Anybody that's been managing Google Ads for a while is familiar with the relentless "recommendations" tab and has had run-ins with overzealous Google reps. While the intentions are always good, the results can be disastrous. These "optimization" tools can be particularly harmful to folks that are new to PPC. So how do you decide what Google Ads Recommendations advice to take and which advice to ignore? In this article, I'm going to give you insight into my agency's internal best practices [...]

If you're a PPC manager that's feeling a time crunch this post is for you. I'm going to highlight the 10 biggest Google Ads time savers. Implementing these will free you up to spend more time working on PPC strategy, other marketing tasks, or watching more "Cheers" reruns, it's entirely up to you. 1. Automate Reporting This is a no-brainer once you have 5 or more accounts/reports to work with. Exporting campaign data into spreadsheets or even using the Google [...]

For some time now, Google has been recommending that most advertisers switch their accounts to 100% broad match keywords. In this post, I'll explore why they are doing that and whether or not you should drink this particular Kool-Aid. How did we get here? Google has a long-term plan for their Google Ads users. While I don't have inside information it's obvious to me that Google wants to exert more control over campaigns. Importantly, the reasons for this aren't entirely [...]

Google's new Performance-Max (P-Max) campaign type has been seeing amazing adoption over the past few months. With most advertisers experiencing excellent performance numbers, it's no wonder that P-Max spending is going up and search spending is going down. But this introduces a number of problems for advertisers and the entire industry built around Google Ads. In this article I'm going to explore the many ways this is great news for Google and bad news for everybody that's not Google. In [...]

The demise of Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) has left many Google Ads advertisers confused and perplexed. You can go in several directions with Responsive Search Ads (RSAs). First, if you haven't yet set up RSAs you should get that done ASAP. Here's a free RSA migration script from Optmyzr that generates a new ad for every ad group by importing ad copies from your existing ETAs. You should, of course, add more headlines and descriptions but we'll get to that [...]