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The work of a pay-per-click specialist is never complete. There are always new ways to optimize your strategies.
The problem is actively detecting the ways to improve your campaigns.
With so many moving parts and factors at play, there are hundreds to thousands of possible paths to explore. Yet, you only have a finite amount of available time.
Google ad recommendations are a helpful feature for overcoming this challenge. This tool automatically analyzes your data to find suggestions on how to improve your performance.
Since it relies on your account data, each recommendation is tailored to your unique strategies.
While there are some shortcomings to Google ad recommendations, it is a helpful feature that is straightforward to use.
This discussion will explore how to use Google ad recommendations and what AI alternatives exist.
Let’s get started.
Ad recommendations are a tool that Google incorporates into its ad platform. PPC marketers use this feature to improve their campaigns. It recommends specific actions that the system determines will help your strategies.
In Google’s own words:
“Each recommendation provides customized suggestions to help increase your campaign performance. 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.”
Let’s break down this explanation.
Improving your campaigns is always a positive. Again, there are always optimization opportunities in your account. Ad recommendations help you locate these opportunities. This holds many powerful benefits.
One of the ways that Google makes ad recommendations is by comparing past performance data to the current. The system also looks at search data to determine the potential value of each new keyword or ad opportunity.
With this data, you get an idea of how each recommended action might improve your performance.
While these forecasts are not always accurate, estimating your future performance can be highly beneficial. It provides benchmarks that you can use to gauge the success of your tactics.
Managing a successful PPC campaign requires a lot of time and hard work. As a result, PPC marketers are always under time pressure.
Whenever you can implement strategies that save you time, it’s a win.
The recommendations feature simplifies your optimization efforts. You can focus your time on enacting changes and making decisions, instead of conducting research and analyzing your data.
Plus, applying a recommendation requires just one click. Once you click on apply, Google automatically makes the suggested change.
Stagnant, stale accounts frequently struggle. You can’t rely on the same keywords, bidding strategies, ads, etc. to continue providing the same results.
If you’ve been relying on the same strategies, the recommendations page will help you discover new ways to freshen up your efforts.
Ad recommendations will suggest changes that you may not have considered otherwise. You never know what new strategies will be the spark your account needs to ignite your performance.
Google ad recommendations can be categorized by 5 types.
These recommendations are focused on improving your ads, whether it’s creating a new one, organizing your ad groups, adding extensions, changing your ad schedule, etc.
You can improve your click rates and make your ads more relevant and compelling, thanks to these recommendations.
There are a few examples of suggestions:
Automated campaigns use AI technology to simplify campaign management. These campaigns automate parts of the management process, like bidding, targeting and ad creation.
This is an example of ad recommendations suggesting that you try new features.
Here are some examples of these recommendations:
Adjusting bids and your budget is an everyday PPC management activity. Ad recommendations will return ideas on improving your bids. It will also alert you when a limited budget is negatively impacting your campaigns.
Here are some examples of what these suggestions may look like:
Even if you develop the best ads possible, your campaigns won’t succeed unless you have the right targeting. You want your ads to be shown to people that are likely to convert.
These recommendations will deal with your audiences, keywords and other targeting considerations:
This type of recommendation aims to solve account issues and other problems negatively impacting your strategies. You will see improvements that affect the overall health and performance of your account.
For example:
It’s crucial to realize that, while Google Ads recommendations are a helpful feature, they aren’t always the best avenue.
While the suggestions are based on your unique account data, they don’t consider your specific goals.
In other words, they don’t know your business, only your PPC data.
Thus, not every recommendation will benefit your specific campaign. In some cases, the suggestion may improve one part of the campaign, but hurt another. If this trade-off doesn’t align with your objectives, it could cause you to waste ad spend and hurt your performance.
You need to apply your expertise as a marketer to determine which recommendations make sense for your campaigns.
If you decide to apply one of Google’s ad recommendations, you’ll want to track your performance after action is taken.
Sometimes, these recommendations can have adverse effects. If you aren’t paying attention to how each suggestion impacts performance, you may be dealing with unintended consequences.
To understand when you should and shouldn’t implement Google ad recommendations, here are a few example cases to look at.
The default setting for ad recommendations is that Google automatically implements them after 14 days of inactivity (i.e., you don’t apply or dismiss the suggestion).
If you walk away from your campaigns or take too long to check the Recommendations tab, you may be allowing Google to implement changes without your direct permission.
Since not all recommendations are helpful, this could have disastrous results.
You should fix this default setting or be in the habit of applying or dismissing your recommendations weekly.
As mentioned, one type of recommendation that Google offers is related to bids and budget. There are several problems with this.
First, you have to recognize that Google is not an unbiased party. They directly benefit when you spend more money through their ad platform. Thus, it may be uncomfortable taking budget suggestions from Google.
Google will often make suggestions focused on increasing clicks or CTR. More clicks can be a good thing, as long as you’re generating enough conversions from these visitors.
However, if you aren’t converting on these clicks, it will waste your ad budget. You may even have to even increase your monthly budget to ensure that your ads continue to run throughout the month.
In short, approach any suggestion related to costs with extreme caution.
Some industries have special ad guidelines, such as finance, pharma and rehab centers – just to name a few. Failure to meet these standards could cause your ads to be denied by Google. You may even run into legal trouble!
Google ad recommendations notify you of changes to comply with, which is a positive. Yet, if you rely on this feature to resolve all legal issues with your ads, it could be problematic.
If the system misses a legal issue, you may not think to look at performance yourself, which creates major issues in your account.
If you enter the Recommendations tab and find no active suggestions, it’s likely because of one of two reasons.
One of the primary reasons Google implemented this feature is to help people who may be inexperienced or short on time. Recommendations help these individuals manage their accounts better.
These Google Ads users typically have a “set and forget” mentality, which is never how you want to approach PPC. They don’t optimize or tweak their strategies on a routine basis.
Recommendations are also an excellent way for Google to alert advertisers of new features or tools.
So, if you’re already managing your accounts regularly and implementing the latest Google Ads tools, you may have very few recommendations.
Essentially, it’s harder for Google to recommend actions when you’re already doing everything right.
That said, it’s crucial to realize that there is no such thing as a 100% perfectly optimized account. Just because there are no Google recommendations does not mean that you don’t need to manage your strategies actively.
Since Google ad recommendations use your account data to make suggestions, you need to have an existing account history.
Ideally, your campaigns should already be live for several weeks to months before you start seeing recommendations. Remember, the AI system only uses what’s available.
If there’s too little data, the recommendations are too volatile. There isn’t enough concrete evidence to back them up.
Once your campaigns have been active for a while, the AI has enough historical data for the system to draw accurate conclusions.
So, if you’re a new Google Ads user and you don’t see much activity on your Recommendations page, then check back in a few weeks. With more data, you’ll have more suggestions.
There’s a lot to love about Google’s ad recommendations. The ability to receive personalized tips on how to improve your performance is every manager’s dream.
Unfortunately, ad recommendations don’t quite deliver on this dream. The limitations of the tool create several drawbacks.
It’s useful for new PPC marketers that lack the time or experience to routinely and adequately manage their campaigns. Experienced PPC users, on the other hand, have little to gain from this feature.
It’s time to elevate your strategies with PPC Signal.
Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, PPC Signal is the tool to use. It provides fully-vetted insights into how to improve your campaigns.
PPC Signal helps you manage your campaigns and your paid search workflow, while creating a data-driven approach to optimization recommendations.
Your PPC account is overloaded with data. Optimizing your campaigns requires you to analyze all your data and metrics (CPC, CTR, clicks, impressions, conversion rate, etc.).
By exploring your data, you uncover opportunities and risks that are positively or negatively impacting your performance. Then, you can manage these occurrences to improve your campaigns and the overall health of your Google Ads account.
Both Google recommendations and PPC Signal exist to try and make this process easier. It’s about making it easier to interact with your data and the insights hidden within it.
PPC Signal has several advantages that make it the obvious choice over Google Ad recommendations.
When you receive a Google ad recommendation, you have the option to apply or deny the suggestion.
Depending on the type of recommendation, Google may offer some forecasting as well. This is not a prediction, but an estimation of what change you can expect from applying Google’s advice.
That’s a good start, but PPC marketers need more. You want complete insight into every change, not just a basic estimate of what might happen.
When you access the PPC Signal dashboard, you’re shown every active signal in your account(s).
These signals are essentially alerts for meaningful changes happening to your account. Each signal is packed with information. This allows you to understand not only what’s changing, but why, how and when.
Let’s look at one example.
From this one signal, you can see:
Every detail of the change is packaged into this clear, easy-to-digest signal.
Google Ads makes its recommendations based on what it knows or ascertains from your data.
Sometimes, PPC data is not always so clear-cut. Anomalies and outliers frequently occur in your campaigns.
These are noteworthy changes that can lead to exciting discoveries in your data, as long as you have the right tool to detect them.
PPC Signal alerts you any time one of these out-of-the-norm instances happens.
Here is an example.
This is a curious occurrence. Typically, an increase to your cost per conversion would increase wasted spend because you are paying more than usual for your conversions. In this particular campaign, wasted spend is actually decreasing, despite the rise in costs.
This is a case of data behaving unexpectedly.
Anomalies are often hard to understand and they don’t always lead to actionable results. Yet, it’s crucial that they are detected and tracked appropriately.
It’s just another example of how PPC Signal offers more than just recommendations.
As mentioned, Google ad recommendations don’t always have your best interests in mind. Many suggestions are focusing on maximizing your clicks, but this isn’t always a safe practice.
If you’re increasing clicks on campaigns or ads that rarely lead to conversions, you’re spending a lot on your campaigns but not seeing much in return.
One of the ways that PPC managers benchmark their success is ROI. Whereas Google recommendations focus on increasing your clicks, PPC Signal aims to showcase trends, shifts and other patterns that directly improve your ROI.
The system classifies each signal as either a risk or an opportunity. Both types of signals require action.
Here is an example of a risk signal.
Due to the spike in cost per conversion, you’re paying 1,285.9% more for each conversion. This could be damaging your profit margins and even causing you to lose money with each conversion.
The longer you wait to resolve this risk, the more money you spend or potentially lose.
Now let’s look at an opportunity signal.
Here you see that impressions are skyrocketing by 480.7%. This suggests increased interest in the ad group “Sports Watch Health Optimizer.”
If you’re one of the first advertisers to recognize this spike in interest, you can generate clicks and conversions without interruption from competitors.
Google does its best to present ad recommendations based on your account data. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that every suggestion is relevant or worth your time.
For instance, Google may recommend that you try out one of its latest advertising features. These new tools may not align with your campaign goals and are best ignored.
PPC Signal allows you to apply a variety of filters to your active signals. This enables you to swiftly get to the performance changes that most align with your goals.
You can filter by:
If your goal is to optimize your end-of-funnel campaigns, you could filter your signals by conversion rate, conversions, cost per conversion, etc.
Alternatively, if you wanted to bolster your mobile ad strategies, you could filter signals to only include changes affecting mobile devices.
No matter your experience as a PPC manager or the size of your account, detecting ways to improve your efforts is a necessary and ongoing effort.
The volume, speed and complexity of PPC data make it challenging to fully interact with the valuable insights hidden behind all your metrics.
Google ad recommendations and PPC Signal both strive to alleviate these obstacles. They simplify campaign management by providing you with ways to potentially improve your strategies.
The real difference between the two comes down to sophistication and approach.
Google ad recommendations favor the top-down method. The suggestions that the system provides are directed at the account and campaign levels. The hope is that improving the overarching parts of your strategies will trickle down into the smaller components.
PPC Signal, on the other hand, presents even the most granular changes. This is a bottom-up approach that focuses on optimizing everything.
Then, it’s in the hands of the PPC marketer to decide which performance changes are most significant and impactful.
Recommendations can introduce you to new relevant features, help you get more out of your budget. In Google Ads account you can see all the recommendations in your recommendation page you can access that from left menu under the overview section.
If you don’t apply, edit, dismiss by yourself then these recommendations can automatically be applied after 14 days.
You can use PPC Signal tool to detect all the anomalies, outliers and any other unexpected behavior in your campaigns which require full attention of yours to improve the performance of your campaigns in Google Ads.
Detecting emerging changes in a PPC account is what every PPC manager strives to accomplish. It’s the holy grail of PPC management.
Google ad recommendations offer an excellent glimpse into what AI and automation can provide to marketers. These tailored suggestions are especially helpful to beginners that are still learning the ropes.
However, experienced marketers need something with a little more sophistication. This is why PPC Signal was created.
PPC Signal takes this concept of automated recommendations and applies it on a much larger scale. Every noteworthy change that occurs in your data is tracked.
If the shift, trend or outlier is significant enough, the system alerts you of the change. This enables you to react to any dip or spike in your performance swiftly.
There’s no extra analysis required or waiting for recommendations to appear in the dashboard. You receive a steady stream of signals that can be resolved to directly increase performance.
That’s how ad recommendations should be!
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