🧠 Ask and learn: Exclusive knowledge from Inceptly's top minds

Dear subscribers,

We're excited to bring you a special edition of our newsletter, where we answer some of the most intriguing questions from our readers. Our experts at Inceptly have shared their knowledge and insights to help you solve your dilemmas and navigate the world of digital marketing more effectively.

Let’s dive in…

Today’s topic: 🕵🏻‍♂️ How to detect early signals of junk traffic in your YouTube advertising campaigns

These are the questions we received from you after this particular newsletter edition. In case you missed it, you can check it out here.

Question 1: “What do you recommend to do in the following case?

I’m running the exact same ads as in another Google ads account, but in this account, it's sending almost all of my traffic to youtube.com home, which is very poor quality. And of course, you can’t exclude it. Thanks in advance.”

Mirna recommends:

• Relaunching a test with different formats of ad - tests will the shorter ad get different traffic

• Testing out different bidding strategies - tCPA/tROAS

• Make sure to use these placement exclusions to hopefully minimize junk

  mobileappcategory::69500

  googleadsense_without_youtube.com

Question 2: “Hi Mirna, what’s the reason this happens?

CPM was stable for the whole day until it gradually started getting to uncomfortably low levels. And this crazy spike in impressions doesn’t positively impact the results either. I was profitable until this happened, and then closed the day with a negative ROI.

Is it that the Google bot picks up certain words within the ad/script it doesn’t like and flags it? And afterward, resulting in lower-quality traffic? This happened after the ad ran profitably for a couple of days.

If I had my budget at 10k, most of it would have gone to waste. Crazy.”

Mirna recommends the following:

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reasons for this without thorough analysis, but it looks like Google pushed it to in-feed placement which resulted in lower CPMs.

An unusual spike in impressions without a corresponding increase in clicks or conversions could indicate click fraud or bot traffic, which can severely impact your ROI.

Use tools to detect and filter out invalid traffic. Consider using third-party services to monitor for click fraud.

Sometimes, changes in ad policies or automated reviews by Google’s system might flag certain elements of your ad, reducing its performance.

Review Google’s ad policies to ensure compliance and adjust your ad content if necessary. Sometimes, simply pausing and then restarting the ad can help reset the performance.

Google’s ad platform uses a Quality Score to determine ad rankings. If your ad’s relevance or landing page experience declines, it can reduce your Quality Score, leading to lower CPM and poorer traffic quality.

Ensure your ad copy is relevant to your audience and that your landing page provides a good user experience.

The digital ad space is highly competitive. If more advertisers start bidding for the same audience, it can drive up impressions but lower your CPM as the system tries to use your budget efficiently.

Monitor your competitors and adjust your bidding strategy or target different keywords/audiences.

If the same audience has been exposed to your ad multiple times, they might start ignoring it, leading to lower engagement and a drop in CPM.

Refresh your ad creative or target a new audience segment to combat ad fatigue.

We hope you found this Q&A edition of our newsletter helpful. Email us your questions, and our expert team will happily provide insightful answers and support.

Thank you for being a valued member of the Inceptly community!

Best regards,

The Inceptly Team

💌 Like this newsletter? Let's continue the conversation!

Get in touch with us by responding to this email or tagging us on LinkedIn or Instagram and sharing your thoughts. Your feedback helps us keep our newsletter relevant and interesting.

Enjoyed what you read? Don't keep it to yourself! Share this email with your friends and help us grow our community.

Not a subscriber yet? Click here and join our community for more insightful content straight to your inbox.