Alone, Google’s ad suggestions can be useful – ideas you may not have thought about.
But watch out – they are starting to AUTO apply their own ad suggestions, and our experience with it so far is…. well, awful.
Why are they auto applying suggestions?
They have blatantly worked out recently that 3+ Ad Variations per ad group makes a big difference to them making money.
And, like a Mormon missionary in Africa, they have decided to impose their beliefs upon us. Without reasonable warning in our view, they’re just forcing it upon some accounts.
Look out for this notification:
Are their auto ad suggestions any good?
In a word, no.
We have had totally irrelevant ads created in ad groups where there really is no common sense. AI misses the common sense part.
We have niche products appearing in very broad ad groups, and general ads appearing in niche product ad groups – it doesn’t make much sense.
And the net result
Steady 8% click-through rates generating conversions have reduced to 1% and no conversions on Google’s own suggestions they have forced upon us.
Out of 10 ads they auto applied to one account, they were all bad, all reduced the CTR, and acquired 0 conversions – and cost good money.
So we turned it off.
How do I turn off Adwords auto ad suggestions?
We made a short animation just for you – here is how you turn this crap off:
In the new view, do this:
- All Campaigns
- Settings
- Account Settings
- Ad Suggestions
- Don’t automatically apply ad suggestions
- Reason: they are crap
The future of auto ad suggestions
Google is full of clever people (and robots!), they’ll probably get it right in the end. But for now this is DANGEROUS, and we advise taking great care with it.
We will probably turn it on for our own account in small doses each month just to keep tabs on its improvement.
But where it matters: follow best practice and add your own 3 variations per group (minimum) and turn this forced crap off.
