How Much Can You Trust Recommendations In Google Ads?

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CashiWaku
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Posts: 291
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How Much Can You Trust Recommendations In Google Ads?

Post by CashiWaku »

A new article on Search Engine Journal reports on what to do for different types of recommendations in Google Ads and whether you should dismiss or accept them.
You can barely go a minute in Google Ads without seeing recommendations put in front of you. The notification bell turns red, alerting you to the fact that you have several recommendations waiting. Suggested budget increases appear right next to the graph at the top of the Campaigns section. You can click a button to apply the updated amount and instantly spend more. So, how helpful are these recommendations that Google puts front and center for advertisers? Let's take a deeper dive into the types of recommendations and how well they correlate with the metrics that matter for performance. This is from Google:

"Recommendations can introduce you to new, relevant features, help you get more out of your budget by improving your bidding, keywords, and ads, and can work to increase the overall performance and efficiency of your campaigns."
If you work with an official Google representative, they'll spend a significant amount of time talking about optimization scores. This score measures how well your account is following best practices for setup, in Google's eyes. Overall, recommendations correlate directly to optimization score, and Google provides you with an exact percentage that the score will increase for each recommendation you accept. While the specific recommendations that surfaced vary depending on the account and types of campaigns being run, there are several common types of recommendations that tend to surface:

Budget: When a campaign is limited by budget, Google will often suggest increasing the daily budget cap to ensure that ads are showing throughout the day. The dangerous aspect of this suggestion is that with one click you can boost your budget significantly.
Conflicting Negative Keywords: This recommendation is one that I generally find useful. If you've accidentally added any negative keywords that would prevent current keywords from showing up, Google will warn you and allow you to remove the conflicting negatives with one click. In addition, this can also be helpful to flag keywords that you didn't intend to be active if you wanted to keep certain words excluded but forgot to pause keywords that contained those words.
New Keywords: Google will periodically surface ideas for new keywords to add to your campaigns. You should always review these lists carefully as opposed to mindlessly adding them with a single click.
Adding Extensions: Google will frequently suggest adding extensions that are not in place for an account. Some extensions generally make sense to apply across the board, such as sitelinks and callouts. However, not all extensions may be relevant to every company. For instance, a SaaS product would likely prefer to send people through a signup process on a landing page as opposed to paying for a click to a phone call. Even if you can't necessarily immediately think of a way to incorporate a certain ad extension, be creative about potential options to help increase your ad visibility.
Add Audience Segments: These recommendations are another area that I do find useful at times, as the data tends to be based on actual audiences who are currently engaging with ads and visiting your website. However, you should still take the time to review carefully through the options before applying everything, as not all audiences may be relevant to your brand.
Include Search Partners: Search Partners performance can be hit or miss depending on the account, and sometimes even if CPAs are efficient, lead quality can be lower. If you've excluded Search Partners based on lead-related or budgetary reasons, you can just dismiss this recommendation.
Improve Responsive Search Ads: This suggestion will surface, either recommending adding more headlines/descriptions or tailoring copy more closely to keywords. This area is also a complex one, as the ad strength metric for RSAs doesn't necessarily correlate to good conversion performance. However, a study from Optmyzr showed that ad strength can correlate to capturing more available impressions, so considering these recommendations can be helpful to improve overall reach.
AlexTinny
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Joined: Fri Nov 25, 2022 1:38 pm

Re: How Much Can You Trust Recommendations In Google Ads?

Post by AlexTinny »

I trust, but I always check before shopping, you never know if this or that application or thing will be of high quality
RasySumka
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Joined: Fri Nov 25, 2022 11:33 am

Re: How Much Can You Trust Recommendations In Google Ads?

Post by RasySumka »

This is actually my problem. I'm usually annoyed with pop-ups and agree as soon as they arrive to have a clear screen and be able to continue my work on the internet. However, I think it would be wiser to read the propositions first. However, it has never caused me trouble yet. I also hate looking for something for too long, so I use services like https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/vody-stylehaul-stephanie-horbaczewski-jeremy-houghton-1234814177/ to do a quick search. I think I'm too impatient to scroll the pages for ages
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