Practitioner pattern · Ashley Black (Founder of Candid Consulting, an agency that runs and audits Google App Campaigns for app clients)
Raise or cut Google ad budgets by at most 20% every 2-3 days
Bigger jumps sent the system haywire when the guest tried
Workedpaid-search
What they did
Google engineers' rule: no more than 20% change in any day to bids or budgets, up or down. Guest is more conservative: at most 20% every 2-3 days, because daily changes keep kicking the campaign back into learning mode. When she pushed beyond it, the system started spending wildly to find new inventory.
What happened
Guest got burned exceeding 20%: the system 'goes crazy'; she keeps to 20% every 2-3 days.
- Stage
- Scale (scaling)
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · The Right (and Wrong) Way to Grow with Google App Campaigns — Ashley Black, Candid Consulting“The The engineers at Google were always like, "20%," right? "No more than 20% in any given day on bids and budgets up or down."”
“I only adjust it, or I try to only adjust it, by 20% every 2 to 3 days. I try not to do it every single day because then it just keeps kicking it back into learning mode at too great of a frequency.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Start Google app ads with one campaign per country: $200-300/day Android, $500/day iPhoneExpect a readable trend within 2-3 weeks
- Split each Google app campaign into about 5 ad groups, one per app featureShows which themes Google favors; one ad group alone tells you little
- Upload Google ad videos at 6, 10-15, 20 and 30+ seconds, portrait and landscape
- Use plain stock photos for Google image ads, mostly landscape on AndroidPlain images got more volume than designed ads in her accounts
- Write your own Google ad text lines instead of taking Google's suggestions
- Check where each Google ad actually runs, and treat cheap CPMs as a warningAn audit traced poor traffic to ads running only on display sites
- Pull costly Google ad videos a few at a time over a week, not all at onceKept conversions flowing; all were removed after a week
- Refresh tired Google ads by changing a single wordGuest says even removing one word makes Google re-test the ad
- Copy a Google campaign that stopped growing to make Google test it againSometimes unlocks more spend; not a Google best practice
- Give holiday or disaster-season ads their own ad group so you can pause themEasy to switch off; new groups often get little volume
- Tell Google to find trial starts, not paid subscribers
- Try Google's return-on-ad-spend bidding for a short test, but stay skepticalWorked for about half of subscription apps
- Spend enough to get a Google rep, then ask them for specific data