We Analyzed 305 Google Ads Campaigns... Here’s What We Found

Now, unless you've only started in Google Ads in the last 2 weeks, you would know that August 17th, 2026 was a really key date for Google Ads. And the reason for that is because Google changed how its smart bidding worked, especially when you're using target CPA or target ROAS and you had a limited budget. Now, Google's promise with these changes is that it would allow you to scale with confidence. Now, I'm not arguing that statement at all in that the changes that Google implemented on August the 17th allow you as a business or brand owner to scale better with confidence. But the one thing that Google didn't mention or didn't focus on enough is that that scaling with confidence came at a price. And what that price is, is that you need to make sure you've got enough data or data inside of your individual Google Ads campaigns. Now what I'm going to do in this video is I'm actually going to break down the data that we saw across 305 individual campaigns. And because what became really, really clear is that businesses or brand owners that were running overly complicated account structures, one of the core results was, is it was limiting the amount of conversion data inside of individual campaigns, which was making your data or making the results that you're getting much more unpredictable and really going against that whole scaling with confidence process. From Google Ads. Now I want to be clear, I agree with what Google is saying, is that it is going to give you the ability to scale more with confidence. But there is that big caveat that I gave. Now for quite a number of months, I've had a real working theory that we've been working on inside of Define Digital Academy, and it relates to how we structure our accounts. It relates— also relates to how much conversion data we want going through our individual campaigns. Because I've got a really clear number, which I will show you in this video, which we try to hit. And the reason for why we try to make sure that our campaigns are hitting this number of conversions is so that we can have a much more structured and guaranteed process or result when it comes to Google Ads. Now, when I release any data like this, I'm really, really conscious that there is always a little bit of nuance and you need to know the background of the campaigns and the accounts. But I did want to take this opportunity to share this because the big change on August 17th allowed me to really run some larger data analysis. And what we looked at is what was happening 30 days before and what happened 30 days after. And as you can imagine, we're looking across over 300 different individual campaigns. We can't really look at ROAS targets because there's some of the businesses in these campaigns are happy with a ROAS of 250%, others need a ROAS of above 700%. But what it can show is the volatility. And that's what I really, really want to focus on. You want to know that there's some predictability in your results. So if you are spending, say, for example, $10,000 a month inside of Google Ads, are you going to be able to get those same results if you are able to scale up to $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, or even $100,000 a month inside of Google Ads? That's why I didn't want to waste this opportunity of this significant change that happened to Smart Bidding on August 17th, because it was one of those events that everyone was facing, regardless of whether you're lead gen or ecommerce, regardless of where you were in the world. This was a platform-wide change. Now, I'm not going to go into the big finite details of what happened on August 17th, but because I'm assuming that most people that are still watching this video would be really acutely aware of what happened on that date. But the top-line change that we all know it, that if you had campaigns that were limited by budget, and you had a target ROAS or a target CPA, there was quite often a case where if you had a limited by budget and you had a target ROAS of 200%, that campaign may perform at 400% or 500%. And what Google did was it just removed it so that the stated target, your target ROAS, becomes much more important, and the, the algorithm would bid towards that target goal. So for many businesses or brand owners who didn't set this right, They had campaigns that were running at $400 or $500, came down to that $200 or $300, whatever their target ROAS goal was. And since that change, I've seen a lot of chat on all different platforms, everything from YouTube to Instagram to LinkedIn, and people either not seeing any difference, or there's a lot of people who are really upset about these changes because it ruins the performance of the account. But as I said, for me, that's really the wrong question. What you should be focusing on is is what is the data points that you need to get right in order to best suit this bidding change or the way that Google interprets that bidding change and acts it out in your account. So for me, what we really focused on is we focused on really looking at when it comes to the number of conversions inside of your individual Google Ads campaigns, does that give you a more direct result on what— or more direct predictability on what's going to be happening with your Google Ads campaigns. Now, the reason for why this is so important for me is this, is that when it comes to Google Ads, I don't like to have campaigns or accounts that are winners one week and losers the next. One of the best things that I love about Google Ads is that there is a greater level of predictability. And the reason for that is because Google is predominantly built on that keyword intent. And so we are looking at targeting people who are already completing targeted searches for our products or our services. So it's very much on the demand capture part of the buying cycle. Now, you can also definitely go through and create some different demand, but once again, that very much does come off conversion data that you've already got in your account, customer lists that you're adding, or your individual interest or audience data from your other campaigns. So it is at some level still based on that keyword intent. And this is really, really different to other platforms. Say, for example, on Meta with different ads on Facebook or Instagram, you can really, really get supercharged performance just by a really, really top-level creative. Now, I'm not going to get into the argument of which is better, whether it's Meta or whether it's Google Ads, because the reality is, is that both are important. And any agency or marketer or anyone who tells you it's a decision between one or the other is probably someone that you should run away from. Really, really quickly because the reality is, is that you need both. But when we're talking about Google Ads, we need to really understand where that sits. And I'm really, really comfortable knowing that Google Ads is predominantly more of a demand capture because one of the advantages of that is that if you— is that you can be a lot more assured about if you increase your spend and if you increase your budgets, these are the results that you're going to be getting inside of your— not only your Google Ads account, but more importantly, inside of your business. All right, so I've got my iPad here and I'm just going to walk you through these results. Now, as I said, the— what we're really looking at here is we really wanted to look at the predictability of outcomes. Now, there were 305 different campaigns, and this was set across campaigns set in Australia, the US, and also Europe. They were all in e-commerce. I will let you know that. And what we looked at here is we looked at the data of 30 days before, 30 days after August the 17th. Now the way that we did that is that we grabbed the campaign data individually 30 days before and also 30 days after the change of August the 17th. And what we were really, really wanting to see is we wanted to see the predictability of the outcome. So as I said, because all of these individual businesses were looking at, you know, some of them had lower ROAS targets, some of them had higher ROAS targets, some of them had longer buying cycles, some of them shorter buying cycles. But what we really wanted to look at is that we had this term which we called blew up. And what that essentially is, is that that's a campaign whose ROAS moved more than 50% either way. Now, this is the one thing that I do want to also let you know is that This was moving either in the positive way or the negative way. And what we broke it down by was that people who are getting below 30 conversions a month, campaigns that were getting between 7 to 30 a week, and then 30 to 50 a week, and then 50 a week. And what I really, really wanted to show you here is that the more conversions you had inside of your individual campaigns, the more predictable your results were. Now, when you had under 7 conversions a week, but you can see from here, it really, really was a lottery. 50% of accounts saw an increase of more than 50%, either for the positive or the worst. And you can see here, the main majority were actually going down the negative way. So there was a lot more campaigns that were underperforming versus the ones that were performing at a higher level. But the big problem is there is that once again, you just don't know what is gonna happen there. When then, when you had that 7 to 30 a week, this predictability got a little bit more and only 25% of accounts were seeing that high volatility of either performance tanked or performance increased. Then when we get to 30 to 50 a week, you can see here that once again, there was only 13%. What's more important, and what I really wanna show you here is that once we hit that golden number, and this is the number that we look to achieve inside of Define Digital Academy right now is that we want 50+ conversions a week in an individual campaign. That's our stated goal of what we want to achieve. Now, for some businesses, I know we can't achieve that just because they don't have the volume that they might be a really, really boutique volume or a high-priced item. But in most cases, we can get there. And what that allows— what I want you to notice from here is, is that there was zero campaigns across the total 305 campaigns that saw more than that 50% variance. The real big take-home message I want you to see here is that the more conversions you have inside of an individual Google Ads campaign, the more predictable your results are going to be. Now let's talk about why that is the case. And this comes back to some of the core functionality of how Google Ads operates. And this is one of the things that I have always been really, really big on inside of Google Ads when I'm looking at optimizing Google Ads campaigns or reviewing different accounts for our members is there are the core benchmark rules that you do need to understand. Because once you understand those core benchmark rules, you can use it to your advantage when you're setting the structure or optimizing your Google Ads accounts. And we do know that with smart bidding, there's some key factors you need to remember here is that Google's documentation and our really real-life lived experience inside of Google Ads accounts is that you shouldn't be using Smart Bidding, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value until you're getting at least 30 conversions a month. That number then increases to 50 conversions a month before you start using Target ROAS or Target CPA. Now there's another layer of data that we look at as well, and this has got to do with the learning phase inside of Google Ads. And this has become key of what we're talking about here. Once again, you look at Google's documentation and it tells you that a learning phase is exited from a campaign when either one of two things happen. Firstly, the most important one, which I feel is, is that once you've achieved 50 conversions, that campaign will move out of its learning cycle. Or once you've gone through 3 conversion cycles. If it's 6 days, that's a learning cycle of 18 days and so on and so forth. So that brings me back to why I am now working on and why internally we're working on having a more condensed account structure where we're trying to get at least at a bare minimum, 50 conversions at a campaign level each and every week. If we can get that in 2 or 3 days, we're even happier. And it comes back to this, is that if there are any events like this, or any events that you make some significant changes in your account, you can move out of learning cycles much, much quicker. What is the advantage of that? Is if you wanna go into and rapidly increase your campaign budget, you can be a lot more aggressive with your budget increases because you're gonna be hitting that 50 camp. 50 conversion threshold much quicker. So there are a lot of advantages of sticking to that. Let me just now finish with why is this even so important? And for me, the reason for why it is so important is because I really want you to be focusing on that inside of Google Ads, it's really about less is more. And, and what I mean by that is that too many cases when we look to optimize or we look to take on accounts inside of Define Digital Academy, What we find is that people get stuck down this trap of over-optimizing or using an overly complicated account structure. Whereas if you use the data from Google Ads in your favor and you can get more conversion data running through your campaigns, it's so much easier to not only manage your account but also predictably scale your account. So we work with this number one rule in mind, and that is that When we look to set up an account structure or what is the best structure for any individual business, doesn't matter whether it's lead gen or e-commerce, we're really looking at this question of we wanna start with a structure of one campaign and one ad group. Now, we're never able to do that, but because we have that as our stated starting point, it means that we have to justify every new ad group and every new campaign that we add because there are a lot of valid reasons for adding different ad groups and campaigns. But what you want to be able to do is that when you're looking at your account structure, you want to have a stated goal for each individual campaign and each individual ad group or asset group. So thank you so much for joining me. And if you'd like to see right now a case study where I actually take you through a real example of how we condensed an account structure from 10 campaigns down to 4 campaigns and saw instant results, I want you to go through and watch this video right now. Right here. Hey, thanks so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here. Remember, if you do want some more strategic help with your Google Ads, just make sure you follow that link in the description below. If you want to stay on YouTube, go watch this video right here. See ya.