Earlier last year, Google Ads introduced automated recommendations for paid advertisements, including keyword bidding, new ad copies, budget changes and bidding strategy. These recommendations are now being automatically applied by Google.

You may find new creative running that was created by the system (without notification) because they are automatically applied to the account without logs under “Change History”. To check the status, advertisers should visit the Auto Applied Recommendations Control Center.

Many may ask “Should we opt out of Google ads Auto Applied Recommendations?”. Natalie Ng, our head of PPC replied “YES”, you should not allow Google to apply these recommendations automatically for several reasons.

1. Missing cross-campaign dimensions

Not all recommendations are smart enough to compare if the actions are done on other campaigns or ad group level. The audit is lacking consideration of a holistic overview. For example, you may find the suggested keywords are already bidding in another campaign, competing against yourself is wasting money.

2. Not Aligned with business objective

Some recommendations may be valid such as testing responsive search ads and extensions that help improve CTR and traffic. However, these may not align with your business objective if you aim to maximise conversions. We should let the system know our campaign objective by selecting the most adequate bidding strategy and campaign objective, manual review and filtering are important to ensure the optimisations aligns with the business objective.

3. Lack of human behaviour detection

Most of the time, the system uses historical data to provide suggestions such as best time of day; device performance; audience list suggestion. Yet, there are moments where historical data does not fit in. For example, searching behaviour in the travel industry is completely different during Covid19, and search terms such as “staycation” increase within a week after many countries lock down. It is always essential to consider qualitative data before blindly accepting suggestions purely based on quantitative data.

All in all, it is important to ensure your account does not automatically opt-into recommendations. It is always good to take Google ads recommendation as reference instead of auto application, unless you go through every suggestion.  If you have any uncertainty about how your account is affected by automatic suggestions, we will be happy to assist you!