Five things worth sharing from the last week or so, brought to you by a different member of the Browser Media team every Friday.
This week’s My Five is by Ashleigh.
1. Google moves the Partner program goalposts
At the end of last week Google announced changes to the requirements for becoming a Google Ads Partner, doubling the total spend requirement across all managed accounts to $20,000 in 90 days but also the certification and performance requirements.
Under the new requirements 50% of a company’s employees have to be certified from the Google Ads Skillshop and the performance requirements are now based upon Google’s optimisation score.
Obviously this has enraged SEMs with a lot of them taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations:
Yeah, we saw that too. If that's the case we're just gonna ignore those and lose our badge! Most of the automated suggestions are crap.
— Gil Gildner (@gilgildner) February 13, 2020
Partner Program is dead, has been for a while. Clients don't care because everyone has it and now they're just focusing on revenue generation and making Partners join the fun.
Recommendations tab is often terrible and just automated crap that doesn't consider the client.
— Brett Dixon (@BrettDixon) February 13, 2020
We have to agree, this is a revenue booster if ever we’ve seen one.
— Force Nine (@forceninemedia) February 13, 2020
In response to its critics, Google has made changes to the performance requirement this week:
From:
“Meet the performance requirement by using Google Ads effectively to set up and optimally run campaigns to maximize outcome. Access your ‘Recommendations’ tab to see the actions you can take to improve your performance. Note: We evaluate the optimization score without dismissed recommendations for the company performance requirement.”
To:
“Meet the performance requirement by using Google Ads effectively to set up and optimally run campaigns to maximize outcome. Partners are not required to adopt all recommendations or achieve a 100% optimization score for the new Google Partners badge requirements. The threshold for the new Google Partners badge requirement is 70%. We introduced optimization score to help customers understand if their campaigns are set to achieve high performance and to offer actionable recommendations for improvement. We’ve found that advertisers who increased their account-level optimization score by 10 points saw a 10% increase in conversions, on average.¹ Access your ‘Recommendations’ tab to see the actions you can take to improve your performance. Note: We evaluate the optimization score without dismissed recommendations for the company performance requirement.”
2. Caroline’s Law
Unless you have been hibernating this week, you will have heard the tragic news that Love Island and Xtra Factor presenter, Caroline Flack, took her own life and that one of the things being blamed is social media.
Following the news, there have been