What am I doing wrong? Can’t seem to grasp Google Ads, CPC or budget.

[Lorathis]

21 clicks and 20 sign ups? I don’t think I’ve ever run even a branded campaign with that high of a real conversion rate in my 11 years of running Google Ads. That data sounds super suspicious.

You really need more detail here to get any good advice, but only $10/day doesn’t go very far in most countries.

In the majority of cases you’ll need at least a month (probably a lot longer at that spend) to really dial in for good performance. Not knowing your industry, what a conversion is, what revenue you expect from it, etc. there’s not a lot of advice other than you should do more research before running your own campaigns.

Do some searches and read some blogs at a minimum about what’s trending in PPC.

The first thing I’d suggest is verify your conversion setup. If you aren’t tracking things generating actual revenue then you’re going to be sending Google the wrong signals.

It could be actual purchases or subscriptions, but if you just do lead gen you really should score leads somehow. Bot leads full of garbage are not worth a real lead likely to sign up, and Google will optimize all day long for bot leads if you track them.

[Appropriate_Ebb_3989]

First of all I’ve never seen a 90%+ conversion rate. Could be a statistical anomaly, most likely fake.

Google ads is an auction based on keywords. Each keyword is its own auction. The CPC you pay is based on what other people are bidding or willing to pay on each specific keyword.

Your ad only shows up for that keyword if you’re a top 3 highest bidder (basically).

To get sub 0.2 cent clicks, you need to pretty much be targeting traffic no one else is bidding on.

This usually leads to bot clicks or clicks that do not convert because, if no one else is bidding on that traffic, or they’re just not willing to pay that much, it’s usually because they can’t make money off that traffic.

Did this “friend” sell you a course?

Basically his strategy seems to be set a super low CPC and then pray you get some cheap traffic that actually converts.

The reality of this? It’s not that reliable.

What keywords is he targeting? What’s the match type? How is he tracking performance over time?

You can optimize for CPA instead, which tends to work better and scale a lot better.

Basically you tell Google, hey I’m willing to pay X amount per action. You can define the action. It can be a signup to the free trial. This way Google automatically determines based on its internal data and your data how much CPC to bid for you to achieve that cost per action.

You need conversion tracking. Google needs to be able to see which traffic actually signs up.

You can determine target CPA like this.

Let’s say you make $10 per paying customer and expect the customer to stay 3 months, so you will profit $30 per paying customer.

Let’s say 60% convert from free to paid.

If I pay $30*0.6 =$18.00 per free trail, I’ll break even.

I want to double my money (which is reasonable, none of this 10x bs.) you do 18.00/2=9

So your target CPA is $9. Then you set max conversion value strategy with tCPA of $9.