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Performance Max Campaign – a way to destroy someone’s Google Ads account?
Hey guys,
on 21st October we received a **fake order** on our website, reaching a value of 4.3 trillion CZK (approx. 189 billion USD). This order was **attributed to a Performance Max Campaign**. It used to be our most effective campaign (even before Google automatically turned it into “Performance Max” from the previous “just Smart” campaign).
Seems like a fraud or unfair practice from the competition. Anyway…
Since Performance Max Campaigns are all about data evaluation, machine learning, and automatization, you can imagine what happened after the campaign had been hit by a fake order, which happened to be several billion times higher than an average conversion value.
**The result: Google Ads account was paralyzed and basically destroyed.** We used the Data Exlusion function, excluding a period of 14 days, just to get rid of as much affected data as possible. Unfortunately, that did not help at all.
After contacting Google Ads support, I mean the community (since there was just **no way to contact the support directly)**, we were recommended to simply stay patient. The account will get back they said. It just has to get rid of the affected data and learn the new data. “It’s just math”, the community assured us.
Well, now it’s the end of December and we hoped it could be a good time to prepare campaigns for January, so we can start all over again.
While creating a **new** Performance Max campaign, I can see the **”Week estimate”** performance on the right side of the page. It says that if we keep the **budget at $50 a day, the estimated weekly conversion value should be around 6 million USD.** Sweet.
You can see a screenshot of the bug here: [https://ibb.co/P13fLPb](https://ibb.co/P13fLPb). The currency is CZK (140 million CZK equals approx. 6.4 million USD).
It’s clear that data from the FAKE order **are still around**. Maybe the data do not affect the smart campaigns anymore, but they still affect the performance planner and other estimation calculations. **Maybe the data exclusion did not work at all?**
Now it brings us to a question: Is this a good time to abandon your Google Ads account, which **has been doing great for 7 years?**
**Performance Max Campaigns can be a way to damage an e-commerce site really badly.** One thing I could recommend to everyone: always have **a shopping limit implemented in a shopping cart on your website.** We did not think about it and we paid for it. That was definitely our mistake. It could be solved much easier though – if there was a way to get in touch with Google Ads support.
There would be quite a simple solution that could help us avoid deleting our Google Ads account. All we need is Google Ads support to completely remove the fake transaction data from our account.
Have you ever had a similar experience?
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1 Reply
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Hey,
I mean that is really rough – I guess you could have tried creating a new website purchase conversion and optimising towards that, that should have reset you from the start again. It’s not possible for Google to remove fake transaction data unfortunately…
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Wow this is scary. Just curious are you optimizing for add to carts or purchases because it definitely seems odd that a fraud order of that size triggered a purchase conversion event.
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That’s really unfortunate. The impact of older data diminishes over time, particularly the impact to automated bidding. But yet, it may hang around affecting some things for up to 90-days.
One thing to note is that if you save the GCLID data you can adjust that conversion. But of course, you have to be using a Google Ads pixel for tracking and most shopping carts don’t allow saving of the GCLID.
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This is a glaring bug on Google’s end if I am understanding this correctly. Any competitor could potentially generate a fake conversion(s) on your site and hose your Performance Max campaigns.
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Wow, I hadn’t even considered the fact that this could happen.
Curious to know what type of product you sell.
I suppose for those of us with inventory levels that would prevent such massive fake orders, although if stock levels are high enough it could still be a problem.
I use Woocommerce and do have a plugin that restricts payment methods based on order value, this is really useful for various reasons, but not considered removing all payment options to prevent an order over a certain amount.
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Sounds like a fake troll story. If you spend a lot on google ads, you shouldn’t be using smart or pmax anything. The manual stuff works way better if you know how to use it.
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Have you looked into the [conversion adjustment](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7686447?hl=en) feature instead? You should be able to remove that high order conversion or restate the conversion value and get back to something more normal for your ad account.
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With respect to the community, nobody knows how the algorithm works. I highly doubt that data is disregarded after a certain time. TTFV mentions 90 days but the reality is we don’t know. More likely, there’s more weight to more recent data. Since you are talking millions of times higher than normal, that will still have an impact on how the algo figures things out, even if it puts only a 1% weight on that figure one year from now.
I’m also trying to figure out how your account was paralyzed. Seems to me that such a big number would be beneficial but then, as I said, I don’t know the algo and how that number would be used. If this was malicious, someone really put their thinking cap on and wanted to see what kind of damage they could do.
It’s a lesson for all of us so thanks for sharing.
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Just a thought…
If you track the gclid, then you can upload offline returned orders or something similar, dunno the exact name, and maybe it should flag the algo… -
Please post this on linkedin so it goes viral
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Interesting. Thanjs for you share. Does not surprise me and typical advice. Wait it out: while you pay. You should sue them for the fake order. If they black box your adspend then they have responsibility towards disclosure otherwise they could have bot armies doing this for them just to make them money.
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Use the conversion adjustment as others have stated. A few more things you can do are
1) Shorten your attribution window so that the automated bidding focuses on more recent data
2) Create another purchase event tag to use as the primary tracker and change the tag with the bad data to secondary
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