Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, is something that we have written about a lot in the last few months, as it continues to dominate digital marketing news.
In Google’s eyes, the perfect advertiser these days (the day of AI), would create campaigns that look like this:
- A list of broad match search terms (or have the beta “Broad match keywords” setting enabled – find out more about this further down)
- Two/three responsive search ads (each containing 15 headlines and 4 descriptions)
- All available assets (previously known as extensions)
- An objective and goal(s)
- Budget (as large as possible and then the freedom to do what it likes with it)
Google’s Power Pairing = Performance Max + Broad Match Search
If an advertiser is promoting an online inventory of ecommerce products, these would ideally feature as part of a Performance Max campaign(s) – another AI-powered, highly automated campaign type.
Google is now calling Search and Performance Max its “power pairing”:
Search campaigns are driven by keywords specified by the advertiser (ideally using broad match with Smart Bidding) and then Performance Max fills in the gaps. Performance Max uses AI to analyse the site’s landing pages, assets and shopping feed to show AI-generated ads to users that it thinks are most likely to convert.
Now, for huge companies with a massive inventory of products to advertise, this “power pairing” could well work, and the staff-hours saved optimising campaigns could make up for any potential budget lost by AI. However, for smaller companies with smaller budgets, this just isn’t viable and certainly wouldn’t be something that we’d recommend.
Brand Restrictions for Broad Match Campaigns
At the end of last month, Google announced the launch of its new brand restrictions, allowing advertisers to choose which brands their Search ads could show for. This means that advertisers can add a list of brands that they are happy for their ads to appear for. Then any other brands that are searched for, alongside the advertisers’ chosen keywords, will not trigger the ads.
Google says:
“You’ll get access to brand restrictions when you turn on the new broad match campaign setting. Since brand restrictions are only available for broad match campaigns, we’ve provided a one-click setting that makes it easier to upgrade your entire campaign to broad match.”
Performance Max Brand Exclusions
However, for Performance Max campaigns, it’s the opposite:
“Unlike brand restrictions, brand exclusions let you choose which brands to exclude, rather than choosing which brands you want to serve ads on.”
This means that if you want to keep your own brand traffic to Brand specific campaigns, for example, you could choose to exclude your own brand from triggering Performance Max impressions.
Broad Match Campaign Setting
This does exactly what is said on the tin, it enables a Search campaign to purely use broad match terms and converts any phrase or exact match ones in the campaign to broad match.
This is something that is actively being launched but is not yet available to all. More information about this can be found here: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/13389795
If you want more control over your campaigns, budget and KPIs, contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
