I have a book online store https://knigavpodarok.com.ua/ua/ on the Webasyst CMS, and I am currently managing my advertising on Google myself. At the beginning of 2024, I divided the assortment of my store by price into different feeds and Performance Max campaigns. One campaign for cheap books and another for expensive books. It was relatively effective, generating about 500,000 UAH in turnover per month, which is a significant amount for my store. With tolerable expenses. The ROAS for the cheap books campaign is 750%, and for the expensive books, it is 600%. Recently, the ratio of turnover to expenses has left much to be desired, especially in the campaign for expensive goods. Although, strangely enough, in September, a message appeared in my Adwords account saying “Congratulations on achieving account efficiency.” Currently, I have 2 feeds with up to 150 products in each, and I am working with them manually.
I would like the specialist to understand the problems, address everything that is lacking, and, while managing my advertising, bring it to maximum efficiency.
Problems to be faced:
Setting up e-commerce
Some time ago, the transition from GA Universal to GA 4 was completed. However, the e-commerce scripts on the site still remain those that were under GA Universal. They do not transmit the events to the new version of analytics that were transmitted to the old one. E-commerce setup needs to be done for the new version of analytics.
Is it targeting the wrong audiences?
Since the end of June 2024, I have felt that the effectiveness of my Performance Max campaigns has decreased. I felt that the system is bringing me to the site not quite the same audiences of buyers that it did before when the advertising was more effective. I learned that the disabling of third-party cookies has not yet occurred and will only happen in 2025, but the system behaves as if it has lost the ability to accurately reach the right audience. In the cheap books campaign, the system suggested a decrease in ROAS from 750% to 600%.
Enhanced conversion tracking.
Enhanced conversion tracking has not been set up; there have been messages in the advertising account about the necessity to do so, and I have already received 4 emails regarding the setup of enhanced conversion tracking:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16uDxa5n7b79JmsJQVydv41Egd_7Ha02jyqJUM7dFPWk/edit
Consent mode. I have also received messages like this https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6-BxxcBhrMWfk5jLlSbs5cJWCN01Ed8Aeuc7VFyJkQ/edit, regarding the consent mode that I need to set up, as I seem to be showing ads in Eurozone countries, although I do not have campaigns targeting outside of Ukraine, only Ukraine.
Fake orders. I previously divided the assortment of my store into a feed with cheap books and a feed with expensive elite books - and launched a Performance Max campaign for each feed accordingly. In the campaign with expensive goods (only in this one), fake orders occasionally come in. What they represent: an order for an expensive book comes through the site, with the details of a real person - name, surname, city, Nova Poshta branch, and when you call, such a person exists, but they know nothing about such an order, and some have said that they have already received calls from different stores 5 times today and insistently asked not to be disturbed ever again. Perhaps such orders are made by competitors, or as I was explained, they can be made by unscrupulous owners of internet platforms where Google shows ads - by clicking on the ad and ordering an expensive product, they inform the system that their resource is effective and that more traffic should be directed there. What have I tried to do about this? I tried to exclude the hour when the fake order occurred, as shown here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrrd6FjvEJg. But, firstly, this probably does not cancel the conversion, and secondly, the expenses have already occurred long ago and are not covered by the corresponding revenues. Therefore, I see no sense in this. I did not attempt to send a conversion cancellation like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCcyXl4D1dE because I do not fully understand how to do it. I tried to set the bidding strategy for the newly created campaign not to “Conversion Value,” but to “Conversions.” Then the value of fake conversions would not affect anything. But the system issues a warning for the campaign that says “Limited by bidding type,” suggesting changing it to “Conversion Value,” and if there is such a warning, then the campaign is unlikely to work well, so I had to agree with the system and set “Conversion Value,” which means being again affected by fake orders. Mainly, fake orders began to appear around the end of the third week of the campaign's operation, so I found nothing better than to pause the campaign, delete it, and create a new one from scratch when such orders appeared. Thus, since the end of December 2023, I have accumulated about 10 canceled campaigns. This is unlikely to be a good solution. It would be good if you have other ideas for combating fake orders - because if not, there is no point in starting.
Doubling or tripling conversions. Occasionally, it happens that, for example, an order is made for a book for 5,000 UAH, but Google Ads counts this as 3 conversions - and here you have the conversion value instead of 5 already 15,000 UAH. What is this? Did the buyer click the “Place Order” button three times? Or did they refresh the success page several times? Or is there some strange formula somewhere?
