I wasn't confident at all. And was convinced I'd flunked it totally during it. But then I passed. I even said to the instructor "really?!?"

I'm gonna guess chatgpt, so not very reliable.

The Optimist by Anathema.

This has happened to me but not my partner with whom I share a Prime account with.

I spoke to support, they didn't tell me what caused it but they apologised and issued a credit and sent the issue "as feedback" lol

The correct answer. Truly terrifying

Lol.

$4 per day.

This was not meta that gave you most of the streams.

Don't get me wrong I'm happy for your stream volume. But the vast majority of those streams cannot be attributed to a mere $800 spend on meta.

You're doing well in other places to get this volume.

Source - I manage clients who spend over 300k per month ad (Google, meta, bing, linkedin) budgets for a living. I've been doing this for 15 years. And I happen to be a musician who uses my full-time job knowledge to my advantage.

Edit - I see from your other comments you acknowledge you got into the algorithms, which is most of my the streams. So again, you cannot attribute this purely to meta with any factual basis.

Not to say it didn't have a helping hand. But 0.30 cost per result (I assume streams with conversion tracking, rather than clicks) isn't exactly a low cost per stream. So divide it by the $800 and that result really would surprise me to even give a smidge of algo play. Otherwise we'd all get in it when we spend more than that.

My hunch is you're doing well in other areas and Spotify picked this up. Not meta.

Yes it means nothing without the cost associated too.

Plus who's to say the streams came from meta and not crappy bot playlists.

If it helps, I ran this through ChatGPT (yes I'm annoying like that) and got this:

The music video you're describing might be from the MTV2 series "Video Mods," which aired between 2004 and 2005. This show featured music videos created with video game characters and assets, including elaborate animated scenes. One notable episode included the band My Chemical Romance with their song "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" featuring in-game footage from "Death Jr." The style and thematic elements of this series match your description of an animated space battle and a unique, visually distinct presentation​ (University at Buffalo)​.

Came here to say this!

In my case, I kept arguing my professional opinion, they got annoyed, so they made me redundant and had to put me on 3 months gardening leave with full pay.

Which worked out very well for me ;)

How does he know our adversaries don't have the same or better tech?

I assume they keep it under wraps as good as the US, maybe even better.

In theory and according to Google, yes.

But see what happens when you update your ad to a different landing page. Check the quality score. Does it change? If you update copy on your page, I can guarantee nothing will change QS wise. So if QS is an indication of Ad Rank, it will make no difference either way.

The biggest influence of Ad Rank has always been confirmed as being CTR. But what is the biggest influence of CTR? Ad position. And how do you increase ad position? Higher bids.

If your website is mobile-first (which I assume it is) and you promote your service on your landing page (which I presume you do), beyond site speed and reducing first-contentful paint issues, I doubt there is much Google would do to grant you a lower CPC.

But I'm an old cynic who has had their skin in the game for a long time...

The only way to reduce CPC with any control is to switch over to manual bidding and lower it yourself. This is what I always do on Search or legacy Shopping campaigns.

Obviously this isn't an option if you're using PMax, but PMax is basically Shopping with low quality extras anyway. So consider testing it against a manual shopping campaign and see what performs best.

There is a genuine argument that CPC is irrelevant if your cost-per-sale/cost-per-lead is healthy anyway. What would you rather pay: $0.50 per click, with a cost per conversion of $100? Or $5 per click, with a cost per conversion of half the price, say $50?

It's the traffic quality that matters most, and if that means a higher cost per click but higher conversion rates, then sometimes you just have to suck up the higher CPC.

That said, Google is continually increasing its cost-per-clicks through a mix of poor choices from its machine learning, and upping bids at the expense of advertisers simply to feed its own bottom-line. So there isn't a huge amount you can do to be honest as the CPC will go up anyway. And I am noticing manual CPC seems to attract lower quality traffic nowadays. I assume Google is doing everything it can to convince users that their automated bidding is best, which in my experience it rarely is.

Don't even get me started on the whole "randomized ad placement" its using, which means it might choose to show other advertisers ads higher than you, even though your competition may have a lower cost-per-click than you, just because "random choice". Haha, Google truly are a joke.

If you haven't already, try Meta Ads which has on average a lower cost-per-click and a much better machine learning algorithm in place. And see what generates better results for you.

Happy to help.

I am at the point where I literally have nothing nice to say about Google Ads.

Once upon a time it was a powerful tool which, when put in the right person's hands, could generate massive income for businesses. Because they allowed advertisers to show ads when they wanted, how they wanted, where they wanted.

Now it's a semi-automated tool that is just "meh", and I don't see many businesses actually getting genuinely fantastic results from it anymore. Unless you can game the system, but every month they seem to remove a "flaw" that enables you to work the tool exactly how you want it to work.

You're over thinking it.

Low quality score / ad rank simply means the minimum reserve bid for showing your ad isn't being met. I'll get downvoted here by people here who will say you need to work on your ad copy and CTR or some other pro-google propaganda nonsense. That's just old school ppc thinking that was never even relevant and I can't be bothered arguing with them. Here it is in writing, QS is and always has been bullshit.

Changing your landing page won't help btw to reduce your CPC. People who make videos about ppc are invariably not experts. Real experts don't have time nor the inclination to make YouTube videos about ppc. It's far too nuanced. I train people PPC in person sometimes for a reasonable fee and I always see it as a waste of time because they shouldn't be managing it themselves, they should hire an expert. That's usually the conclusion they come to after training and rightly so. All the stuff they've been taught is just wrong, pro Google best practice sales. But Google isn't following its own historical best practice because all it cares about is you wasting your spend to fill its pockets.

Like those youtubers who make videos like "how I became a millionaire, sign up to my course and I'll show you how". Real millionaires aren't interested in selling a $100 course. Always makes me laugh when I see it hehe.

Some industries have a higher reserve bid in the auction. So even if nobody else but you is bidding on a keyword, Google may decide a minimum bid of $10 is needed for that sector. They increase that every year.

And if you're using machine bidding/maximize convs, you're at the whims of Google anyway.

Lucky!!

Google says it themselves, quality score has no influence on the auction:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6167118?hl=en-GB

It never has. And yet agencies still talk about "optimising for quality score".

People seem to ignore this on Google's support page about QS:

"Quality Score isn't a key performance indicator and shouldn't be optimised or aggregated with the rest of your data.

Quality Score isn't an input in the ad auction. It’s a diagnostic tool to identify how ads that show for certain keywords affect the user experience"

Straight from Google's mouth. It took them 15 years to admit this though. But anyone who's attempted to influence QS will have told you you can't directly influence QS without testing alternative KWs.

Always been a fools errand.

Sure, you could argue a higher QS would suggest a higher ad rank but in my 15 years of ppc management it's been such a minor importance in anything in the grand scheme of things that there's simply no point even considering it. The biggest impact on ad rank is CTR. And what's the biggest impact on CTR in Google? Ad position.

Given that Pmax runs your ads on the display network and this generates lower CTR naturally as a result of this, you can see why they're not factoring in this any more, not that they ever have.

Back in the day when you could control ad delivery (accelerated or standard, just one of many controls they removed to remove advertiser freedom) the done thing to do was set the lowest possible bid at high acceleration on arguably irrelevant terms (like supply chain terms) that had low CTR but huge volume. Low cost low traffic and high yield returns. Low QS keyword? Didn't matter, as qs didn't do anything anyway.

If your copy is relevant, which it invariably will be, there's absolutely no point in even worrying about it.

That's so weird. Do the women who add hiking as as hobby tend not to have any hobbies then?

Well balancing both points will help guide OP to what works best for them either way.

PPC managers who have toyed with Google ads for many years will know that trying to manipulate CPC through ad copy or "quality score" (which doesn't influence ad rank anyway) is like trying to piss in the wind and catch it in a bucket. Especially with how the platform runs now with its bid manipulation.

A good analogy I have of this is about 14 years ago I had a ppc client who wanted leads. But bounce rate was also a KPI he set.

He wanted it less than 35% or some other random figure he threw out of the air.

Interestingly enough, when lead conversion rate and cost per lead were at their prime, bounce rate naturally sat around 54% or something.

But if bounce rate was optimised for whenever the client complained, the lead conversion rate would drop and the cost per lead would subsequently go up.

Bounce rate (which is a stupid metric anyway) had a natural figure that related to lead conversion.

My point being CTR has a natural bottleneck on Google ads, especially as people don't expect to see anything other than the service they've googled for and a direct explanation of why that service is the best. If the ad copy is relevant and relates to his USP, people will click, or if it's not relevant, they'll choose not to.

Because they're a bunch of fucking cunts.

They have the ability to identify fake streams yet don't remove the source of the fake streams and instead blame the artist.

They are basically a bunch of fucking cunts.

On Google Ads, CTR is a vanity metric which is not important in the grand scheme of things when your priority is generating a return on ad spend.

You can influence CTR but sometimes at the expense of your ROAS/CPL.

That said the main influence of CTR beyond ad position is the ad copy itself.

But ask yourself if you really want everyone to click on your ad. Sometimes qualifying the click with an actual prospect, at the expense of a lower CTR, is preferable.

Die hard fans no longer exist in the way you think they do. People have access to millions and millions of tracks to listen to anytime they want.

The times of sycophantic music obsessers are over.

So on that basis, I disagree with the argument that one can "make it" on streaming.

Does it help for exposure? Sure. Can a song do well and generate millions of streams? Absolutely. Well, assuming there's decent marketing or the band is touring where and when it matters. Streaming services don't just promote any random good song. It needs traction in the first place.

Can you make a career and living purely from streaming, even if your music is good?

100% no.