Notes
Notes from the desk.
Working notes on running paid search with rigor: what we measure, what we watch, and why it shows up in cost per acquisition.
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Most accounts don't have a bidding problem
Why we rebuild measurement before touching a single bid, and what month-end reporting hides.
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The hidden catch with negative keywords
Negative keywords in Google Ads still run on the old, strict match-type logic, even though your regular keywords no longer do. That mismatch is why the searches you negatived keep coming back.
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Performance Max won't tell you if it's prospecting or harvesting
Run Performance Max to find new customers and it often spends the budget on brand and existing-customer demand instead. That demand is worth buying. The catch is PMax won't show you the split, so a strong blended ROAS can read as new-customer acquisition when it isn't.
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Why doubling your budget doesn't double your leads
Raising the budget often does nothing, because the bid target was the real cap, not the budget. You scale a profitable campaign by freeing the spend first, then growing it with budget, and when the CPA tops out, going to work on the CPA itself.
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Set your tCPA from your real CPA, then stop touching it
Target CPA only works if you set it from what the account already achieves, not a number you wish for, and then leave it alone long enough to learn. Most tCPA problems are patience problems.
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Exact match isn't exact anymore
Exact match stopped meaning the exact term years ago. It now buys synonyms and rewordings, and in competitive niches phrase drifts so wide it shows you on competitor names. Here is how to run an account when the keyword labels no longer mean what they say.
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In Standard Shopping, your product title is your keyword
Standard Shopping has no keyword field. Google decides which searches you show on by reading your product feed, and the title does most of the work. So a flood of irrelevant search terms is not a bidding problem you fix with negatives, it is a titling problem you fix in the feed.
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Google optimizes for the conversion you feed it
Smart Bidding learns to find more of whatever you count as a conversion. Count form fills and it finds form-fillers, not buyers. Capture the GCLID, send back which leads actually closed and what they were worth, and the same bidding starts hunting for revenue. It is also the edge a lead broker cannot copy.
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A tight daily budget can push you out of the auction entirely
A budget that's too small doesn't just buy fewer clicks. With aggressive automated bidding, Google chases top placements from the first impression, and if those cost more than your budget can sustain, it drops you out of the auction. Few impressions, no data, and nothing for the model to learn from.
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