Practitioner pattern · Ashley Black (Founder of Candid Consulting, an agency that runs and audits Google App Campaigns for app clients)
Check where each Google ad actually runs, and treat cheap CPMs as a warning
An audit traced poor traffic to ads running only on display sites
Workedpaid-searchanalytics-attribution
What they did
Use the 'networks' segment to see, per asset and ad group, the share of traffic going to search vs display (AdMob, mobile web, Play browse) vs YouTube; search partners should be small. Add CPM as a custom column: when performance drops, check whether CPM also dropped, since cheaper CPMs often mean worse traffic. Ignore Google's asset performance rating (it reflects scale and CTR, not your CPA) and don't hold IPM to one bar across networks. Check placement reports and block spammy sites/apps (blocks apply account-wide). Judge ultimately on CPA and down-funnel ROAS.
What happened
In an audit, a client's poor traffic was explained by all assets serving on the Display Network with no search traffic.
- Stage
- optimization
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · The Right (and Wrong) Way to Grow with Google App Campaigns — Ashley Black, Candid Consulting“everybody uses that the segment called like networks. And that's, again, where you can see at an asset level how your ads are serving across all those different inventory sources.”
“I actually spend a lot of time looking at CPMs.”
“cheaper CPMs mean worse traffic, not always, but a lot of times.”
“And I'm like, "It's because all of these assets are serving on the Display Network. And you're not getting any of that high-quality search traffic."”
Related topics
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