Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 48 - Google reps (with Aaron Young)
In this special episode of Inside Google Ads, host Jyll Saskin Gales speaks with Aaron Young of Define Digital Academy about Google Ads sales representatives. They cover everything from identifying the expertise of your Google rep to understanding the nuances of optimization score and budget recommendations. Plus, they dive into the evolving world of match types, audience targeting, and the power of smart bidding.
Disclaimer: This is a raw transcript of the podcast episode. It may contain errors, inconsistencies, and informal language due to the conversational nature of the format. You can check out this article on my Learn with Jyll blog, which summarizes the key takeaways from Episode 48 for you.
The first time you see an email from Google in your inbox, it can be really exciting. My goodness, a real Google employee is emailing me? Of course I want to take a call with them. Well, as you soon find out, this may or may not actually be a Google employee. They may or may not know what they're talking about. And chances are that conversation will not be helpful for you, your Google Ads campaigns, or your business. Why is that? What is the job of a Google rep, really?
I recently spoke with Aaron Young, the creator of Define Digital Academy and the founder of the largest Google Ads-only channel on YouTube. Aaron has nearly 100,000 YouTube subscribers, so when he asked if he could interview me on his channel, of course I said yes. We spoke in depth about the different support levels that Google offers advertisers like you. How to identify the expertise of your Google rep.and my strategies and recommendations for getting the most out of your interactions with Googlers, since I used to be one. Then, Aaron and I spoke about the evolution of Google Ads, changes to keywords and automation, and where we think it's all going in 2025 and beyond.
It's always a little risky for me to just hop on a one-hour call with a stranger because there are lot of wildly different and absolutely valid perspectives about Google Ads. I was pleasantly surprised to see that although Aaron and I literally come from opposite ends of the earth, I'm Canadian, he's Australian, and we'd never met or spoken before, we'd come to a lot of similar conclusions about how to effectively manage your Google Ads campaigns. And full transparency here, I appear on quite a few podcasts and webinars and things,
It's a great way to network and share my expertise. But after appearing on Aaron’s channel, I got four new Google Ads coaching clients within a week who specifically mentioned this conversation. And two of those turned into longer term retainers. So thank you, Aaron. And I will take that as a sign that this was a really valuable conversation, which means I had to ask permission to share it with you here, my Inside Google Ads podcast listeners.
I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you. This is Inside Google Ads, special episode 48, Are Google Reps Helpful? featuring Aaron Young. Let's have a listen.
And today I've got the absolute pleasure of having Jyll with me. And Jyll, so that I don't get anything wrong about who you are and what your experience is, why don't we take the first 60 seconds just to give a little bit of an instruction of who you are and what your experience is with Google Ads. Sure, thanks for having me. I'm Jyll Saskin Gales. That's Jyll with a Y. I'm a Google Ads coach and teacher and course creator and podcast host. used to work at Google. So I worked there for six years in Toronto as part of the large customer sales team left a little over three and a half years ago and built a business helping entrepreneurs and marketers get better results from Google Ads.
Great. Well, look, Jyll, the reason why I wanted to get you on today is because I'm sure you get the same as well. You get a lot of requests and a lot of just commentary and feedback from people having, let's say, not the most positive experiences with Google reps. And one of the big scenarios that does happen is that, especially new starters, when you start a new account, you'll either get a phone call, you get an email, someone's saying, look, I'm your Google rep.
And we can sometimes get situations where the recommendations that are given lead to performance, which actually makes the account to get worse than what it was before the call came. So could you just give me, I guess, a context of why that happens? And yeah, who those people are who are actually calling or emailing you, you know? Yeah, so how about we start there? Sure. I've had that happen to my clients as well. It's devastating when you help a small business owner set up an account and it gets going and then just gets absolutely decimated. So why that happens? No malicious intent. Most of those people who call you, are not Google employees. They are third party contractors. They have maybe a few weeks of training at best. Most have never opened a Google Ads account before.
And so they're just teaching you what they've been taught. You know, they have a script, this is what you're supposed to do. We want to always use broad match and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they're going to repeat that to everyone. Not cause they're trying to trick you or have you get bad results, but that's really all they know. So that is the outsourced Google sales team. And I think that's another common misconception people have. They'll think, well Google's calling me. It's the Google support team. Like, yeah, they want to help you, but ultimately it's a sales team, their goal is to make Google more money. Now, of course, Google wants you to make money so that you keep spending money on Google ads, but you get much more of that support with the sales, the more you spend on Google. And by that, mean hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year on Google. Yeah. So, I mean, are there any... I mean, I've got my own sort of metrics that I sort of find out really really quickly of who you're talking to and I sort of coach my clients through, but are there any...
I guess ways that you would recommend for people to engage when they get that first phone call to really find out whether that person, know, does that person have the level of experience so that you don't have the situation of the, really the blind leading the blind. First thing I'd recommend you do if you get the Google web reaching out to you is to look at the email signature because it will for the most part stay there, whether or not they actually work at Google or if they're contracted to Google by someone.
So just because they have an atgoogle.com email address, doesn't mean they work at Google. And generally someone who is a Google employee will be able to offer you better advice and support than someone who is contracted, though that's not always the case. And then within Google, it's helpful to look up your Google rep on LinkedIn, because you can get more information that way and see if they are, for example, part of large customer sales, which is the most high touch support organization. That's what I was a part of. Or Google customer solutions which is the euphemism for the kind of scaled support everyone else gets. And then within Google Scaled Solutions, there's teams like AGT, the Accelerated Growth Team. So their goal is to work with you for three to six months to help you spend a lot more, I guess, but to really help you grow with quite high touch support.
There is one called Engage. Like there's all these different programs. MMS would be kind of the largest Scaled Solutions program before LCS. And so it just kind of...understanding a bit about where your Google sales rep sits in the organization can help you understand, they going to have the expertise and motivation to like really understand my business and help me grow? Or am I one of 250 clients assigned to them and they just need to check a box to have a call with me. Yeah. And I think I've always sort of viewed it and sort of our spot taught teach people through either clients and now other students with it is very much that be aware that even the high support, as you said, even the accelerated growth teams.
I mean, the seller records can be very, very upfront that you can only get accepted if you do say that you're be increasing your budget. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that as long as the results are following. One of the things, I'd be interested to hear your thought on this, but one of the ways that I've always, I guess, approached any Google rep that's reached out or told clients to approach a Google rep that's reached out is to ask for a competitor analysis report, ask for some general gist market insight information, and that way,
The reason why I found that beneficial is it really lets you know that so the rep that I'm talking to, are they prepared to actually give me some extra insight and reports or are they just looking to tick some boxes and give recommendations? And if they're not prepared to do that, I generally just say, just flip them off as quick as they contact you. Yeah, it'd be interesting. It's an excellent Yeah. Yeah, it's an excellent tip because again, there are certain teams that can do that and certain that can't. And then a little more insider information here. It's very little work.
For a Googler to do that. There are internal tools already built out. So all they need to do is tap a button for the client name, tap a button for the industry, press a button, and they have a 20 page Google Slides of Market Insights or competitor insights ready for you. There are dozens to choose from. So whether they're willing to take the extra five minutes, we'll tell you a lot about what kind of support you might expect from them, if any at all.
And in that vein, as many as anything extra you would recommend apart from that in terms of, you know, first contact engaging with a Google rep, how to really pre pre qualify them really, really quickly as to whether this person is just wanting to do their job or whether they have the experience and skillset to really help me with your account. Yeah. Another thing I would suggest is before taking the meeting, if you're not sure if you want to, ask if they can send you an agenda of, you know, plan recommendations and see if they're going to do that.
Of course, the recommendations will be very generic at that point because they don't have the context about your business. But you can see, they suggesting auto applied recommendations, increasing your budget, adding performance max and broad match keywords, or is there a little something else going on there? The flip side to that I'll say is if you do want to hop on the call with them, like tell them a lot of information about your business, tell them what you want to achieve. Is there a CPA or ROAS goal? Is there a new format you want to test? What hasn't worked before and see how they respond to that information. If they adapt what they're saying based on the business context you're giving them, that's a really good sign.
Whereas if no matter what you're saying, they're still, yeah, autoplay recommendations, it'll help you, then you know it's probably not worth a second call. Yeah. And the big thing that I always talk to people too is just remember, just because they're Google and they're saying they're from Google, it's still your business and it's still your account.
I get a lot of situations where people just feel like they're being kind of one of a better word, like bullied into different changes that they didn't feel comfortable doing. So that's the other thing I would really say is if it doesn't make sense, you know, push back on it and really get some extra data saying, well, you know, show me another thing that I always say is to can you show me examples of other accounts where you've done this and what are the results are?
So ask for case studies. And once again, they can't, they can't replace that. They can't give you that information or they're not unwilling to give you that information. Yeah, it's probably you want to just tread with extreme caution. But all that being said, you know, at the end of the day, it is a human doing their job, just like you are a business owner, a marketer, freelance who has to do your job. So I like to go into these conversations with Google reps. If I choose to engage, assuming best intent, they've got a job to do. I've got a job to do. Let's see where we can work together to do it. And then if I determine it's not worth my time, not because they're a bad person, just because they don't have the experience needed to be helpful to me.
Then fair enough, good day. And now they have metrics they need to hit. They need to talk to their clients a certain number of times. They need to get a certain percentage of their portfolio opting into whatever the product Azure is. Again, not because they're bad or evil or mean, just that's literally their job. And so if I can help them with that because their objectives align with mine, then great, everybody wins. And then if their objectives don't align with mine, good day and they'll be assigned a different business the next quarter.
Yeah, so that's obviously, I think people get that a lot with obviously what you would see if you're dealing with a smaller account, that's very much what you're be getting. Let's just talk about some of the other teams you mentioned. One program I do recommend for anyone who can be involved in is the Accelerated Growth Team. Generally, I mean, I know this is based around countries, know in Australia, you've got to be spending at least $100,000 month to get into it. Fairly sure different countries have different markets. But yeah, for any brand or any even freelance or agency that does get an offer that is that is something that I do really still recommend because you add but I go my recommendation is if you're to be part of an accelerated growth team period is actually think about the data that you want and what you're wanting to achieve. So I like what you said before, have some really clear objectives and be really upfront with what you're not liking at Google what you want me to see. And yeah, I've found some of those programs to be really, really successful for the clients. I've had the same experience with American clients and with Canadian clients with AGT. They were colleagues and then I've also been on the client side with multiple AGT teams as well. And upfront, they'll say, over the next three months, you need to spend this much. That's not a contract. It's not binding.
But it's just an idea of like, this is what they need to hit. This is what success looks like for them. They'll put out a media plan for you of, know, this much in PMAX or that much in video or that much in search. You can go back and forth on that. And if you agree on this plan, that's going to work for both of you, then they're going to give you a lot more resources and support and skilled support than you would otherwise get for your spend level. But if they're proposing is not what you want to do and they're not willing to adapt, then it's better to just not work with them. Yeah. I mean, one thing we've done with AGT teams before too, is let them know that especially if I've been the manager in between, like working between the client and the AGT, I've said, look, they're happy to do that, but they need these results after the first six weeks before they get the next budget thing. And we never had a problem with getting that through the AGT team. So that's the other thing I would say is if you do have that, I guess opportunity is probably the right word, is definitely, once again, don't feel like you don't have any control in the situation. Like you can actually set some bars and some standards that you want to achieve.
It's a partnership like any partnership, right? Give and take. Yeah. Okay. Any other comments before we change gears and talk more about the recommendations that are happening inside of Google Ads? Any other recommendations or anything else that we should be talking about when it comes to Google support? Well, let's get into it because recommendations actually come out of the Google sales team. So it's really interesting to see how that's evolved over the last couple of years.
Yeah, so now that we're talking, so everyone knows, we're talking about the actual recommendations that you see in your dashboard, you get by email, whatever communication methods they're using, you do get these recommendations. So think a good place to start would just be to really just give people a bit of a broad explanation of what are the purpose of the recommendations and how they generate.
The purpose of the recommendations is to help you get good results. I know it doesn't seem that way, but from Google's perspective, the objective is to help you get good results. And the recommendations are a set of kind of 40 to 50 suggestions for things you can do in your account. And there's a bank of these recommendations and Google will look at your account and pick which ones apply to you, not because it meets your business objective.
But for example, if you're not running a performance max campaign, they won't tell you to add more assets to an asset group. They would tell you to launch a performance max campaign. From the user perspective, recommendations are often seemingly irrelevant or just trying to get you to spend more money. But the key is that recommendations are all based around this idea of optimization score, which trips a lot of people up. So the more that you review your recommendations, the higher your optimization score will be.
So you may get a recommendation that says upgrade all of your keywords to broad match. I'll put upgrade in quotation marks there. It's worth 10%. Whether you accept or reject that will give you the same 10 % uplift. You don't need to accept them. And so I think that's a better way to think about it. Recommendations, they can be helpful. There can be some good ideas, but you can just dismiss them. And I think something else a lot of people don't realize or want to know about recommendations is that they actually started as an internal
Google sales tool. So before we had recommendations in Google ads, before there was an optimization score, there was something Google sales teams had and still had called ROPs, recommended opportunities. And so this was a way to operationalize what the sales teams were doing to try to get consistency across teams to make sure they weren't missing out on opportunities to pitch things to you, to advertisers. And so these all started as things that Google sales reps, whether you were in large customer sales or small businesses or anything in between,
You had to pitch your ops. Like you would not get a good performance of you. would not be considered doing the job if you didn't pitch them, whether the client said yes or no, no different store, but you, have to pitch all your ops in the first month of the quarter. and it was really helpful. Low and behold revenue on things with increase, you know, if video for action adoption became a recommended opportunity for all sales reps, what do you know revenue went up there? And so then they got turned into this external facing thing where now it wasn't just on a Google or tube pitch things to a client, but the client would see them in their account and Googlers can actually track their clients and if they're reviewing and accepting those recommendations. So now it's turned into something to try to help all advertisers meet best practices, but it did start absolutely as a sales team tool, an efficiency tool. And it absolutely, I think is still viewed that way at Google. Externally, they're viewed as a pain in the butt, but. Yeah.
Yeah. And, Okay, so, and those recommendations, and probably one of the biggest recommendations that I have reservations for, and we'll talk further about this, is that you see, and a big one that I get a lot of questions about is that you see people come in and they go, I've a recommendation to increase my budget from $50 to $222.50 and increase the ROAS by X amount. When it comes to those type of recommendations,
Are you able to give us some extra data on where Google is getting that information from? Is that on industry specifics? Is that just the generating data within your account? Yeah. Where, where is that coming from? It could be a mix. And that's actually one where even before we had the recommendations tab that was always there. If your campaign was limited by budget, you would get a warning in your account for more than a decade. Now it wasn't always bright red the way it is now, but that one we do there and show you that sensitivity. And so where that comes from.
Now it takes into account the data in your account and your current performance. So the way a budget recommendation would work is at your current efficiency, meaning your current CPA or current ROAS or near it, you can increase your budget to achieve similar results without adjusting your targets if you're using a strategy. And then there are also recommendations that will tell you there's about to be an increase in demand for your keywords, you wanna increase your budget, take advantage of that. I think we'll all see that happening in e-commerce with the holiday season coming up. Rather than waiting till you're limited by budget and you're missing opportunity, Google will say you're about to be limited by budget. And same with targets. Of course, if you lower your target ROAS, you'll get more reach and potentially more revenue overall. Will it be profitable to you? Maybe, maybe not, but that's a valid recommendation in my opinion to suggest that to you.
You can decide for yourself if that makes sense for your business. So to answer your question, it takes into account your own data in your account and market data to determine if you can achieve similar levels of efficiency by increasing your budget, because you can't always, right? There's a reach efficiency trade-off. And then more in the last couple of years with recommendations specifically, it's letting you know if there will be an opportunity in the future that you don't want to miss out on, or maybe you do want to miss out on, and that is A-OK as well.
Look, I'll put my view on it here as well. Is it there? Probably the recommendations that I find the most dangerous. as a rule, I don't apply them. I also strongly recommend that when it comes into automated, auto applied recommendations that they're the main ones that you turn off. Anything to do with bidding and get rid of. Because I did actually question when I was part of a generated, sorry, the AGT team when I had a client in there. And that was a big thing I questioned. Okay, this goes, the recommendation that's in the recommendations tab for this client was beyond anything else that you would do. Like it was a massive budget increase. It was everything. And he even like, he even agreed that it wasn't a, it wasn't beneficial for the account. So, so that would be the thing that I would, I've always, guess probably would be one of my problems with Google is that the recommendations that they give actually don't align with what they would even say their best practices are in terms of taking a budget from $50 to $400 in a day, like things like that. It's true, those are rare though. Yeah, usually the budget recommendations won't recommend more than three times your current budget. that's they like 400 was over the top, but they are, even I would say three times is way too much straight away. All at once, I agree. I absolutely agree. And that's what's hard, I think with Google ads is it's trying to balance your small advertisers spending their $20 a day and your advertisers spending a million dollars a day, which I've also seen. And it's one product and one recommendation set that's supposed to serve all of them. Those recommendations were designed with large advertisers in mind, not with small advertisers in mind.
But of course it's the smaller advertisers who don't know what they don't know. Google says, do this? Sure. And that's where I know you've seen the stories. Just decimates accounts overnight if those model recommendations go wild. Yeah. And I think it comes back to, to like, you know, we moved, we moved house not too long ago. And we, you know, we always see when you move house, you get new furniture and I obviously can get all the new TVs and those things. And, and that's where I think the miscommunication is, is because people see the recommendations kind of like an instructions list. If you know, I don't know if you ever know what you're like when you set a new TV, press this button, you know, tune this, do this and everything works. And I think
That's where people get the misconception. That's where the recommendations are. So my biggest thing is, well, yeah, once again, I'm a big believer in turning them off. Go through and review them. even if you just, so I even go, just use it as a bit of a tool, as a reminder. And then you go, does this make sense to me? Do I want to do this? And if you don't want to do it, don't feel like you have to do it. And that's probably the biggest thing where I, the other thing I always say too, is if you're unsure about a decision, just wait. Because if you're going to wait two or three or four weeks it won't make a big difference if you think it's risky. Yeah, I agree with that advice. You always want to turn autoplay recommendations off. I have heard through the grapevine that your Google sales reps will not be pitching AAR as much going forward. So let's hope that's true.
And it's a good idea to review them. It's actually interesting. Optimizer recently did a study and they looked at optimization score and like, does it actually impact results? And what they found was that the score itself doesn't, but like the fact of reviewing them matters that people who have a higher score tend to actually have better Google ads results, meaning they're meeting the ROISER CPA targets, but it didn't matter if they accepted or rejected. And I think that's right. know, the advice you gave Aaron to be, you know, look at them, see if there's some good ideas in there, something you may have overlooked. If it works for your business, you can accept, you can just implement it on your own if you don't trust it or you can reject, but just the act of doing that, of checking in your account looking for and considering new opportunities was actually correlated with better performance.
So go figure. Yeah. And I think also too, something very similar to that is the, you know, the ad ranking or whether it's excellent, good, bad, or poor. Ad strength. Yes. Ad strength. Like I would say the same thing there too is, is it probably in a brand new account, the brand new campaign, this is me just looking at Anadolu. I would go, it's probably beneficial to have at least a good bit of an excellent ad in there.
But I'm still a big believer in split testing. But I then know I've found that if you've got an ad that is average or bad because you're in an app, pinned in a headline or done something that Google doesn't like. But if the click through ratio and the conversion rates are better, it actually outranks the ad rank. So that's where I kind of think that optimization scores are the same there as well. Review it, don't be held to it but go in there, but ultimately remembering that as in anything with Google's within Google Ads, things like click-through ratio in search or shopping campaigns, that outranks everything because in the algorithm that Google wants to get paid. So if you go to high click-through ratio, it's better than any ad quality or anything that you can get in there. Absolutely. I'll say ad strength is just letting you know if you meet Google's best practices, not related to performance. Quality score.you know, and ad rank itself, whole different thing that, you know, definitely matters. Although that may be a controversial statement, but yes, ad strength meant to just help you out. You can ignore it. And then optimization score meant to help you out. You can just ignore it if you need to. Let's dive a little bit deeper in there just because we're talking about quality score and click through ratio. I've worked off, this is for the last probably four years and I've tested this heavily in different accounts.
And I, I'm a, so my methodology with this is I definitely believe in keyword quality score, but then I would say once keyword quality score gets above a five, your click-through ratio is far more important than your quality score. So what I mean by that is if we had, if we had, if we had competing ads in the same auction and you had a quality score of eight out of 10, and I had a quality score of five out of 10, but I had a click through ratio of 15 % and you had a click through ratio of 7%, my ad would win, would get a higher ad rank. Sure, right. Cause Google wants to make money. Exactly. Right. So yeah. So that's, that's where, but, but if my quality scores are two, I'm not even in the auction.
So, so I'm always looking at, so I sort of more frame that around that it's still keyword quality score. should always be something that's important to work on, but there is diminishing returns above a five or six out of 10. So like getting a keyword, quality score from three to five is gonna have much more impact than getting it from a six to an eight or a seven to an eight or something like that. Yeah, but quality score, I like A more for like a six, I would say is my kind of floor because I mean, the most important component to quality score is expected click through rate, which is not the same thing as click through rate, but it your click through rate in context of your competitor. So of course, that's what that looks at. Add relevance is the one where you should always be above average. Cause that's when you have complete the control is your keyword related to your ad, your ad related to your landing page, that should be above average. And then landing page experience is the one, as Google has practitioners, it can be hardest to change. Like we know what goes into that. It's light speed, originality, all that stuff, but that's hard to fix. You can't fix that in your account. So that's the one where I say, if your landing page experience is below average, like not great, but we're okay. But you definitely want your ad relevance above average, which is worth three points. I'm choosing your quality score diagnostic tool and then expect a click through rate at least average, if not above average. And that's the one where the constant ad copy testing is not something that people who do Google ads are used to doing. That's more of like a social media practitioner thing, but we're having to get much better at it now because of how important that is in getting that visibility. Yeah, okay. Look, we'll finish a couple other questions, but just before we dive into some other topics.
Google Ads recommendations, is there anything else that people need to be aware of or any best practices that you recommend when it comes to people viewing those recommendations dashboards? We both agree that turn off the auto applied recommendations here. Anything else that you would One more thing I'd add is remember recommendations don't just live in the recommendation section. When you're working Google Ads, Google will constantly be recommending things to you. For example, as you type in your keywords, it will recommend you put them in broad match or if you uncheck the box for display network in a search campaign, it'll recommend you check that box again. And so the general tip I give is that when Google makes all these recommendations, there's always a color associated with them. The recommendation is in red, yellow, or blue. So if the recommendation's in red, that means you've got a real problem.
Like your conversion tracking is broken, it will not work. But if your recommendation is in yellow or in blue, it is just a suggestion. You do not have to do what it says and you should move forward with whatever you think is best for your business. So keep that color in mind. Okay, so that's a great recommendation. Look at, deal with the red ones and the other colors, use some common sense as we're there. Hey Jyll, last question just before we finish. I do always like, you know, cause I've got you on this call. Yeah, any emerging trends or any practices that you are changing when it comes to, I guess, setting up account structures as we move from into 2024 into 2025. I am an automation embracer. I'm very much of the mindset of getting the might of Google working for your business rather than trying to fight against it. So I feel like that's an important caveat to say upfront from my life. So things that I'm really thinking about and experimenting a lot with is match types. I used to always recommend phrase match keywords as a starting point.
kind of your Goldilocks solution. Whereas now I think phrase match is becoming more and more relevant. So it's a really small budget, start exact, large budget, start broad. That's how I'm starting to approach the keyword side of things. And then from audiences, I'm actually writing a book about audience targeting right now, because there's so much that's changing in that part of Google Ads. And so I'm really keeping an eye on how a lot of the audience stacking and layering and niche audience targeting we used to be able to do in Google Ads is going away.
but the automated targeting solutions just aren't always there yet, especially at smaller budgets. I don't have a solution for that piece, but that's something that I'm really experimenting with a lot as we see combined segments and custom segments going away. And the last smart bidding, know, smart bidding is just the best AI that exists in Google ads, in my opinion. And I know some people are going to clutch onto manual CPC with their cold dead hands, but when used correctly, just, smart bidding does exactly what you tell Google to do.
And I say that because you can be using a smart bidding strategy. It can be achieving exactly what it's supposed to achieve. And yet you're not happy with the results because smart bidding can only do one thing. You have reach or you have efficiency. You can't get both at the same time. But even with that, that's the piece where it is a very, very, very situation where I will not advocate for smart bidding, especially moving into 2025. So those are kind of the three big things I'm focusing on right now with my clients and course members and what I'm thinking about going deeper with in 2025. Great points. I mean, I agree with you on the phrase match. I am now dubbing phrase match a poor man's broad match. Just because I was getting like, and I was the same too. actually really, I used to love broad match modifiers and phrase match. That was my go-to. all did. Yeah. But they're just not there anymore.
They are not. So I'm only using either broad match or exact match. They're the only two keyword phrases I use. My gut feeling on that as well is that if Google eventually remove phrase match, they probably just didn't want the big uproar at the moment. So they're giving it there. But it actually operates the same as broad match with less signals. if you're going to do it, it's actually, yeah, it's not something I would use.
Only thing I'd say there too is that if people, you've got an existing account and phrase match is working in your campaigns, don't feel like you've got to go switch them all out. Like it's more, that's more for new people coming in from there. And I'll jump to the last one, smart bidding. Yeah, I agree that I know there's a, there is a lot of talk at the moment and some in this space. I think what people are missing with trying to hold onto Max CPC and this is, this is my view is they're just seeing, they're not taking into account what's changing outside of Google ads
So with the Google Ads practitioners, we can just be sitting inside and looking at the Google Ads dashboard and just thinking that's our whole ecosystem. My saying to people is just that the search experience for users is going to drastically change very, very quickly. And it's going to be going to voice, going to be able to chat a conversational base. So I think brands that and Google Ads marketers that are embracing the newer types of campaigns and working out how to use them properly will see success. the other thing is there's some cheaper traffic out there. So yes, I completely agree with that. And I think any negative I've heard about smart bidding and those things, can purely come down to it hasn't been used in the right way. Absolutely. Makes me very happy to hear you say that. Work with the system, not against the system, because the only way through was forward. We're not going back.
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I guess my view on it has always been to is I've always I think when people fall down is you've got to you've got to understand how Google created these different campaigns and what they created for so that they're creating the rules. So I just don't see any point in trying to like, you know, go beyond it. I've got an analogy. I don't know if you've got kids about three, three teenage daughters. So my my thing is, is Google used to be a compliant child, where you could tell it what to do and it would just go do it, where now it's the rebellious teenager, where if you tell it not to do something, it's just going to go, right, I'm going go do it anyway. Our role is to put in those really hard barriers so that they can't do it. So I think that success in Google is more by giving Google, fighting back, not fighting back, that's the wrong word, but giving Google back guidelines of this is where I want you to operate. But it's broader than what it used to be. You can't have a little narrow laser focus with Google Ads for success now.
It's an interesting analogy. think that, you used to be able to, you know, tell Google exactly how to do what you wanted it to do. And now you can't tell it how to do it. You need to tell it the end goal. So in a way you actually have to become a much better manager because you're not saying follow this step, then this step, then this step. saying my end goal is a five ROAS. You figure out how to get there. I have faith in you. Take all my money and all my data. And now here's the end goal. And the way it gets there can constantly change.
But it will get there if it's possible to get there. And I guess that's the last piece. You must set realistic expectations for the machine or else no one will be happy in the end. And look, I think we both understand why people have those views where they're very anti-Google because let's be honest, Google probably hasn't done itself a lot of favors in certain areas. But yeah, I mean, I'm still a lover of the platform and yeah, you can definitely.
I think for me, you've just got to lean into the change because it's not just the changes that's happening inside of Google Ads. The whole search space in terms of how users interact with search is changing rapidly. So we need to be on board with that and move ahead. Absolutely. Hey, Jyll, it has been an absolute pleasure having you here. For anyone watching this video or listening to the podcast version, just check the description of the show notes and I'm going to let you know I'm going have some links so that you can get in contact with Jyll and find her in all the various places where she is located on the internet. So Jyll, thank you again and I hope you have a good rest of the day.
Thanks Aaron, you too.
Thanks for joining me today for this special episode. I'll have a new insider challenge for you next week in 2025. I wish you and your loved ones a happy and healthy new year. I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.