[AMA] “We did exactly what Google told us to do, and went from 15 leads to 6, how to fix?”

A follower on Reddit asked:

Hi Nils!

Got a client we’re running between $5K and $6K a month on Google Ads, and he’s looking for 15 to 20 good, qualified leads outta that spend.

Before that August 17 change hit, we had this thing singing. Target CPA set at $300, campaign was budget limited, but we were pulling in 20 to 30 qualified leads a month, easy. Actual CPA was running about $220, leads were good quality, and the client was tickled pink.

Once the August 17 change came through, we went and brought that tCPA down to match the $220 where it’d actually been performing.

Ever since, we’ve been watching our average CPC creep up, and some of these search terms are pulling clicks at prices waaay higher than what they used to cost.

Last two weeks, we only scraped up 6 qualified leads total, and Google’s still spending that daily budget down to the penny.

Our best guess is them high-dollar clicks are the culprit here. You got any thoughts on how we straighten this out?

Below was my response.

Assuming you are already tracking qualified leads and mining your search terms for negatives, here’s what I would try:

1. Create a target CPA portfolio bid strategy with a Max CPC bid limit.
2. Initially, set the tCPA to the business-acceptable CPA of $300.
3. Pull search term level click data for the 10 weeks before August 17.
4. Filter to search terms that converted (conv >= 1), and look at the CPC distribution (sort high to low). 
5. Set the Max CPC bid limit at roughly the 90th–95th percentile. 

The logic: almost all of your profitable clicks sit below that line, so the cap only clips the expensive tail where smart bidding is currently overpaying, without starving normal auctions.

Once you get back to 20 conversions per month, try decreasing the tCPA and increasing the bid limit in small steps of 10%-20% to see if you can get performance back to where it was.

Here’s the logic for that: after the initial learning phase and at a volume of 20-30 conversions per month, smart bidding gets significantly better at predicting the likelihood of conversion, so it can place higher CPC bids with a higher confidence that will still result in lower actual CPAs.

– Nils

PS: To catch a CPC spike like this in week one instead of week three, use a script that flags outlier search-term CPCs against averages. Use my Script Sensei to create the script for you –> https://tinyurl.com/ScriptSensei