In a recent announcement titled “Making it easier to manage automatically applied recommendations”, Google have announced some changes to Auto Apply recommendations, making it easier for advertisers to consider recommendations being made in their Google campaigns. So, what are Google Ads Auto Apply Recommendations and what are their advantages and disadvantages?
Google Ads Auto Apply Recommendations: What Are They?
Google Ads is constantly developing new features to help users improve their campaigns. One such feature is the “Auto Apply Recommendations” tool, which was first introduced in early 2019. This tool uses machine learning to identify potential optimization opportunities in your campaigns and then automatically applies the recommended changes.
The Auto Apply Recommendations tool can be found in the “Recommendations” tab of your Google Ads account. From there, you can review the recommendations and decide whether or not to apply them to your campaigns. The question is are Google Ads Auto Apply Recommendations right for your campaigns and should you completely auto apply all recommendations?
The Auto Apply Recommendations tool can be found in the “Recommendations” tab of your Google Ads account.
How Can Auto Apply Recommendations Benefit Your Business?
If you’re like most Ad Managers, you’re always looking for ways to improve your efficiency and clients bottom line and looking at ways of improving campaigns. One way you can do this is by implementing auto apply recommendations into your business. This can save you time and money by eliminating the need to manually apply these changes, helping you to reduce your operating costs and improve your bottom line and campaign outcomes. Auto applying recommendations are a way of potentially providing potential optimisation to accounts without any human review required.
You can now make better use of Auto Apply recommendations by only selecting certain recommendations to auto apply, which is what most account managers use as their go-to setup. Examples of auto apply settings you may wish to choose include:
- Use Optimised Targeting
- Use Optimised Ad Rotation
- Remove non-serving keywords
- Add audience segments for reporting
What Are the challenges of Using Auto Apply Recommendations?
While Google’s Auto Apply Recommendations uses artificial intelligence (AI) to complete ad campaign maintenance for you, they are not without challenges.
For one, the tool is not always favourable to campaign management needs; a perfect example of this is where recommendations are made to increase CPL levels that say may cost $100 per lead on a campaign and provide an additional 5 leads, where the campaign is running at a much lower CPL level. Removal of so called “redundant keywords” is also an issue I have faced, where keywords are removed even though they are still delivering a certain level of leads. Phrase match to broad match changes is also another setting which remains turned off in all Google Ads accounts I manage.
Then there’s the automatically created ads (i.e., Improve your responsive search ads) which on the surface seem like something which would be a no brainer; however, the feedback I have received from other Google Ads managers is that the quality of these are may not be up to what your clients expectations are.
How to Set Up Auto Apply Recommendations (our recommendations)
At days end, it is really up to the Ads Manager to decide what they want to accept in relation to the Google Ads auto recommendations. Google Ads provides managers the opportunity to select what they want to automatically accept and what they want to review themselves.
Simply follow these steps to change the Auto Apply Recommendations on your Google Ads account
- Click on recommendations
- Click on the Auto Apply option, which is located next to the cards, table and download icons
- Select the Maintain your ads and Grown your business options that you’d like to auto apply
You can customise all recommendations when you like. So if something isn’t working for you, simply return to the Auto Apply section and turn the option off.
How to Monitor and Improve Your Results with Auto Apply Recommendations
Monitoring and improving your results with Google Auto Apply Recommendations would seem like a simple process, but the proof of performance really comes down to improvements to your clients bottom line. Tracking the results of an automated change in a Google ads account may not be simple for everyone, so make sure you have relevant tracking in place and prior data to ascertain the differences in changes for the metrics you are tracking for your clients in relation to campaign performance.
Enable the settings you require in your Google Ads account and simply commence monitoring how the tool is performing thereafter. To find changes either view your change history for auto apply changes or review other reporting options; thereafter ascertain performance based on these changes.
If you’re happy with the results, then you don’t need to do anything!
For further details visit the Google “Manage recommendations that you opt-in to apply automatically” at https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10276359.