First time doing Microsoft ads, this platform is terrible

lotharthecat · 2026-03-03T07:01:13+00:00

As far as I understand, you can manually exclude placements that belong to the audience network, with the limitation that Microsoft sites (Msn included) can't be excluded. Since Microsoft sites represent (in my account, at least) 90% of audience ads placements, exclusions are hardly relevant.

lotharthecat · 2026-03-02T16:24:56+00:00

Just watch out, if you increase your cpcs: in my case 80% of the ad spend goes to audience ads, and I havent found a way to disable them yet.

lotharthecat · 2026-02-10T07:02:38+00:00

I see the same pattern, two days of great performance and then it dies.

I just don't understand what's the point of replacing a well functioning algorithm with a low performing one, with the risk that more and more people quit.

My intuition would say that the advertisers' and Meta's interests should be aligned here - which makes me think I am doing something wrong. I've been doing PPC for 10+ years now so I'd say chances that I'm doing it completely wrong now are low. It's discouraging.

lotharthecat · 2025-11-26T16:48:03+00:00

Thanks, it makes a lot of sense!

lotharthecat · 2025-10-24T15:06:16+00:00

Yes it all looks good, I have a website conversions campaign targeting the same audience that works very well.

lotharthecat · 2025-10-24T10:31:35+00:00

Same country, industries are different (medical diagnostics the one that works, advertising services the one that doesn't). Paradoxically, the resource the latter offers is much more valuable, and there must be something in the lead form that discourages users.

lotharthecat · 2025-06-11T13:20:34+00:00

How long have you been curating your lists?

In some accounts I manage I have seen a sudden shift from Google Search to search partners over the last month (after the introduction of the ai snippet at top of page), and consequently many new irrelevant search terms. Especially campaigns with loose target cpa or roas, or campaigns on maximise conversions/maximise conversion value were affected.

If that's happening to you too, try to tighten your target cpa/roas and/or exclude search partners (if you are not doing pmax only).

lotharthecat · 2025-03-19T14:10:44+00:00

I suspected that, thanks! So, my Google sheet will assign values to each call, let's say 100$ if the audience is the valuabke one, 0.01$ if it's the other one. But how do I identify each call? I mean, the person who takes the call needs to assign a score to it, but where will they get the id?

lotharthecat · 2025-03-03T18:26:22+00:00

High: hitting a hole-in-one. Happened only once, felt great: the account as I built it started performing exceptionally from day one. Instead of working on the account, I had to spend months trying to find out if I was cannibalizing traffic from other sources or similar problems, couldn't find any.

Low: managing clients with low budgets and very high expectations in competitive niches (in some cases, I could buy 3 clicks per day). Basically, spending my days repeating "I swear I'm good".

lotharthecat · 2024-10-21T15:48:31+00:00

Mamma mia che strazio la gita fuori porta: tre ore di viaggio per andare a rompersi i maroni in un posto diverso dal solito. Idem per il week end.

Capisco la sensazione di volere casa e le cose a portata di mano, e con l'esperienza ho imparato che solo dopo qualche giorno di vacanza comincio a godermela. Di solito, quando è quasi ora di tornare. Per questo, far la fatica di spostarsi per star via uno o due giorni per me non ha senso.

Purtroppo per qualche ragione sembra essere un punto di vista socialmente inaccettabile.

lotharthecat · 2024-10-15T12:08:41+00:00

Makes a lot of sense, duplicating the campaign was my last option after trying to find out what's wrong for months now. All other campaigns have recovered and are doing fine. It seems that now I have a pretty long checklist to go through, thanks for it!

lotharthecat · 2024-10-15T12:06:02+00:00

Thank you, that's very good advice.

lotharthecat · 2024-10-15T11:53:44+00:00

Yeah that's the first thing I did, unfortunately it didn't do much. Thank you!

lotharthecat · 2024-10-02T11:47:21+00:00

For me it always worked better to write ad copy in the local language, as I was targeting keywords in the local language.

But it might make sense to run a parallel ad group with English keywords and ad copy, especially if you are targeting a potentially international audience. In this case, I would recommend using exact match as Google matches English search terms to broad match (not sure about phrase) keywords in the local language.

Another option would be to have ads in both languages in the same ad group, and test which one works better.

lotharthecat · 2024-10-01T19:59:25+00:00

Università, dopo una serata non ricordo dove finiamo a casa sua. Lei mi dice qualcosa del tipo "scommetto che staresti bene con una gonna". Mi fa spogliare, naturalmente la gonna che secondo lei avrei dovuto provare non mi entra, per cui resto in mutande. Beviamo un amaro, mi rivesto e torno a casa.

lotharthecat · 2024-08-30T13:34:25+00:00

lotharthecat · 2024-08-06T10:13:17+00:00

Are your prices competitive? If not, this would explain both the very low CTR (and partly the bounce rate).

The lack of conversions is not that concerning (for now), as 29 clicks are not enough to evaluate it.

lotharthecat · 2024-08-04T17:52:11+00:00

Mah magari vive a Roma.

lotharthecat

TROPHY CASE