DIY Digital Advertising?
The Google Ads platform has always prided itself as something that is both powerful enough to power a significant part of even the largest company's online marketing, while also being easy enough to use for absolute beginners. While it may be straightforward to do simple things and they do offer free help to get started, getting the best out of your advertising does mean you need to know what you're doing.
To help any DIYers who might need some help, Google added a feature called Recommendations. These are automated suggestions based on best practices that are supposed to help Ads users maximise their performance. Some of these suggestions are actually helpful, even for experienced professionals who might have made an inadvertent oversight, pointing out settings that are misconfigured or assets that haven't been included. Unfortunately, many of the suggestions aren't helpful. They're often a one-size-fits-all type suggestion, and for many advertisers, these recommendations can be actively harmful to implement.
Why harmful? Surely Google wouldn't want your account's performance to go down?
What Does Google Get Out of Ads?
Well, the answer to that does depend very much on how cynical you are and how much you actually trust Google.
The Optimistic View
Those who do trust Google would say that best practices require giving the machine learning algorithms behind Google Ads a chance to learn about your website and your target audience and that you have to fulfil all of Google's requirements for feeding back data on results. There is merit to this stance, using Google's more advanced features does require giving them as much information as possible about the traffic they send you. This means enhanced conversion data, conversion values, and customer match lists.
The problem is, even with the best will in the world (and a whole team of experienced developers on your side) it's not always possible to get this information. So you have to run your Ads account in a way that gets you the best results without following the gold standard of best practices.
The Cynical View
For those who are sceptical of Google's intentions (and there are plenty of them online), the explanation for Google’s changes over the past nine years has been to progressively obfuscate where your money is going when you advertise on their platform, while essentially handing all control over to Google to spend your money as they see fit. Smart, dynamic, and then fully automated targeting and ad copy, blurring of exactly what keyword matching does, automatic bidding strategies, and now Performance Max all have taken progressively more of the fine control away from the user.
Couple this loss of control with loss of reporting detail and you can see why the cynic is grumbling so much. Search terms going unreported, nothing but very top-level data from Performance Max campaigns being shown (although Google have actually done something about this), and a thousand more minor adjustments which mean you can’t see exactly what’s going on with your ad spend. All this at a time where cost-cutting redundancies at Google have left their support staff for Ads running an apparent skeleton crew.
The Realist View
The bottom line is that Google really don’t want their Ads customers to go broke. While the cynics have a point that Google isn’t above being a little sneaky about maximising their own profits, they aren’t going to risk losing the revenue they make from Ads by bankrupting their own customers. Google really do want you to make money from your advertising on their platform, that way you will continue paying them to advertise.
On the other hand, for some companies, the new hands-off style of Google, where you give their algorithm a few hints and your credit card*, trusting it to actually deliver some results, can be a difficult leap of faith to take. Especially those with niche markets or pretty much any B2B industry will know that it can be next to impossible to deliver the conversion data Google needs to run these campaigns effectively.
The Old Ways Disappearing
Because there are limits to how well Google Ads’ new automations handle some industries, you would think that we would just continue using the “old” way of doing things. The old way being keyword research, a finely tuned list of keywords using phrase and exact match types, and a carefully calculated max CPC.
The problem is that the old way isn’t what it used to be. Keyword research is much the same, but you still need to be flexible and you can’t just take the data in the planner tool, you need to carry out manual searches and dig into all of the SERPs elements to get a real idea of what search terms you should be targeting.
Keyword match types certainly aren’t the same. Broad match seems to be the future (Google just announced it would be the default for new campaigns), but for anyone who remembers pre-2018 Google Ads, that’s a difficult pill to swallow. Broad match can be disastrous if poorly handled, especially if you’re not fastidiously going through your search term report and making liberal use of the “Add Negative Keyword” feature.
As for manual bidding, that’s still available for the moment. It is going to be deprecated fully at some point in the near future. However, unlike some of the other changes that Google have brought in, the automated bidding strategies do work well, providing that you configure them correctly. Anything other than visibility (max clicks or target impression share for example) requires you to have good conversion data. Not just that your conversion actions are properly monitored, but that you are actually getting conversions.
The other issue with all this extra automation in your Google Ads account is that once you make a change to something, you typically have to wait two weeks to see if it had the impact you expected. Adjusted your target cost-per-acquisition? Two weeks to see if you made your campaign perform better or worse.
Recommendations; The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Ridiculous
Google’s emphasis on their automated recommendations really comes to the fore when you see the layout of the new Google Ads interface. Recommendations are right at the top, in their own section of the default Campaigns navigation. It’s also apparent whenever you speak to a Google Rep about the performance of your account, as they will almost always take you through the outstanding recommendations.
Recommendations come in three flavours:
Useful
Useful information, but not-useful resolution
Rubbish
Useful recommendations include suggestions about things you might have overlooked. New keywords being recommended (especially if they’re phrase match) can be helpful, but too often it’s just telling you to add a bunch of broad match keywords that aren’t going to improve your bottom line.
Recommendations with useful information, but suggesting a not-useful solution to the problem include conflicting negative keywords. Often if you chose to add a negative keyword, it was for a good reason, so it may be the search keyword that needs to be changed or removed. Redundant keywords are another recommendation which don’t always suggest the right course of action. If you have keywords that aren’t showing or that are too similar to another keyword, it may only take a minor adjustment to actually get them working properly, and removing them might actually result in your account not performing as well.
Rubbish recommendations aren’t necessarily rubbish in all situations, but can be devastating if applied when not appropriate. Display expansion is a prime example of this. Although clicks from the display network are almost always much cheaper than search clicks, you’re going to see your impressions go through the roof, your CTR plummet, and (unless you have a widely appropriate offering and enticing ads) almost certainly no actual conversions from it. If your campaign goal is visibility or brand awareness, this isn’t a problem, but if you’re driving sales or leads, it’s likely a waste of time and money.
Other rubbish recommendations occur when Google completely misunderstands your website. If you’ve repurposed an ecommerce function for your website, Google might still see it and assume you should be running shopping campaigns based on the data within those pages. While it’s difficult to go through the whole process of setting up a shopping campaign without realising that it’s not going to help you, there are things like Price Assets which it can also recommend that involve a couple of clicks and can be equally irrelevant to you. These would just serve to confuse your potential customers and that confusion will likely see your conversion rate suffer.
The Dreaded Auto-Apply
Some recommendations can be configured to automatically apply to your account. This is something that Google Reps will try to get you to do during calls. Google automatically making changes to your account can occur in two different ways, the standard Auto-Apply Recommendations and the automatically generated ad assets. Both can be very helpful, but both can be problematic.
Spend More Money for Worse Results!
The potential dangers for most of the auto-apply recommendations are the same as if you were to blindly apply them manually, but there are some here that don’t often appear in the manual recommendations. These are the recommendations associated with bidding. Target CPAs (tCPA) and Target ROAS (tROAS) changes made by the system based on their “signals” can actually result in much, much worse performance.
As an example, a client of ours recently had an auto-apply tCPA change, which increased their target CPA by 15%. This is despite them having a healthy conversion rate as it was. There was no need to do this, unless it resulted in more value for that customer. But it didn’t. After two weeks the ad spend on the account had increased by 10% and the number of conversions had dropped by 10%. Undoing these auto-applied recommendations (they were split across multiple campaigns) almost immediately restored those KPIs to their previous rates.
We’ll Make Promises on Your Behalf, Even if They’re Illegal!
The automatically generated ad assets have the potential for much worse than accidentally making you spend more money for no good reason. They can make promises to your customers that you can’t actually fulfil, either because they make no sense or because it would break the law to do so.
A client of ours offers a financial service. Running adverts for financial services on Google involves a fair amount of red tape to ensure that you are complying with the rules in the jurisdictions where you advertise. So, in the UK you have to demonstrate that you are registered with the FCA and all of your ads meet the very strict policy requirements set out by Google.
We’ve been doing this for years, we know the drill (even if Google changes it occasionally), and everything was going well, until Google decided to automatically add a callout asset to all of our campaigns. “No credit check.” The particular financial service being offered must not be offered without a credit check in the UK. To do so would expose our client to legal action and a potential torrent of negative publicity.
Google did this automatically. Without notice.
While for most companies advertising on Google, a random new ad asset is unlikely to have severe consequences, it might be embarrassing to have something nonsensical appearing in your ads. It can also be frustrating when Google creates automatically generated assets which are then judged by their other automated systems as being in violation of their advertising policies.
Protecting Yourself From Automatic Damage to Performance
First of all, you need to know if automatic changes are possible on your account. Checking the auto-apply recommendations (the little clock icon in the top right of the recommendations page) is the first step. Each option has an explanation of what it will do along with links off to more expansive documentation.
Exactly which you can turn on to benefit your account will depend on a few things. How in line with Google’s “best” practices are you? B2B advertising or niche markets probably mean you’re not putting all of your eggs in the “broad match plus Performance Max” basket, so you’ll want a tighter hold on the reigns than someone who is going all out for the automation. Beyond that simple advice, time and experience are going to teach you what you can trust Google to do with your account for you.
Automatically created assets are another matter entirely. If you are in a highly regulated industry (especially healthcare or financial) then think very carefully before leaving the automated created assets switch on. Google specify that they use your whole website, existing ads, and anything they consider relevant to your keywords. If you feel that the risk is negligible, then feel free to rely on this to potentially increase your CTR.
Should I Even Bother With Automation At All?
I know this whole piece has sounded like a doom-and-gloom rant about how automation is terrible. Honestly, the reason is that most of the PPC accounts I run, and have ever run, are focused on either B2B or niche industries. Otherwise, honestly, with how Google set Ads up, people could do it themselves.
It’s in those tricky niches that you need someone who knows what they are doing to get the best performance out of your advertising. And it’s those niches that are going to be the last to truly benefit from Google’s automations. AI needs something to learn on, and there is nowhere near as much data about marketing in a niche as there is for more universal topics.
If your product or service is something that doesn’t need that extra finesse to find an audience for, then automation is almost certainly going to help you more than harm you. If finding your customers is like panning for gold in a river, you need to be careful you’re not paying too much for the stones you also pick up.
