I almost got a heart attack while opening a client's dashboard once. I was doing my usual check-in, but this time everything had dropped flat, no conversions, no clicks, nothing. I started checking everything. Was it a bidding issue? No... Ah, maybe competitor aggression? Nope... Well, turns out the design team had updated the page and removed the tracking code. Safe to say I always check if my codes are still on now.
This is something we had to deal with almost as soon as we launched, and the cause of the problem was simple: We're in a very crowded industry with lots of large, established players, and those players were outbidding us for keywords and ads. It was something we simply didn't have the resources to overcome; instead, we shifted our focus to smaller businesses and we've found a good niche there.
I don't really see Google Ads performance drops as "unexpected." It's more like something we can anticipate because of how the platform has evolved. As far as my knowledge and market experience, performance on Google Ads has gone down quite a bit and many people are frustrated. Companies haven't stopped spending because there aren't many alternatives and you can't advertise on ChatGPT yet for example, though I believe ads will eventually come there and everyone will want to be on it. Google still gets a big share of budgets even though effectiveness has declined. The truth is Google Ads has become very complicated. Getting performance up is tough and even achieving a decent quality score is difficult, let alone hitting low CPAs. Costs per click are rising, competition is growing but results aren't necessarily increasing. Many of Google's suggestions don't really work in practice. In fact, I think it's possible that less than 10% of advertisers consistently have quality scores above 7 across their clicks. Most advertisers are stuck with low scores even after working on a ton of optimizations because that has become the norm. So when it comes to troubleshooting, you can work on every possible lever and still not see the results you expect. That's simply the nature of Google Ads today. No wonder Google was penalized $3.5 billion in Europe for self-referencing practices, businesses are spending more but not necessarily getting more. That's why it's smart to explore GEO, SEO, and other channels, instead of relying too heavily on Google Ads alone.