Google Ads is frequently rolling out new features designed to “improve your Google Ads performance.”
Many of these features are (initially) designed to “fully automate” your campaigns — from automated targeting to automated creatives, and even automated bidding.
It may feel like a game of removing humans from the process entirely.
You may be worried about your job.
I am not.
In my 20+ years of managing Adwords/Google Ads campaigns, here’s what I’ve seen:
1) First, new features are mostly introduced prematurely, with little control for advertisers. For the first year(s), the performance of the new feature is so-so at best and always easy to beat by experienced PPC professionals sticking to proven methods.
2) Then, after a few years, Google has learned its lessons based on a lot of clicks from good-faith-advertisers that jumped on the wagon early, before the new thing actually starts performing. In the meantime, PPC pros who knew what they were doing prevented the wasted ad spend the other advertisers paid to teach Google what it needed to learn.
3) After Google has learned its lesson, the new feature has gotten less “fully automated” and more transparent, or it simply gets removed. Think: bid limits in portfolio smart bidding, search terms and negative keywords for PMax, brand controls, etc.
4) The matured version of the new feature will do a “good” job for the average advertiser, and maybe an “okay” job for you. However, you have to remember: Google is first and foremost optimizing its own profits, not yours. And no advertiser is the average advertiser. Which brings me to…
5) The best results are still the result from a combination of the Google Ads features with the manual actions of real PPC pros who look at the individual account specifics. Think: adding negatives to combat irrelevant matches from the always-changing-match-types, or fixing automatically-applied recommendations, or auto-generated headlines, etc.
Here’s the thing: As long as Google stays hungry, our careers stay fed. And when Google gets grabby, we get busy.
– Nils