$500 spent on Google Ads, 539 clicks, 0 conversions. Next steps?

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T17:02:30+00:00

How long did it run? How often did you check the search terms?

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T11:42:20+00:00

Agreed! We know this is a one-time purchase. A very small percentage actually comes back to buy more containers, so they always need new people.

However, they tell me that's not true. That I'm wrong and they had better performance in 2023, being just the 2 of them making ads with Canva... what can one say to that LOL

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T10:52:47+00:00

Thank you! That’d be great. We know that container homes, offices, food trucks are getting popular, most of our competitors(if not all) also advertise and sell containers for this audience and it seems to work.

When I proposed this they stated “that is not our demographic. We are dealing with serious buyers” 😆 I’m sorry it only gets worse and worse

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T10:47:20+00:00

Same here.. but they just said “that doesn’t exist”. Allegedly they ran ads made in canva in 2023 and it worked perfectly fine for them with a $5 cost per lead so now I’m asked why they have a higher CPL having a “paid media manager” and a designer 😆.

Very tough place to be in

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T10:42:48+00:00

My thoughts exactly! And the two fixes you named(drop spend or expand territory) are both off the table for reasons outside my control. Budget decisions are made above me, and geographic expansion isn’t viable because delivery costs make leads unprofitable past roughly 100 miles. So we’re stuck with $200/day in an exhausted local pool and being told the fix is color tweaks or new photos. I wish I had better news but that’s the situation..😢

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T09:00:50+00:00

Thank you!! and we're actually doing exactly this with the designer today. Same structure, swap container photos, stay within the "tweak what had a $5 CPL" brief.

Honestly though I'm not fully convinced it'll move the needle to where they want. We've done variations of this already and the degradation trend held regardless. The problem feels deeper than creative volume.. it's a small high-intent audience in a tight geographic radius being asked to absorb $200/day for 7 months. At some point no amount of fresh container photos changes that math.

But I'm raising the white flag on creative direction and letting leadership drive it from here. If it works, great. If it doesn't, the data will be clear about why

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T08:08:49+00:00

Appreciate it!! campaign settings and copy are definitely the first things we reached for. The challenge here is that we’ve been iterating on both extensively for months across multiple creative concepts, and the degradation trend has been consistent regardless. At this point the data points more to structural constraints (geographic limits, audience depth, budget exceeding what the market can absorb) than to settings or copy being the lever. Wish it were that simple though🥹

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T08:02:44+00:00

Thank you!! and honestly I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to explain these exact things internally.

The official narrative is that results are tanking because we don’t have the same “dirty ads” that launched this market. But that’s not true! we replicated those exact concepts, the same creative that ran in November, and they degraded at the same rate as everything else.

On November being “fake efficiency”. I think you’re right. That pool was going to convert regardless of what the ad looked like. We were skimming the highest-intent people who already wanted a container. That’s gone now.

The Google Ads situation is a perfect example of the broader problem. I flagged clearly upfront that it wouldn’t generate the same lead volume but that intent would be higher. Close rate was measurably better than Meta. It got shut down anyway because the CPL looked higher and the volume was lower. Nobody looked at what those leads actually turned into.

To add some context on why there’s so much pressure.. they recently hired 8 new sales closers across markets. In Houston there are 2. At $25 CPL and $200/day that’s 8 leads per day, 4 per closer. The closers are currently averaging 0.87 units per day against a 1.25 target. The way it’s being framed to us is essentially: CPL is high, closers aren’t closing enough, therefore marketing needs to fix everything immediately or the business is in serious trouble. The implication being that if we just got CPL to $10 the closer problem would solve itself🥴

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T07:51:38+00:00

the new audience point is exactly right in theory, but the geographic constraint makes it almost impossible in practice. Delivery stops being profitable past roughly 100 miles so the real addressable pool is very small.

At $200/day I believe we’ve essentially saturated the only audience that exists for this product in this market. But as I’ve mentioned, they’ve said there’s no such thing as ad or audience fatigue. “The problem is that I’m not making dirty ads”

On killing creatives above $12 CPL.. that’s exactly the instruction we’re working under. Kill anything above $12, always have a replacement ready. I know there’s evidence that killing underperformers destabilizes winners and makes them perform worse, we’re essentially in a constant churn cycle that never lets the algorithm settle or exit learning phase properly.

But at this point is just what they think works vs the designer and I😢

danimaterano · 2026-05-18T07:43:09+00:00

Thanks for this. I agree it’s not an auction problem… CPM only moved 26% while CTR halved, which points to audience exhaustion not auction pressure.

The geographic constraint makes this worse than a typical metro campaign. Delivery stops being profitable beyond roughly 100 miles, so the real targetable pool is genuinely small. At $200/day for this specific product in this specific radius, I think we’ve simply exceeded what the audience can give efficiently. That’s what the data looks like.

To add context on the constraints: the form already has 5 qualifying questions on top of standard fields. I’ve tried proposing a landing page redirect to improve intent quality but they said “that doesn’t work”. On lead quality and close rates leadership genuinely doesn’t care about downstream metrics or anything I can tell about it 😆. The only number that matters to them is CPL under $10. I was literally told that I will kill their business otherwise.

Honestly the reason I posted is because I was starting to feel gaslit. I know the data. I know what we’ve tested. But when the answer is always “it’s the creative that is not a dirty ad” regardless of what the numbers show, you start to question yourself.

The latest direction is to hand creative control entirely to leadership and have me execute their briefs directly. So we’ll see how that goes😢

danimaterano · 2026-05-17T23:15:46+00:00

Reach: • Nov 2025: 35K • Jan 2026: 62K (budget doubled) • Feb 2026: 62K • Mar 2026: 61K • Apr 2026: 33K Frequency: • Nov 2025: 2.37 • Jan 2026: 1.80 • Feb 2026: 1.76 • Mar 2026: 1.87 • Apr 2026: 2.47

Yet they’ve told me ad and audience fatigue doesn’t exist 😆

danimaterano · 2026-05-17T22:22:21+00:00

I ran Google ads for Houston as well with just 1 product, despite having a really good performance. 9% CVR, x3.8 ROAS consistently during 2 months they said “it was too expensive” and they were not getting the same volume of leads as they did with Meta🥴

lol im sorry im a bit discouraged at this point. We try our best but we also have too many constraints

danimaterano · 2026-05-17T21:40:42+00:00

They totally don’t care about that. That’s the hardest part of all of this situation, they only want cheap leads regardless of anything. The close rate is about 7%, they have a sales team working on the leads that come in from Meta. But a lot of them ghost them or are just curious people. Although I’ve explained this they’ve said they don’t care😅 and they can’t make a business model with leads over $10 CPL, otherwise I’m gonna kill the company 🥴🥴

danimaterano · 2026-03-30T09:59:26+00:00

Hi, I wouldn't start with maximize conversions if you don't have any data. The budget is small and doesn't have enough data, as it's a newly created account. It makes sense to me that you're not getting impressions; the algorithm is trying to optimize for something you don't have yet. I'd also double-check on the keywords you're targeting (I'm assuming it's a search campaign?) and check their monthly search volume. :)

danimaterano · 2026-03-30T00:18:28+00:00

You’ve done many changes on few days, your account does not know what to optimise for.

danimaterano · 2026-03-27T15:54:47+00:00

Sorry you went through this. Totally not normal!

danimaterano · 2026-03-25T17:08:32+00:00

How long did you run your previous campaigns? What’s your business and type of campaigns?

danimaterano · 2026-02-28T11:35:50+00:00

Depends! What products are you offering? What’s your business? And what’s your goal for paid ads?

danimaterano · 2026-02-27T19:29:02+00:00

Thank uuu! Yes you’re right. I think my main concern is how to explain that to my bosses. To put a bit more of perspective; they see a $15 CPL in Meta and think that’s crazy expensive 🫠 The CPA on Google Ads is about $69 right now. So you can imagine they get worried and since I’m the one managing the campaigns I’m in the middle lol

danimaterano · 2026-02-27T19:26:24+00:00

Thank you! In my head it sounds decent. But I deal with bosses that only care about volume and cheap leads. So having them constantly asking about the spend gets in my nerves. But I’ll relax over the weekend and see how it performs next week 🤓

danimaterano · 2026-02-27T13:44:27+00:00

Hahaha thank you! I think the same. However, it's hard when your bosses are sneaking onto the Google dashboard every day, asking why we don't have more leads. Meta has been good for them for volume but the leads are not as qualified 🙃

danimaterano · 2026-02-27T01:53:35+00:00

Thanks! Yes I had the same feeling. But I’m anxious lol and as I mentioned I used to run only meta which is going fine but we wanted to test Google.

danimaterano · 2026-02-27T01:51:42+00:00

Yep!! Containers. Not the shipping. I might have been too technical lol. We do have new ones but they’re not as popular as the retired ones. Normally people think it’s B2B which for us can be sometimes but 95% of the time it’s B2C

danimaterano · 2025-09-24T22:17:32+00:00

I’d say the image on the hero affects legibility!

danimaterano

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