Apply Google Ads Recommendations as an Experiment
Google Ads recently announced that we can now apply recommendations as an experiment within the Experiments page. This new feature allows you to test recommendations without impacting your original campaign’s performance. If you’re happy with the results from the experiment, you can apply by transferring to a new campaign or adding the experiment results to an original campaign.
The different types of experiments include:
- Ad variations
Available for Search Campaigns (text and responsive search ads).
- Custom experiments
Used for Search and Display Campaigns. Custom experiments are typically used to test smart bidding, keyword match types, landing pages, audiences and ad groups.
- Video experiments
Available for Video and Discovery Campaigns. Used to determine which of your video ads is more successful on YouTube.
This functionality is only available for broad match and Target ROAS recommendations now. But Google said it would continue to roll out support for more recommendation types on the Experiments page in the coming months.
Google has rolled out this new feature to try and improve marketers’ experience of using the Recommendations tool. Recently, Recommendations was voted the least favourite part of PPC – you can read more about this here.
We understand the hesitation with using this new feature with Google Ads Recommendations not fully understanding the context of your campaigns and seem to favour Google Ads optimisation score. However, this could be an effective way to see if Recommendations could genuinely make a positive impact on your campaign’s performance.
If you want to find out Google’s best practice tips on setting up, managing and optimising your experiments, take a look at their best practices guide.
Google Ads Automatically Create Assets
Some of us can now automatically create assets due to Google Ads’ new beta. This feature allows Google to generate headlines, descriptions, and other assets using content from the following:
- Ad landing page
- Relevant web pages in the same domain as the ad landing page
- Existing text ads in the same ad group
- Keywords in the same ad group
If you can access this new feature, you can instruct Google to generate the assets from eligible sources based on relevance and predicted performance.
To view the performance of your automatically created assets, navigate to the reporting section of your Google Ads account.
If you want to see which assets are used in the RSAs, navigate to “Asset report” from the Ad level to “View asset details”. You can also see which asset combinations are used by heading to the “combination report”.
Of course, you can opt-out of automatically generated assets by going into your Google Ads account, clicking on settings, then Automatically created assets, and then selecting off.
Google has rolled out this beta to some users because they believe it might improve ad relevance (and therefore quality score) and save us time. For example, automatically created assets include text from your landing page, domain, and other ads in headlines and descriptions. It will also use text from your ad group’s keywords to customise headlines and descriptions, which could better match more unique search queries.
As with any automation, we would recommend testing first to understand how it works and to see if it saves you time and improves your campaign’s relevancy.
To get a deeper understanding of how this feature works, read Google’s Help Document.
For more information about the latest Google Ads updates or about our paid media services, contact PushON today.
