Google Ads Is Taking Back The Efficiency It Gave You: The August 17 Limited By Budget Change
There is a quiet win that most people managing Google Ads accounts have enjoyed without ever really naming it. You set a Target CPA of $60. The campaign is limited by budget. Over a few months, Smart Bidding settles it at $38. You did not ask for that. The system found the efficiency inside the […]
The Display To Demand Gen Migration: The Complete Guide To Moving Before Google Moves You
There is a version of this migration where nothing much happens. You click a button, the campaign changes type, performance wobbles for a few days and settles. There is another version where you lose your seasonality adjustments without noticing, your combined audiences quietly stop existing, your HTML5 creative stops serving, your Brand Lift study has […]
Performance Max Segmentation: When To Split Your Campaigns, When To Leave Them Alone, And What It Costs To Get It Wrong
Most advertisers arrive at Performance Max carrying a rule they learned somewhere else, and it is the wrong rule. The rule is consolidate. Fewer campaigns, more data in each one, let Smart Bidding learn. For Search campaigns that advice is correct and we have argued for it ourselves, with data: all 24 of our Search […]
Smart Bidding Benchmarks 2026: 7 Of Our 10 Target CPA Campaigns Never Had The Data To Run It
Google publishes a number for Target CPA and almost nobody checks their account against it. The number is 30. Google’s own Target CPA documentation recommends evaluating performance over the last 30 days including at least 30 conversions. Below that, the machine learning has too few examples to find a pattern, and you get bidding that […]
Performance Max vs Search Benchmarks 2026: 36 Lead Gen Campaigns, $163,732, and the One Account That Broke the Numbers
We nearly published a number we would have spent the next two years apologising for. The plan was simple. Pull thirteen months of campaign data across the lead generation accounts we manage, compare Performance Max against Search on cost per lead, publish the table. Almost nobody can run that comparison properly, because you need the […]
Google Ads Campaign Structure Benchmarks 2026: All 24 Of Our Search Campaigns Were Below The Learning Threshold
We expected some of our Search campaigns to be short of conversion volume. We did not expect all of them. Twenty-four Search campaigns across thirteen lead generation accounts. Not one produced 30 conversions a month. Twenty-three produced fewer than ten. Twenty produced fewer than five. Every dollar of Search spend in the export, $109,631 of […]
Google Ads Seasonality Adjustments: The Data Says You Probably Shouldn’t Use Them
Every October, a version of the same message lands in our inbox from a client: “Should we set up seasonality adjustments for Black Friday?” For years the standard answer, including from Google itself, was yes. Tell Smart Bidding the spike is coming, let it bid harder, capture the peak. Then Optmyzr published a study that […]
Google Ads Limited by Budget: When to Increase Spend and When to Fix Waste First
Quick answer “Limited by budget” does not mean your Google Ads campaigns are stopped delivering. It also does not automatically mean you should give Google more money. It means your daily budget is not high enough to cover all the traffic your campaign is eligible to enter. Google thinks there are more impressions, clicks, or […]
AI Max for Google Ads: What Businesses Should Fix Before Turning It On
Before you turn on AI Max, fix these things first AI Max is not the first thing we would fix in most Google Ads accounts. It is one of the last things we would test after the account is clean enough to handle more automation. That may sound cautious, but we have seen what happens […]
The 9 Pillars of a Profitable Google Ads Account
The account is usually not broken in the place everyone is staring at When a business owner says, “Google Ads is not working,” the first thing most people do is open the campaign screen. They look at keywords. They look at bids. They look at cost per click. They look at Performance Max. They look […]