Google Ad Recommendations Guidance

With so many Google AdWords tips out there online, it can be difficult to know who to trust. Some say, “do this, but don’t do that!” while others advocate doing precisely what the first person said to avoid. But, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re in the right place.

Let’s start with a bit of background information.

At the beginning of April 2021, Google announced its recommendations feature which has been designed to make it easier for advertisers to identify new opportunities and improve their overall marketing performance.

AdWords recommendations can be accepted by advertisers automatically, but I believe that it’s always important to fully understand exactly what you’re opting into. So, here are some of my top Google AdWords tips that could save you a significant amount of time.

Bid and Budget

There are six Google AdWords tips that fit under the bid and budget umbrella, including using maximise clicks to boost bid efficiency. If you find your campaign is eligible for more than one bid strategy recommendation, it won’t pay to apply them all. Google itself prioritises using target ROAS, which relates to conversion value, and target CPA, which focuses on driving the most conversions from bids, over clicks and target impression share. So, if your campaign is eligible for one of those, don’t overlook them. That being said, if you don’t have conversion tracking correctly set up you’ll be barking up the wrong tree. Only use conversion based bidding if you know for sure your conversion tracking is accurate.

Keyword and Targeting

Everything from adding negative keywords to creating Dynamic Search Ads can now be automatically applied to your campaign. Adding negative keywords is arguably one of the safest recommendations of all, particularly as it can only ever decrease your ad spend waste. It will also be beneficial to automate the deletion of non-serving keywords, however, you should also make a point to examine the suggestions to effectively address any underlying issues that could be affecting your performance.

Ads and Extensions

There are some recommendations that I don’t believe any advertiser should be automatically accepting, both of which can be applied to ads and extensions.

Firstly, you have probably selected to use ‘optimised’ or ‘even’ ad rotation for a particular reason, so why would you automate that process? And secondly, as I think it’s important to invest some time in adding responsive search ads, this is something that shouldn’t be surrendered to automation. Why? Because while, yes, it is possible to save a considerable amount of time using headlines and descriptions from existing regular text ads, you have so much riding on your investment that it makes sense to at least take a quick look at this information before hitting the apply button.

Many marketing professionals initially viewed this announcement from Google with a big spoonful of scepticism, myself included. However, many of us have also been surprised at just how many recommendations we would be willing to apply automatically to campaigns we’re running. And even if that’s only because a good chunk of them are fairly low-risk, I’m taking this as a step in the right direction. After all, it frees up time to pay even closer attention to some of the higher risk strategies that could drive some seriously impressive results.

But remember, just because something is automated doesn’t mean you can afford to take your eye off the ball. So keep monitoring things and be ready to make adjustments to improve performance accordingly.