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Start with your bidding strategy. If you are using a target CPA or target ROAS, the algorithm may not have enough conversion data to bid efficiently, which drives costs up. Check if your conversion rate has dropped — a lower conversion rate means the algorithm bids higher to hit your target. Also review Quality Score: a drop in relevance or landing page experience raises your CPC structurally. Finally, open the auction insights report. If new competitors have entered the auction, that changes the dynamic regardless of what you do.

Ad rank is a product of bid, Quality Score, and expected impact of ad extensions. The highest-leverage move is improving Quality Score, which comes from keyword-to-ad relevance, landing page relevance, and expected click-through rate. Using exact match or tight phrase match keywords in dedicated ad groups usually improves this faster than any bidding change. Increasing your conversion rate — even artificially through micro-conversions like scroll depth or time on site — gives the algorithm better data and can improve delivery. Adjusting your CPA or ROAS target also affects how aggressively the algorithm bids. Sometimes loosening the target temporarily gives the algorithm more room to compete.

No. PMax was designed primarily for e-commerce businesses with product feeds, clear purchase signals, and sufficient conversion volume. It needs more budget than other campaign types to exit the learning phase and more conversion data to optimise effectively. For lead generation businesses, service businesses, or accounts with limited budgets, PMax often consolidates spend in ways you cannot control or measure properly. We treat PMax as a scaling tool, used in phase 3 when the foundation is already proven, not as a starting point.

Ask for an audit of your current account before you sign anything. The quality of that audit tells you most of what you need to know. A good agency finds specific structural problems and explains how they would fix them and why. They do not give you a generic report. If you are new to Google Ads, talk about your goals and be specific about timeframes and budget. Ask them what CPA or ROAS you should realistically expect in the first three months, not after a year. Ask how they structure campaigns in the learning phase and when they start scaling. If they cannot answer those questions clearly, keep looking.

Not automatically. Google's recommendations are designed to increase spend, not necessarily performance. Some are useful. Many are not appropriate for your specific account. Every recommendation should be evaluated against your actual goal. A blanket acceptance of recommendations is one of the fastest ways to lose control of an account.

It depends on your CPC and your target CPA. A general rule: your monthly budget should be at least 10 to 15 times your target CPA to give the algorithm enough data to exit the learning phase. Below that, you are running in permanent learning mode and results will be inconsistent. We always set a budget recommendation based on your specific market and keyword landscape, not a generic number.

The most common causes are: a competitor increasing their presence in your auction, a seasonal shift in search behaviour, a technical issue with conversion tracking, a landing page change that affected conversion rate, or a Google algorithm update. We always check tracking integrity first, because undetected tracking breaks are the most common cause of apparent performance drops that are actually data problems.