Google Ads research report

5 Oct 2026. The research behind the Google Ads guide.

The Google Ads playbook is written, passes the shape check and is staged with its research note. Three passes ran inline through /research-router: Google's pages, snippets of 72 Reddit threads with agency data, and a contradiction pass. Fix round 1 added the evidence and flip lines of block (e), the one-source labels and the full URLs. Fix round 2 read the Demand Gen page in full and added three source rows. Guide and report on Cloudflare: https://sah-playbooks.pages.dev/google-ads/ and /google-ads/report/, with the Meta guide at /meta-ads/. here.now copy: https://marine-mesa-q8ek.here.now/

The five recommendations

  • (a) Brand campaign: run one for 8 weeks as a capped test. Keep it only when a rival bids on the name, the site is not the first organic result, or the on and off weeks show a cost per incremental trial at or under the stop line.
  • (b) Keywords: exact and phrase on the name and the product name, a shared phrase negative list in every singular, plural and misspelled form. No AI Max, no brand lists.
  • (c) Bidding: brand runs Manual CPC with a cap on every keyword, Search Network only, and tests Smart Bidding only after 30 conversions in 30 days. A later non-brand campaign runs Maximize clicks with a cap, then Maximize conversions at 15 trial starts in 30 days.
  • (d) Conversion: the trial start is primary (Kajabi's native GA4 purchase event imported into Google Ads). The first payment is a secondary import by GCLID.
  • (e) Budget: brand daily = Q x S x C x P (brand searches a day, target share, ad CTR, CPC cap). Non-brand daily = 30 x stop line / 30.4.

What stays uncertain

  • What a Kajabi 0 dollar trial checkout sends to GA4. No Kajabi page says so. One test trial settles it.
  • The brand evidence is from large brands (2012 to 2016 data). No source tests a creator membership.
  • The 15-conversion threshold for Smart Bidding comes from practitioners only (D).
  • Reddit post dates were not read. The 2015 to 2026 range is an inference from the thread ids.
  • Callout, image and logo limits and the default location option were not read in this run.

What sah-google-ads must settle for Sah

  1. Who owns the Google account and the payments profile, and whether an old Google Ads account exists.
  2. Search Console impressions on the name and the product name for 28 days, to get Q.
  3. A manual search for rival ads on the name in each target country.
  4. One test trial through the Kajabi checkout, read in GA4 DebugView.
  5. The lifetime value and the trial-to-paid rate for the stop line, and the weekly trial count of the last 8 weeks for the noise.