Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 131 - Keeping Up [Lunio]

Due to the length of this webinar and the presence of multiple speakers, this transcript may contain errors.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the hundreds of feature announcements and changes in Google Ads every month, you are not alone. Google Marketing Live is not the only time we hear about news in Google Ads. It feels like every single day you’re on LinkedIn, Twitter, or PPC communities and something is being added, something is being taken away, something is changed, or something is launching.

Please don’t get overwhelmed by this. In this special episode I am sharing with you an edited version of a webinar I recently did with my friend Duane Brown of Take Some Risk and James Deeney of Lunio.

We talk about some of the biggest changes coming to Google Ads like AI Mode, UCP, Ask Advisor, Asset Studio, and what you need to actually focus on right now to continue getting great results from Google Ads.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working with big brands at Google and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 131: Keeping Up.

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James: Google Ads has arguably changed more in the past 12 months than in the previous five years. How are you feeling about the pace of change right now?

Jyll: I would say my take is cautiously optimistic. I'm on board with the vision of where things are going in Google Ads, but it can be a lot to keep up with all the different changes and features.

Jyll: For example, you mentioned I was in Manchester last week, so I came back this week and on a client call three times in one hour, I had to say, "Well, Google just announced this change, so we can do this now." And, "Well, Google just announced that, so we can't do that anymore." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, one week out of office and three new things." So, yeah, cautiously optimistic, but it's a lot.

James: And Duane what about you?

Duane: I think it depends on the day of the week. I think most days I’m energized. Yeah, some days I’m cautiously optimistic. I think it also depends on what the change is. You know, someone today on Reddit was like, "Oh, they're going to take away negative keywords." and I'm like, "Well, if you take away negative keywords, I will not be energized, cautious, optimistic." 

But I think some of things like Nano Banana and AI and using those tools to make ads are really cool. But I think other changes were like maybe they ignore negative keywords or they add Broad Match keywords to your account without telling you. Those things are less energized about. So I think it depends on contextually you know what it is and what my focus is as a whole.

James: Yeah that's completely fair. I understand and yeah interesting to see that yeah the majority of the audience are falling into that like you Jyll cautiously optimistic buckets. So it's interesting to start to see these new ad formats like conversational discovery ads highlighting answers showing up in real accounts or is it still too early for that? 

Jyll: It's still too early. And when you say showing up in the accounts, there's two pieces to it. Are we seeing these ads in the wild? And then can we see in our accounts if we have served these ads? So in terms of showing up in the wild, you're just starting to see a few more ads. In terms of the account, there's no reporting on this. Like you cannot look at your Google Ads account today and know if you showed an ad in AI mode or an ad in AI overviews because that reporting is just not there yet. 

James: That's really good to know just to clear things up at the start. And could you say a little more about what it is about the shift that makes you nervous?

Jyll: The thing about the shift that makes me nervous is you can make yourself eligible to show ads in AI mode or AI overviews through things like AI Max or PMax or Broad Match. You could turn on features like text customization and final URL expansion which can expand your eligibility to show there. But you won't know if you're doing it or not. You won't know how it's performing or not. So, we're very much in the stage where like of course as advertisers, we want to be in these latest and greatest surfaces, but we have no way to know if we're there and if we are, if it's working or not and what the results are. None of the reporting ecosystem or mechanisms are in place. And so, that's why I'm optimistic but nervous because it's like, yeah, I want to be there, but I don't even know if I'm there and if it’s good and is it bad. It's just sort of a leap  before the parachute is there to catch us if needed.

James: Cool. Well, let's hope the parachute comes in and saves us. But , Duane, before we move on, you know, Jyll kind of alluded to it there, it is a bit of a guessing game at the moment where there's no real clarity on exactly how this is going to work and exactly what the best practices are going to be. But if we were to think about it on a practical level, are there kind of, you know, basic inputs and things that you would advise are probably smart to start getting your ducks in a row or trying to get your house in order now before this new AI mode becomes the reality for everyone.

Duane: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think for most things, you know, whether you think of like AI mode or you think of like ad copy and whether it's, you know, Google or Microsoft or whatever the platform is, right, you want to think about like how do you want to like present yourself to the outer world, right? 

So like your ad copy, you know, sometimes we’ll take on a client whether it's ecom or whatever and I'll say like what's your brand guidelines or or how do you want to talk about the brand and people won't know. I think your ducks and rows are like how you want to talk about your brand. What things are really important that your customers care about? You know, could that be easily just taking your last thousand reviews and scanning them for the common things that your customers talk about that they care about. So I think those things are those housekeeping items that people generally don't do and say they'll like to do tomorrow but tomorrow never really comes I think is helpful and then from there  you just have to decide if I want to invest time in that. You know the example I give to clients is well if you get 1% of your traffic from you know everything sort of AI mode related and agnostic commerce related you know we shouldn't be spending more than 5% of our time on that 1% potential return because if you do you're going to miss out on doing other things that are probably more valuable in terms of like the time I put in than the money I get back at the end of the day.

James: Yeah. Yeah. The real 80/20 principle always applies everywhere and yeah, focus your efforts where you're going to see the biggest results. But so Duane, you said that you've kind of been kicking the tires or you're at least keeping up to date with the latest on Universal Commerce Protocol or UCP and maybe if you could just give people a quick download on what you think are the key things they should know about UCP.

Duane: Yeah, I'd say it's not easy to implement. You don't necessarily need to be a developer, but it doesn't hurt to be a developer to implement it. For those who don't know, it's basically a standardization of code. Kind of like schema, but instead of being for your website, it's for AI agents. So whether you want to appear on OpenAI or Copilot, Google and  eBay and Walmart and all these brands have gotten together and tried to standardize the mechanisms with which you need to have on your website in order to appear on different AI agents. 

There's good documentation on Shopify's page. Even if you're not on Shopify, I'd say go read their UPC stuff because it's it's really good in terms of like what it is and how it works and what you need to do, but I would say unless you're already seeing tons of traffic from there, maybe it's not a thing you need to work on today, but maybe something you need to work on in three or four months, maybe focus on something like SEO because I think a lot of people still sleep on SEO and that would probably be a better foundation to start from than trying to skip SEO and jump to universal protocol.

James: And it's just like SEO has just changed. Like it still matters. It's just like how you show up, the structure of your site, the way it's organized, how it can be crawled, how it can be indexed, what content's on there, all that stuff still matters. The basic best practices of SEO have not been thrown out the window. And I'm sick of hearing people saying that SEO is dead. It is changing obviously, but like you said, Duane, it's a good place to focus on  if you want to put yourself in a good position. 

Jyll, before we move on from this, do you know much about the business agent for leads? Or is that something that it's too early to really say anything about it at this point?

Jyll: It is very early, but it's basically the idea that you know people can talk to an agent of yours that's been trained on your business. So rather than calling your business and then you pick up the phone and can I help you and let's do it along that and a trained AI agent would be able to handle that intake for you and get them booked in for your calendar or paying for the service or whatever it might be. And this would be facilitated by Google as part of your ads. So I think it sounds great. I think it's one of those GML announcements that's like a vision that may come at some point. I would not expect to see this live in accounts before the next GML, for example.

James: Okay. Well, that is a very nice segue onto my next question, which is a short one that I was going to give to both of you. And I just wanted to get your kind of expert opinion on how many years away are we from this kind of new user journey which is kind of laid out in a basic framework on this slide. Is this something that we're looking at two years plus longer than that? 

Jyll: Yeah, I mean I think there are a lot of purchases that just human behavior is never going to be at the point where I'm just going to let my agent go buy all kinds of crap for me across the internet. There's a certain look to buy my toilet paper and my water bottle that broke. Clothing and flights? No, I don't see that happening. So in terms of a Google ads perspective and this you know ads future I would say by 2028 keywords will truly truly be dead. I know they're really on their deathbed now, but like keywords gone, full automation, our jobs are always changing, but like our jobs in - my prediction is 2028, they'll be completely absolutely unrecognizable from what we did in say 2022. But in terms of the user part of that and AI running our lives for us, I don't see that ever fully becoming realization.

James: Yeah, it's a really interesting point. And you know, I recorded a podcast with

Rand Fishkin last year and he said a very similar thing to you where there's like certain kinds of purchases where humans are not just going to put their trust in an agent to make a fairly hefty purchase, whether it's flights, you know, you're not going to let the agent choose the seat and stuff like that for you. You know, there's always going to be transactions where people want to be in the loop when they're making those purchases. 

But Duane, very quickly, if you were to kind of get our crystal ball and try to guesstimate the time horizon we're looking at here, what would you put it at?

Duane: You know, like best case scenario, three, five years, maybe in that time frame, the amount of money a business gets from, let's say, AI agents as a whole, regardless of the platform, might eclipse what they get from like, let's say, Microsoft. That's kind of my benchmark. Because Microsoft might bring you 5% of your revenue, whatever it is. Until I think agents eclipse what a business would get from Microsoft, I don't think we're in territory like this is the best thing next to sliced bread.

James: Yeah. So it's interesting but it's not going to fundamentally change things overnight and lose sleep over. Could you talk about your experience with Ask Advisor and where your head’s at at the moment?

Jyll: For sure. And I will say Ask Advisor was formerly Ads Advisor. It was announced at the last GML, first started rolling out in November. I tested it at that time and it was terrible. By which I mean it literally could not answer a single question, right. And I know some people try to just trick the AI. So I want to be clear, I asked it very like what is the performance of this campaign and what suggestions do you have? And it just was able to do literally nothing back in November. Now all the analytics Advisor and everything has all been rebranded as Ask Advisor. 

So I tried this again in June 2026 after it was lauded again at GML and again what's the benefit and drawback of Ask Advisor is it doesn't just use Google's documentation as a source it uses the whole open web. So while on the one hand that means it's not just a shill for Google saying you know increase your budget and turn on auto apply recommendations. The downside is it just says a lot of stuff that's incorrect. And so in this example I asked what it would suggest for a campaign. 

It said I should put some locations on observation instead of targeting. And that's just literally never been an option. That's not a thing. Like I have no idea where it got that from. It's not possible. And I think my other criticism is whenever Google talks about ask Advisor, it calls it agentic. Agentic. Agentic. Agentic means it can take action. And as of right now, Ask Advisor is a chatbot. It can't actually take action at all. So that's why I say I know it will get better. I hope it will get better. Like it's being trained on all of our data. And Google Ads is complicated, right? So, it's not good at its job yet. But I do believe in time it can get better and at the point that it can be agentic. So, I could say to hit, "Okay, you recommended these new keywords. Go add them for me. Great. Done." Like, that would be excellent. But it is so far from being there. I don't even see that happening in 2027. 

And I do want to add, James, if I might, I've also used the Ask Advisor in Google Analytics, and I am not as proficient in Analytics as I am in Google Ads, but even there, I asked it to tell me what was my top performing landing page by conversion rate. And it pulled up a page that had one session, one conversion. And it's like, here, this is your top performing landing page. And I'm like, okay, technically correct. But no human would have given me that answer. So definitely, I'm not even going to say use with a grain of salt. I don't use it now but I'm optimistic for the future and I have also been told by the folks inside Google like as you might imagine they really want this to work so there is a feedback mechanism within Ask Advisor if you are flagging responses that are bad and giving feedback there that is actually being reviewed by the people building it so do keep that in mind as well.

James: yeah I think it's just an inevitability that as usage and adoption starts to creep up and as Google starts to collect more data and feedback from users inevitably you know the thing is going to get better and better over time. So, yes, it's good to know that you've kind of ruled it out for people now, Jyll, as you know, do not use even with a hefty pinch of salt. But let's just wait and see. And I would expect to see pretty swift progress on this front over the coming months and years. 

Duane, could you let people know about what kind of cool new features are being brought in here via Nano Banana Pro? Could you let us know what you're excited about, Duane, and what the possibilities for advertisers are here?

Duane: Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting. You know, the name isn't great, whatever. But I think it's interesting in the sense that, you know, we work with a lot of small brands, so let's say they do a million dollars a year in revenue, right? Or maybe it's a small business that only does half million dollars. They don't often have a designer, right? And so things like Nano Banana or other tools are really great because it allows people to be better creative than they would have if they went into Canva, for example. It's kind of like an ugly baby. ugly baby is beautiful. Everyone thinks the thing they made in Canva is beautiful and half the time it's really ugly. So with this stuff, I think it sort of leaps people's ability a little bit better. 

Obviously, you still have to have an eye for aesthetic and design and stuff like that. But the fact that tools can pull things from your website, you know, if you look at Google Merchant Center, there's brand management in there. They pull images and things from your website. You look at other Google things like Asset Studio, they often will pull assets from your website, pull assets from YouTube and other places. And so the fact that it can pull your assets from various content pieces you own and with a little sort of templating make you a product that's a lot better than what you would do if you did 100% on your own. I think it is really good. 

Now you still have to have an eye for design like I said and stuff like that. But it definitely gives people a set of tools they didn't have before because they're not 100% started from scratch which I think is a nice thing. You know obviously you still have to say whether they're going to like it or not. So, some stuff we've seen, a client would never approve of. It's not on brand. Other things we've seen. I think it's great and it's kind of like where we'd want to sort of the brand if we're going to do anything we could do on our own without the client having to be like, "It's not on brand. We can't watch that."

James: The brand police will come for you if you're not careful. On that point though, there is a concern or a caution that I want to bring up here. And maybe you can talk people through the risks here, Duane, or in certain industries that are heavily regulated, if we're talking about finance or if we're talking about pharmaceuticals or things like that. Can you just talk about some of the potential risks and maybe cautions that you would urge when using autogenerated creative there?

Duane: Yeah, I mean, the big thing I think everyone thinks about is basically like if it's using assets that you didn't give it, where did it get the assets from? So, there's like an IP conflict there, right? You don't want these tools to pull from somewhere you don't know where it pulled from and then it uses an asset you didn't know you couldn't use. So I think that's the big issue. And also if people aren't reviewing let's say text or copy or things correctly you know does it say something that you're not allowed to say from a legal, political you know liability standpoint. 

And so I think one of your steps you should do before you launch anything is have a review session with those who care about reviewing things internally in your company. And then what we always do as an agency is like 24 hours after we launch ads or 12 hours after we launch ads, we always go back and relook at the ads sort of as if they were alive just to double check that we actually like the way it looks aesthetically online. It's a bit of a pain in the ass to do, you know, when you have, you know, a dozen plus clients to work on at any given time. But sometimes what you saw in the preview isn't always how it looked live. And so making sure it looks good live, I think, is really important whether it's Google or any platform in general.

James: Nice. Yeah, it's a really good point about making sure that the human in the loop oversight remains there and and just to your point about IP, you know, that's a really good point and I'm connected with a lot of marketers. I recently had a conversation with someone where they basically got in quite a lot of trouble because they used AI to generate an ad, but it wasn't generated entirely from a text prompt. Alongside the text prompt they also fed in examples which were examples from you know other people's IP and then the output that came out was very very similar to you know stuff that was copyrighted by other people so I you know do be very careful when you are using these tools and and you definitely need to keep the human in the loop as Duane said.

What are you most excited about from GML 2026 and on the flip side, what are the announcements or are there particular announcements that you feel are more hype than substance?

Jyll: I am very excited about a lot of the lead gen features that were announced and I also think they’re a lot of hype. So on the main stage, you know, lead gen was only spoken about a little bit, but if you read through the documentation that was shared from Google, the announcements, there's like a dozen new betas all designed for lead gen. 

The most prominent one is journey aware bidding, something I'm very excited about and very bullish about that's finally launching. So they say. I still don't have it in my client's accounts yet. all the way to things like the business agent for leads which like nice vision we'll see if it happens. So lots of lead gen features which I find so exciting because lead gen is often left behind in these things with e-commerce being more of the focus. So I'm really excited about that and really excited for those opportunities because we know the number one struggle for lead gen advertisers is getting those proper conversion data foundation via offline conversion tracking. It’s a huge struggle, it’s not sexy, but it’s needed more than ever if you’re going to succeed with more and more AI. As I spoke about at Performance MCR last week, it's no longer about control versus automation in Google Ads. Your data is the control you need to feed the automation to do what you want it to do. So optimistic and, and we'll see how it goes for lead gen advertisers.

James: Nice. Nice. And Duane, if we were to ask you the same question, what are you're most excited about and maybe the announcements that you feel, you know are more hype.

Duane: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think some of the things outside of like asset stuff, Google launched, I think it's pronounced Pomelli. It's kind of like Nano Banana, but its own sort of like piece of software. I think that's kind of interesting. We're figuring out how to try to incorporate that  in the agency as a service offering and maybe some of our small clients who refuse to and don't want to hire designers, you know, we can leverage it to try to make something creative to run on, you know, demand gen, PMax, paid social stuff. So, I think that stuff is interesting only because it has gotten a lot better in terms of how creative it makes than maybe even 12 or 18 months ago when I looked at stuff. 

And then I think GML I think is always a good way to look at things like the last couple years plus three, four years is a good way to recap everything Google launched in the last 12 months. I don't always feel there's tons of like net new things where they're announcing it for the first time. It's no Steve Jobs iPhone July 2, 2007 type thing. Here's everything we talked about over the last 12 months, but we're going to tell you again just so you don't forget about it.

So most things just feel like they're just trying to shove AI down your throat and make it seem like it's the best thing. You know, kind of reminds you a little bit of like when we all talked about voice search back in like 2017 and that kind of never took off. Now, I'm not saying AI and none of this stuff is like voice search. I'm just saying it reminds you of that in the sense that we're talking about it a lot and there's a lot of hype around it. I'm not seeing the needle move so much on like the revenue end things yet. 

So, I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will do a lot better than voice search because voice search feels awkward because it's nonvisual. I think if voice search was visual, it probably would have taken off a lot better. But that's another story for another day. 

James: Yeah, you're bringing me right back to like 2017and 2018. I worked at like a podcast production company at the time and yeah, we thought a voice search was going to be the next big thing and how do we get podcast to show up in and be played on Amazon Alexa and we thought that was going to be the future of podcast and turned out not to be the case. 

Jyll, there's a LinkedIn post that you made which I thought was particularly good where you said the best Google Ads managers today are the ones who thrive in shades of gray. Where you argued that binary thinkers lose because “you can't fully leap into the future but you can't turn back either.” Could you say more about the mindset advertisers should adopt in this period of sign significant change?

Jyll: Absolutely. We're in this moment where you know the way that we have always been doing things in Google ads. You know your keywords and your bids and your perfectly crafted ad and whatever it might be that still works today. Like you can still get really good results with that today. Maybe not as good as they used to be, but maybe. And so I find with a lot of the clients I meet, whether it's business owners or agencies or in-house marketers, that it's really hard to shift to something new to try Broad Match for the first time, to give PMax time to learn, to test out text customization because the old way still works, and so that's really tricky because of course we want to do something that works versus something that may or may not work. And so what I'm advising people now, I'm not saying forget everything you've ever learned. Those foundations of Google Ads are absolutely still the same, but you need to at least start testing these new automated features, automated targeting, automated bidding, that's not a test, just use automated bidding, and automated creative. 

I think I said in the post so that you're not like the frog who's sitting in the water that's warming and warming and warming and you're kind of okay with the warm water, but it's going to boil at some point. So don't throw away everything you've learned. There's absolutely value in being someone who's been doing Google Ads for two decades and has all that expertise, but don't let that hold you back from testing new things and figuring out how to make it work for your business because we see very clearly now there will be a time when the way things used to work is not an option anymore. It's still an option today, but Google is so clear. They said you can't use keywords anymore. Like that is going to go away even if it's still here today. 

So, I know sometimes people say, "Well, I don't want to waste my, you know, client's money testing some unproven thing." And my perspective is I actually think you're wasting your clients money if you're only still doing what was working in 2016 that still kind of works today because you're not setting them up for success in the future. So balance I don't mean throw out everything you know but but you got to start testing if you haven't yet.

James: So on the measurement and attribution side we know that this is a growing problem. We have some proposed solutions or paths forward from Google which we can see on the slide here but as kind of hands-on experts who are both of you are working in accounts and seeing what works. I'd love to get your view of what marketers should do. What's the yard stick we should actually be using to evaluate channel performance as we move into this new era.

Jyll: I mean the yard stick at the end of the day is your bank account right for all these metrics and these and whatever. Like you're making money or you're not. And I will say you know Google's kind of damned what if they do and damned what if they don't. 

I mean, when I first read the qualified future conversions announcement, I burst into laughter, candidly, and just see, because I was filming those videos with Google Ads, you saw one of them earlier, I got sent some of this information in advance. I remember opening my email, reading about QFCs, and I burst out laughing. But, okay, then I thought about it a little more and I'm like, yeah, one of the biggest problems advertisers have, especially lead gen or B2B, is that neither you nor Google knows if a click or an impression converts until 3 months later, 6 months later, 12 months later. So, there's no way for you or Google to optimize. 

And so, this is a feature that look, if you don't want to use it don't, but it may prove to be helpful in that regard by letting us know earlier which clicks or interactions Google predicts are likely to convert. 

So, I say all that to say Google is bringing in a ton of tools like this. There's also Attributed Branded searches that's rolling out more widely, lots of ways to help bridge that gap, but none of it's perfect. And so that's why at the end of the day, looking at your analytics or your Shopify dashboard or literally your bank account is the ultimate way to know are my ads working or not.

James: Yeah, you you can't lose sight of the P&L at the end of the day that you need to need to keep eyes on that. 

Duane I'll pass over to you here. Is there anything that you know you would advise people on if they're trying to weigh up and determine where I should double down and where I should scale back? 

Dune: Yeah, I mean obviously your bank account's a great place to start, but I also think most brands should set up like Google Analytics 4 at a basic level. You know, the amount of people who either say, "Oh, I couldn't make the transition or they don't have any analytics set up whatsoever." I'm like, how are you measuring things? Like I'll be the first to say that Shopify is not an analytics platform. To say that you just look at Shopify to decide where your traffic comes from is pretty poor. Most things like Wix or Big Commerce, are not an analytics platform. So setting up some sort of free dedicated analytics platform would be a good place to start and sort of help understand where is your traffic coming from, how much traffic comes from this area, SEO, paid, how much conversions and revenue as percentage comes from this channel as well would be really helpful. And then yeah, you know, your bank account is really helpful. I think doing those things would put more businesses ahead than trying to buy like a North Beam, a Triple Whale, all these tools that cost tons of money, but no one's going to really use.

James: Great advice there, and the price on things like Triple Whale, I know, is very popular, but yes you need to have deep pockets. And it's something that's prohibitive for smaller brands and businesses.

Jyll, I know you're in the process of working on a new book on bidding strategies, and I just wanted to ask, how's that coming along? Is it stressing you out? Is it coming together nicely? At what point in the process are you at the moment?

Jyll: So many people are asking me about it, which I feel so fortunate that people want to read it so badly. I have to finish writing it. It's coming. I wanted it to be out by now. Life happens and opportunities have happened. So, I'm hoping to publish this year, but we may need to wait till early 2027 until I'm ready to share my perspectives on bidding with y'all. Well, I've shared them frequently on my podcast but together in a book for your easy reading pleasure.

James: Yeah. So, check out the podcast in the meantime, but yeah, be on the lookout, you know, at some point over the coming 12 months for that release. 

And Duane, I'd like to point everyone towards Take Some Risk’s on your website where you can access your DTC brand index. Could you maybe just say a tiny little bit about why you put the brand index together and how people can get the most value if they work with ecom brands?

Duane: Sure. Yeah. I mean it was just a question of like there's always like oh what brands should we look at to see what they're doing on like social or meta ad library or wherever it is, and so putting together sort of database and breaking it down by different categories like fashion brands versus like hard goods or kids stuff, just means that like when we talk to

prospects or we're working with a client, we can easily sort of figure out what other brands are doing. Both to get inspiration, but also to make sure we're not just doing what the other brands are doing so our ad sort of blends in because the worst thing you can do is just copy your competitors and have an ad that looks exactly the same because then your ad just gets lost in blur. 

James: First question from one of our regular and returning webinar attendees, Peter. “On a small budget, is it worth chasing AI mode placements now? Uh or should we wait until there's more data?”

Duane: I was going to say, I mean, I don't know what a small budget is. That's very relative to different people. Let's say you're spending $50 a day or 50 pounds a day, or whatever your local currency is. I would probably say wait is better than chasing it because you've got a very limited budget as is and you don't want to spread your budget  too thin across too many opportunities. We see brands make that big mistake. They just try to do too much at once.

James: Jyll, anything you would add to that?

Jyll: Yeah, I would also add you can't actually chase those placements. Now, you can make yourself eligible by using Broad Match, AI Max, PMax. But to Duane's point, if small means really small, you may not have the budget to use those things and you may be better off being much more focused. So, short answer, no, I would not try to chase those placements at this time.

James: Nice. So if we move on to our next question, from Ashley. The question reads, "What are the must-have control levers to implement in an account before testing auto assets in order to set the account up for success? Do you have particular auto assets to test first especially when you have clients that are picky around ad copy, images, and brand voice”

So brand police is being mentioned again here. Duane, I'm going to go to you first on this one. Because it sounds like it's something that you're familiar with in your own work.

Duane: Sure. I mean, if a client was picky, we wouldn't test autocreated assets to begin with. That's just the honest answer. Uh we have some clients that are very passionate about their brand. There's a certain sort of style, look, feel, whatever you want to call it. Uh so we wouldn't test that because they would see something that maybe them and four people saw, but they're like, "Oh my god, this is the worst in the world. You shouldn't do this." So we wouldn't do that. 

I mean, if there's another client who's maybe more flexible and is willing to sort of take that risk to see what would happen, then I have to make sure things like, you know, what your best ad copy is, you know, what your best images are, sort of find that baseline of this is what success looks like currently in the account and this is what the best performing assets are across images, ad copy, yada yada yada. And then once you've got sort of that foundation, you know what the best is, you can then test these other things like autocreated assets against your baseline, so you know whether it's either successful or it's doing worse at the end of the day. I think most people try to do too many things too quickly because they're impatient like they launch ads on the first of July and then by the 10th they want to do A/B test and I'm like you don't have any conversions and you haven't spent any money. How about we take a step back and maybe collect some data first?

Jyll: Two technical things to add. First there's two kinds of auto assets in Google Ads. There's like in your you know AI Max campaign text customization like it creating headlines and descriptions for you and so my advice there the feature I don't it's called guidelines it's going to be renamed AI Brief but the point is you can give it guidelines about what's okay and not okay so if you're going to use the feature then use the guidelines with it and then the other kind is automatically created assets at the account level where it can create things like site links and callouts and pull images from your website which you may not have the rights to use in advertising, etc. So, if you have not checked your automatically created assets setting recently, it's an account level setting and you may be surprised to realize the kind of auto assets that are running with your ads.

James: Very good points. The second to last question we have is from Jenny and she asks, "It has been advised to me from Google that you should have more ad groups as opposed to campaigns. So having four ad groups inside a campaign rather than four separate campaigns. However, by doing this I am seeing zero clicks regardless of changes. I make a CPA budget with more ads and keywords etc.” 

Any advice for Jenny in this particular scenario? Either Jyll or whoever wants to go.

Jyll: I would say Jenny it sounds like you're in throwing spaghetti against the wall phase where it's not working. So you're changing bids and changing budgets and stop throwing spaghetti against the wall. 

I agree with Google's advice.Fewer campaigns with more ad groups, consolidation, is generally better than many different campaigns because your bid strategy learns at the campaign level. So, consolidation is helpful. If you're not seeing any clicks, that's probably not a campaign structure problem. I'm going to guess either your targeting is too restrictive or your bid strategy is not the right bid strategy.

So, try to maximize clicks as a starting point just to force it to spend if you're really seeing no clicks. If you're still seeing no clicks, there may just be a policy issue in your account, not enough search volume, something else going on, but it's likely not due to the campaign structure.

Duane: I mean, the only thing I quickly say, I mean, the only reason you might have, let's say, two campaigns versus four is maybe you want to control things from a budget perspective, right? Because your budget's at the campaign level. Maybe you want to put your, if you're a service business, your best service in one campaign and your other three services in another campaign. That's the only thing I'd say is maybe why you might want to have two campaigns versus one. But yeah, what Jyll said is very true.

Jyll: And I agree with that too, Duane. 

James: Good, good, good. The final question is from Nikunj. “As a person starting into Google ads, should we overwhelm ourselves with AI updates?”  My answer to that would be categorically no. There are more important foundational aspects of the process which you should probably focus on first.

Jyll: Yeah. Don't overwhelm yourself with anything. You know, as someone starting to do Google Ads today, there are benefits to that and disadvantages. The benefits are like you're not yearning for the good old days. You weren't there for the good old days. You're just learning Google Ads as it is now without all that baggage. But having said that, and this is a good takeaway, the foundations of Google Ads have not changed. Like ad quality is still at the heart of the auction. Whether it's a shopping ad or a search ad or an ad in AI mode, your website and your offer must be an offer that people want to buy. It must answer their question. Again, regardless of if you're on an exact match keyword or in PMax or something like that. 

So, the foundations have not changed. And if you're just starting today, you still need to learn how the auction works and ad rank and Quality Score and Smart Bidding and how are keywords whether or not you decide to use them. So the training is not as someone who does a lot of Google ads training training is still very similar and then when you have that foundational understanding then of course start to experiment with new features.

James: Nice a flurry of emojis from the audience there in response to your question or your answer there Jyll. So you know people clearly resonate with that and Duane anything you would say advice for people to to not get overwhelmed or to get to grips with Google ads if they're just starting out? 

Duane: I think the only other thing I would say is, you know, when I think back to 20 years ago when I started, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Today it’s much more complicated. And so, even within Google, you've got, you know, four or five different campaign types. So, it's better to maybe start with like let's master search ads for the next six months or PMax for the next six months or shopping campaigns for the next six months and really sort of like get super narrow and then sort of expand from that versus trying to learn all four or five campaign types at once because you're just not going to get there.

And then yeah, you can worry about AI Max, you know, beginning of next year, next GML live, it's still going to be here. There's going to be other updates that replace the updates we just heard today. So, I don't feel the need to feel like you're behind because you're not. Most people writing on LinkedIn are just writing for clout and that's all

James: I just want to say a huge thank you to both Jyll and Duane for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. I feel like I've learned a lot. It is always good to hear from experts like yourselves who are very much hands-on in accounts kicking the tires of new features so other people do have to see what works and by sharing with us in forums like this helping  the whole PPC community and helping people learn. 

So I just want to say thank you again to both of you. If you'd like to chat with me. For anything Lunio or IVT related, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, drop me a message on there and I will help you out if I can. 

Again, if you're interested in auditing your traffic with Lunio, you know where to go. Head to our website and we can help you get that set up. 

Thank you again to Jyll and Duane and I want to wish you all the best with your Google Ads campaigns.

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Thanks for joining me for this very special episode from me and my friends Duane and James. If you’d like to follow them on LinkedIn you can find them both there, Duane Brown and James Deeney. And of course, me Jyll Saskin Gales.

I’ll see you next week for a very special episode about improving your Quality Score.

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time inside Google Ads.