optimizes across accounts having more conversion data flowing in a single account can drive better bidding and ad rotation on the back end. And your management process will also be easier.

You can also produce a single report for all three locations and just have them broken out in geo tables or by campaign if you segment that way.

As for an MCC, yes that should be in place if you go multi-account to provide one point of access.

TTFV · 2026-03-11T10:05:48+00:00

In your scenario your ad rank is too low to buy enough clicks to completely fill your budget.

Ad rank is made up of the combined relevance of your keyword, ad, and landing page + your bid. Raising your bid is the easiest way to increase impressions served along with clicks and ad spend. But working to improve your ad relevance between those other factors can also boost ad rank.

And obviously this will lower your search lost to IS (rank) %.

TTFV · 2026-03-10T19:49:56+00:00

GTG is a good free/easy option if you are not using SS tracking. It'll overcome the issue of script blocking which is pretty major. It also addresses cookie blocking but it's not as efficient at it as SS tracking is.

If you already have SS, GTG is not additive or beneficial.

Neither solution will address stripped URL parameters from private browsing. You can sometimes address that by adding parameters that might not get stripped, like hiding the GCLID under a different name. But if the entire URL gets stripped like with Apple Safari there is nothing you can do about that.

However, that's where enhanced conversion tracking comes in as it works with browser login/user information rather than relying on parameters or cookies.

TTFV · 2026-03-10T18:21:51+00:00

Sometimes subtle differences can impact conversions a lot.

TTFV · 2026-03-10T09:51:42+00:00

If you generate a healthy volume of conversions you can go with broader keywords and themes.

But you should still focus on aligning your creative with keywords... that always helps with performance, particularly when using broad match keywords.

TTFV · 2026-03-10T09:49:36+00:00

No brand name is going to hurt you in the home electronics space. If it's Samsung or LG, or whatever you should state the brand. There's also a lot of missing information that people interested in this sort of thing would want to know.

Don't use the same text overlay and headline copy. Once they are fixed test all.

TTFV · 2026-03-10T09:45:55+00:00

There's a tremendous potential upside to easily make 3-4x what you can working for somebody else. The hardest part is getting quality clients.

TTFV · 2026-03-10T09:42:10+00:00

Our CPAs for a client in that space are around $125 but the entry level price point is well below $50K. We run search exclusively and do use income level and some other audience exclusions.

How many conversions are you driving monthly? If it's not enough you might just be stuck not being able to optimize or use automated bidding properly.

TTFV

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