u/Buggzf

Hello everyone, I have a question for you all. My outdoor hibachi company's ad campaign recently switched from optimizing for clicks to optimizing for conversions. Why is it that, typically, only half of my allocated budget gets spent? Is this normal? When I was optimizing for clicks, the entire daily budget would be utilized; why did traffic drop so drastically after making this change? Should I go back to optimizing for clicks, or should I stick with optimizing for conversions?

Hello everyone, I have a question for you all. My outdoor hibachi company's ad campaign recently switched from optimizing for clicks to optimizing for conversions. Why is it that, typically, only half of my allocated budget gets spent? Is this normal? When I was optimizing for clicks, the entire daily budget would be utilized; why did traffic drop so drastically after making this change? Should I go back to optimizing for clicks, or should I stick with optimizing for conversions?

Hello everyone. I run a newly launched outdoor hibachi catering service. I hired someone to build my website and set up several Google Ads campaigns targeting three different regions. Our initial budget strategy allocated $100 per day for one high-demand region, while the two relatively lower-demand regions were each budgeted at $50 per day. For various reasons, our collaboration ended after just one week. During that week, we received only one actual booking, yet we burned through a total budget of $2,000. There were certain actions taken that I simply couldn't understand; for example, although the campaign strategy was set to "Maximize Conversions," he inexplicably raised the daily budget for the high-demand region to $275 over a weekend. Furthermore, he changed the ad's landing URL to link directly to the "Booking Complete" confirmation page. This resulted in the daily budget being consumed at double the normal rate, and—because of the direct link—the reported "conversion count" became identical to the "click count," reaching a figure of 75. These were not genuine conversions, as users were being sent straight to the confirmation page rather than reaching it organically after successfully completing a booking themselves. Is there some deeper strategic rationale behind this kind of maneuver? Additionally, at the start of the following weekdays, click volume dropped drastically; a daily budget of $200 saw only half of that amount actually spent. Then, by the second weekend, the cost-per-click (CPC) in the high-demand region suddenly skyrocketed to over $65—a cost we simply could not sustain—and yielded zero conversions. In response, I switched the campaign strategy to "Maximize Clicks" and set a manual bid cap of $7 per click. I’m not sure if this was the right move, but we did receive three bookings that week. However, the results still fall far short of our expectations. Google has also recommended that we continue to prioritize conversions. We would like to ask: should we persist in optimizing for conversion rates and increase our budget? After all, our previous budget was indeed somewhat too low, and we had already planned to increase it in May.

Hello everyone. I run a newly launched outdoor hibachi catering service. I hired someone to build my website and set up several Google Ads campaigns targeting three different regions. Our initial budget strategy allocated $100 per day for one high-demand region, while the two relatively lower-demand regions were each budgeted at $50 per day. For various reasons, our collaboration ended after just one week. During that week, we received only one actual booking, yet we burned through a total budget of $2,000. There were certain actions taken that I simply couldn't understand; for example, although the campaign strategy was set to "Maximize Conversions," he inexplicably raised the daily budget for the high-demand region to $275 over a weekend. Furthermore, he changed the ad's landing URL to link directly to the "Booking Complete" confirmation page. This resulted in the daily budget being consumed at double the normal rate, and—because of the direct link—the reported "conversion count" became identical to the "click count," reaching a figure of 75. These were not genuine conversions, as users were being sent straight to the confirmation page rather than reaching it organically after successfully completing a booking themselves. Is there some deeper strategic rationale behind this kind of maneuver? Additionally, at the start of the following weekdays, click volume dropped drastically; a daily budget of $200 saw only half of that amount actually spent. Then, by the second weekend, the cost-per-click (CPC) in the high-demand region suddenly skyrocketed to over $65—a cost we simply could not sustain—and yielded zero conversions. In response, I switched the campaign strategy to "Maximize Clicks" and set a manual bid cap of $7 per click. I’m not sure if this was the right move, but we did receive three bookings that week. However, the results still fall far short of our expectations. Google has also recommended that we continue to prioritize conversions. We would like to ask: should we persist in optimizing for conversion rates and increase our budget? After all, our previous budget was indeed somewhat too low, and we had already planned to increase it in May.