Small Businesses Can't Make Google Ads Pay Off
72 posts across 16 communities in the last 30 days; 36% from r/PPC.
“Just some parts saves as draft. So annoying - why it can be like that? Any advise on fixes?”
“LinkedIn and Google Ads can get expensive, so I’m looking at Reddit as another channel to test. I keep seeing more SaaS ads here, but I find a lot of them annoying... and now I’m considering running some myself hahaha. If you’ve tried them, how did it go? Did people actually…”
“Not going to prove you wrong, because most accounts I see do burn money. But the reason is usually boring and fixable. The platform sells attention and it delivers attention. What it cannot do is decide who should be paying attention, and that part is in your copy and your…”
Local and small-business owners running Google Ads themselves and getting clicks, bills and support dead-ends but no results: $60k spent for 20 conversions, Shopping campaign with zero conversions, switched to Max Conversions and nothing happened, can't reach Google Ads support, tCPA needs 30 conversions they don't have, 'is Google Ads getting harder for small businesses'. The ask is to know whether the account is salvageable and what to fix first.
SOURCES (60)
“Yes, but Google Ads only scaled once the offer, margins, and repeat purchases were already working. Ads amplify a good business, they don’t fix a weak one. [re: Scaling e-commerce with google ads]”
“To be honest, my Google Ads conversion performance has been very poor since mid-September, and it’s gotten even worse in October. I initially assumed it was due to Labor Day or Amazon Prime Day, but as of today—October 16th—things are still just as bad. I’m at my wit's end; my daily sales are only a third of what they usually are. How are your Google Ads performing? submitted by /u/Novostella-Lighting [link] [comments]”
“To be honest, my Google Ads conversion performance has been very poor since mid-September, and it’s gotten even worse in October. I initially assumed it was due to Labor Day or Amazon Prime Day, but as of today—October 16th—things are still just as bad. I’m at my wit's end; my daily sales are only a third of what they usually are. How are your Google Ads performing? submitted by /u/Novostella-Lighting [link] [comments]”
“Just some parts saves as draft. So annoying - why it can be like that? Any advise on fixes? submitted by /u/La-Rouge-Elephant [link] [comments]”
“Hi, I have a new google ads account and I'm creating a new Search campaign. But I keep seeing this issue: Your ad has issues that will prevent it from showing on Google Search Can someone please help? Thanks. submitted by /u/weirdis_Cool [link] [comments]”
“My site is in english because most of my customers only speak english. Im currently trying to tap into the German market, since I speak german fluently and had a question regarsing google ads. Is it enough to just have the ad copy in german and the landing page in german, while keeping everything else in english or will that hurt trust and should I translate the entire site? edit: Im selling software as well as development services. And this ad is going to be for the services. So the normal conv”
“My site is in english because most of my customers only speak english. Im currently trying to tap into the German market, since I speak german fluently and had a question regarsing google ads. Is it enough to just have the ad copy in german and the landing page in german, while keeping everything else in english or will that hurt trust and should I translate the entire site? submitted by /u/bad-ass-jit [link] [comments]”
“I have an AI analytics platform; it's been 1 year we launched it. we started Google Search ad from this Sep. It's been 25 days we are running the ad but no conversion at all. Even the clicks are low and the ads are landing in the competitor's branded keywords. Out target audience is USA and our monthly budget is $1500/month. I have 1 ad group, targeting all related keywords phrase and exact match. No, competitors related keywords. Bidding strategy: Maximize Clicks (no bid cap) The ad”
“Questions: Anyone ran it on a live sale yet? What happened to ROAS during and after? Replacement for seasonality adjustments, or a complement? Did spend actually normalize after the dates, or was there a hangover? submitted by /u/scalemarketer [link] [comments]”
“Google ads are increasingly more competitive and thus more expensive. It costs around $150-$350 to get a client”
“LinkedIn and Google Ads can get expensive, so I’m looking at Reddit as another channel to test. I keep seeing more SaaS ads here, but I find a lot of them annoying... and now I’m considering running some myself hahaha. If you’ve tried them, how did it go? Did people actually sign up and use the product, or mostly click and disappear? And as a user, have you ever discovered something useful through one? Would like to hear your experiences before giving it a try. submitted by /u/C_Pira”
I run a swimwear brand (premium about 100$ a set), and I’ve been trying to do marketing myself: I’ve constantly tried FB & Google ads (cac crazy high, tested endless creatives, burned…
“So, I’m a little less than 2 weeks in on launching my Google ads. Zero conversions. I started with maximize clicks as I read that it’s best for Google to learn first before switching to maximize conversions. I do have it ready to change over and already integrated with my website form. I currently am doing $50/day as this is supposed to be my “proof of concept” before increasing budget. Ive added a good amount of negative keywords as I saw some bad searches align. The rest look solid to what I’m”
“Hi, for the past half year I been running my small brand, have decent spent in meta ads, having a pretty good success 2-3 roas. And now decided to run Google Shopping Ads, starting small 10 euros a day, but what Im seeing that second day in a row Im barely spending any money (2 clicks), i have 4 different products, but clearly I dont know something or I need more patience? Thanks in advance submitted by /u/madgesadgepepe [link] [comments]”
“Which Google Ads numbers are you seeing, like CPA or CTR? I tried running Ads for a micro SaaS once and the clicks looked fine, but the CPA quietly ate my budget once I pushed past the initial “learning” phase. Budget will tell you fast, not vibes, and most people burn money when they don’t track conversions properly.”
“Hello everyone, I am new to this but I just started running LSA for our electrical company. However it is not as successful as I thought. How do you troubleshoot your ads typically? I also set up a smart campaign yesterday we’ll see how it does. What kind of ads you think are best for a small electrical company? TIA Edit: please don’t flood my chats with your services submitted by /u/PiccoloElectronic511 [link] [comments]”
“To the good people who run google ads for their roofing business or for someone's business, if someone wants to start from a small budget say $3K/month. What should they target? Repairs? Replacements? General queries? (Roofer near me, roof repair near me) Any advice would be helpful submitted by /u/Charming-Hawk7077 [link] [comments]”
“On Google Ads, they're pretty cheap. Every time someone searched for "How to organize X", I'd run my ad. Free to use and affiliate links to the organizational products you promote for monetization. As demand increases, may switch to # of rooms/spaces free before having to pay/buy credits for more. Expect to take 6-18 months of figuring out the perfect blend between ad, landing page, and app functionality before finding the right flow. You can also send mailers to interior decor”
“I have a client who has a 1K+ products with several hundreds of variants, I worked to break down campaigns by product type, but PMax - Shopping is struggling to just get off the ground. We have a Con. Value bid strategy, hundreds of products per campaign, removed asset info and audience targeting (to promote Google Merchant Center information), and limited negatives to allow traffic. Any advice or tips to get the campaign running? submitted by /u/Relevant_Customer_90 [link] [co”
“The fact that you can spend up to $80 per day for ads and whatnot means you have a useful budget which is a great place to start from. I’ve never really been in the supplements line before but generally Google ads and Meta ads should be helpful but how to go about it is the question. I think you should be open to hiring a marketing strategist within a reasonable price and assess their suggestions first through consulting before starting the process.”
“Not going to prove you wrong, because most accounts I see do burn money. But the reason is usually boring and fixable. The platform sells attention and it delivers attention. What it cannot do is decide who should be paying attention, and that part is in your copy and your landing page. When an ad is broadly appealing, you get cheap clicks from people who will never buy, the dashboard looks healthy, and nothing lands in the pipeline. That feels exactly like a con. Before writing the channel off,”
“The budget question matters less than one thing you can answer today: do you know the words your buyer uses when they already know they have the problem? Google works when you can buy intent that already exists. If people search for the category, you can start small, a few hundred a month on 5 to 10 exact match terms, and you will learn fast. If nobody searches for what you do yet, Google will happily spend your money on broad terms and teach you nothing. Two things that save new accounts more m”
“Hey everyone, I'm new to Google Ads and set up a small Search campaign as a test run. It's been live for 24 hours, the bid strategy status still says "Learning", and I've got only 2 impressions and zero clicks. Setup: Campaign type: Search Daily budget: ₹500 (I know it's tiny, this is just a test) Duration: 4 days Location: India Bid strategy: Max CPC capped at ₹70 What I've checked: Campaign status: (Eligible, Limited by budget) Billing is set up: yes Ads approved:”
“I'm still trying to make sense of performance max. I've has campaigns where it looks great on the surface, but then when I dig into the actual search terns and conversions, I'm not always convinced the traffic is valuable as the headline numbers suggest I'm considering getting some outside help rather than continuing to fiddle with it myself. Flighted came up during my search for a Google advertising agency, and their approach to Search and pmax seems pretty hands-on But i'd”
“Ads are pretty good man, my guy is doing a great job at it, we’re just having a hard time scaling. 4x is low for ecom? I thought it wasn’t bad. The Google shopping ads were too expensive”
“Have you tried using demographic based bid modification (eg: bidding + / - for 18-24 age ) ? Are there use cases wherein the demographic based bid modifiers has worked? Curious to know as we are experimenting with a few use cases and getting somewhat positive outcomes. submitted by /u/amitabhverma [link] [comments]”
“You mentioned free Google Ads credit. Unfortunately that usually goes to Display/PMax, which sends a lot of bots your way. 200 add to carts and zero sales is exactly what that looks like. Nobody using your 100% off code backs that up. Check GA4 for where the carts come from, and try Microsoft Clarity (free) to watch real sessions. Also, the email in your banner has an extra "t" (eternallytattuned), so support emails might not be reaching you.”
“first thing i'd check is if the clicks actually match the target audience or if your landing page is leaking interest somewhere.. we use Nordveia.com to handle google ads fixes directly instead of just handing over reports”
“https://preview.redd.it/a8mtfkx2hpsh1.png?width=1432&format=png&auto=webp&s=155e24239304fc0c45e26df4e6ddf3c4fd603cab I'm trying to retarget visitors who have hit my google ads landing pages or main website but not converted. Audience size is Search 370 | Youtube 370 | Display 120 | Gmail 110 I get about 1200-1300 clicks a month in the ads campaign, and a couple of thousand visitors to the main site, so I would have thought that there should be enough traffic to retarget. I starte”
“Hey all, so I 'manage' an automated google ads site for a transmission shop. I transitioned to a fully manual (expert?) account and am having great difficulty making google happy. Previously I had a landing page (sites.google) with a couple sub-pages that worked just fine. I link to the same pages now and they arent accepted. Ive brought in chatgpt to help, but Im not sure its helping. It keeps emphasizing that the domain name and the business name must match. I developed multiple landin”
“Hi everyone, I run a fresh D2C apparel brand that's doing really well on Meta, so I wanted to try my luck with Google Ads PMax campaigns. I've been away from PPC for a while, but I found recommendations that this is the way to go in 2026. Results are absolutely horrible: Roughly 2000 clicks on a 600 USD spend, not a single conversion. Keep in mind that with Meta I have a 3-4% conversion rate. 90% of traffic is to YouTube and display ads (wtf?). It literally makes its own YouTube ads with”
“Hey everyone, I’m looking for some advice on how to structure and scale my Google Shopping campaigns. I have around 14,000 SKUs(Clothing store) and recently launched a Standard Shopping campaign . Here’s what has happened so far: Standard Shopping Budget: $50/day Running for: ~2 weeks Purchases: 10 ROAS: 0.5 Currently showing “Limited by budget” Bid Strategy - manual cpc After about a week, I started identifying products that were generating sales and moved those products into a PMax campaign .”
“I work at a healthcare/tech company in LatAm, and I'm now responsible for paid ads and user acquisition. I know a few things, since I had 1 yr experience in PPC in 2021/2022, but it's been a while. We have Google Ads, Meta Ads and TikTok Ads accounts, besides Google Tag Manager, GA4 360, Firebase and AppsFlyer for tracking. My main concern with the accounts is tracking. It isn't my strong suit, since when I worked at PPC, we had people do the tracking. Don't get me wrong, I can a”
“I am seeing search volumes going down, cost per click, cost per lead, cost per demos going up etc. The pipeline isn’t great either. Clearly the buyers are now doing most of their research in LLMs, unfortunately no way to run ads in LLMs to get B2B buyers yet. I am sure we all agree showing ads in free version of ChatGPT isn’t helping either. In a time when competition is tight and everything except brand is getting difficult how are you managing to make improvements for your clients? Are you goi”
“Not strategy. The boring bit. Checking what's spending, pausing duds, catching broken ads, sending the weekly snapshot to a client or your boss. For one typical account last week, roughly how many hours was that — and was any of it stuff a dashboard already showed you? submitted by /u/alex_in_ops [link] [comments]”
“I guess if you account for it when calculating your break even and target ROAS figures then it doesn't matter. But yeah easiest to push net sales as revenue into Google Ads. And also review blended MER across Meta + Google, and first-order / new-customer revenue. If Google's average conversion value sits well above Shopify net AOV, treat reported ROAS as inflated”
“Hi guys, I wanted to see if anyone else has experienced something similar. I’ve been running PMax campaigns for my e-commerce business for a while, and they were performing well. However, I noticed that after August 17, Google changed the campaign status to reach people even if “Limited by budget,” and a huge portion of my budget started going toward YouTube and 0 going to search which was not the case before. Has anyone else experienced this recently? Is there a way to fix it or better control”
“Your landing page is confusing and a bit distracting. It took a little while to load first of all and I’m still trying to figure out what your product does. Make it so clear a toddler would understand it in one sentence.”
“Do you guys have custom google ads on your applications? I am a beginner so far having my web app in public and I currently use Google Ads to get some traffic on my website. I am thinking to put ads to people that use my website but have no account. But I feel like having advertisement is ruining the quality of the website. What's your opinion about it? Is it worth it? How much revenue do you have approximatelly? submitted by /u/kostasa124 [link] [comments]”
“we run this on the meta side more than google (conversion adjustments via CAPI), but the mechanic and the pain point are the same. when you send a refund back as a negative value event, the algo doesn't relearn instantly, it re-weights on roughly the same lookback window your original conversion event used. we turned this on for a supplements client running 15% returns and CPA crept up almost 20% over the following month, not because delivery got worse, just because the bidding finally stopp”
“Besides the target audience, your website is literally shit. It's lagging, not optimized for mobile at all. None of the navigation links are working. Bro at least test your product after you vibe code🤦♂️🤦♂️”
“whats your CLV? so you spend 600 USD and gained 20 customers. if one customer is lets say 100 USB worth, then you got 2000 USD by spending 600 USB with is very good. without further day it's impossible to say if this scenario is good or bad”
That's why you should validate the idea before advertising
“We’ve been running Google ads for a product we’re building, and I’m trying to understand what’s going wrong with our campaign. Here are the numbers from the reporting period: • Impressions - 361k • Clicks - 40.5k • Recorded conversions - approximately 20 That’s roughly a 0.05% click to conversion rate. The weird part is that we’re clearly getting clicks but barely anyone is converting. Now I’m wondering whether we're just attracting the completely wrong audience, our landing page isn't c”
“I got given ownership to this Google Ads account where it was using a pmax feed only campaign. I know feed only is dead now so I dont think that really matters. Anyway, the sales was doing pretty good, but there was literally no segmentation or any optimisations. To gather more relevant data, I asked the client to give me their best sellers and ran it in a new shopping campaign. I also performed proper segmentations to the current running campaigns. But instead, we are getting lower sales since”
“Your point about ROAS being inflated by tax and shipping is a strong UGC hook. Show the inflated Google number on screen then cross it out to reveal what actually lands. Film the math live on a calculator instead of stating a percentage. Viewers trust the visual more than the claim.”
“Before you pay anyone to optimize your ads, check if the traffic is even real. I ran a small Google Ads test and 98 of the 114 "clicks" in my analytics turned out to be Google's own page checking bot. Real traffic was like 7x smaller than it looked. Worth knowing before someone bills you to improve it. On agencies, I went through something similar hiring help with AI stuff. About 20 calls and every single one wanted to take it over and run it. Nobody offered to look at what I'd”
“I run a small healthcare business in a rural town and I’m looking at Google ads to increase our visibility and have more traffic in the door. I have never done Google ads in my 13+ years of practice. We have mostly relied on word-of-mouth, which has served us fairly well, but there is more competition moving into the surrounding areas, and as I stated, we are a small business in a rural community. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get started? I reached out to one professional, but the”
“Folks, I've been running a Google ads campaign for a product - any insights - please see attached. Yes, the queries will be keywords, niche, etc - but for obvious reasons I cannot share that. Any guidance based on the redacted/filtered data, please? Much appreciated. Thanks a tonne! submitted by /u/No-Mongoose-6332 [link] [comments]”
“I got a new client with a 6k monthly budget and zero Google Ads history, so I had to guess the split somehow. The standard move is to throw it all at one campaign or split it evenly and hope. I've done both, and both fail. One sinks the intent you'd catch, the other burns money on keywords that don't work yet because you don't know which ones do. I've been planning search campaigns since 2019, so I started trying something else: split by search volume and buying intent, not b”
“I primarily use google ads and have built out a couple meta campaigns, I’m sorta worried about launching them based on the posts i see here. If you’re a business with good consistent results I would love to hear it. Also, we have a service based business submitted by /u/SufficientFriend3545 [link] [comments]”
“I primarily use google ads and have built out a couple meta campaigns, I’m sorta worried about launching them based on the posts i see here. If you’re a business with good consistent results I would love to hear it. Also, we have a service based business 😊 submitted by /u/SufficientFriend3545 [link] [comments]”
“Agree on contribution profit, that's the number that actually pays the bills. On the bidding question, honestly, I haven't run a clean before and after myself, so I'd be interested if anyone has. What I'd expect is that reported conversion value drops by roughly your refund rate, so if you're on a target ROAS you need to lower the target by the same proportion when you switch adjustments on. Otherwise Smart Bidding thinks performance just fell and pulls back spend. I'd ch”
“This is one of those things that can make a "great" ROAS look way better than the actual economics. Personally I care a lot more about contribution profit than whatever revenue number the ad platform happens to report. Refund adjustments matter too, especially in categories with 10-20% returns where the gap can get pretty silly. First-order ROAS is also underrated if repeat customers make up a big chunk of sales. Questions: Have you compared bidding performance before and after sending”