Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 79 - AI Max & Broad Match

AI Max, Broad Match, and the keywordless future in Google Ads. What's changing? What's staying the same? And what do you need to know to get the best results from your Google Search campaigns?

I recently spoke with James Deeney of the Paid Media Lab podcast by Lunio.

James shared with me that this is the best performing episode of their podcast they've ever had. And I thought, you know what? I bet that would do pretty well on the Inside Google Ads podcast as well!

I'm going to share an edited version of that conversation with you here right now.

And if you like Inside Google Ads, I recommend you also subscribe to the Paid Media Lab podcast where James interviews a different PPC expert every week.

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, Episode 79: AI Max and Broad Match. 

Let's turn it over to James.

James: I reached out to Jyll because she wrote a fantastic LinkedIn post debunking some of the most common myths and misconceptions about Google's new AI Max feature for Search. And that's what we focus on in the first half of this conversation. There's a lot of hype and talk online right now about AI Max and what it means for the future of Search. And Jyll did a great job of cutting through all the noise and distilling down the key things you should know if you're planning to experiment with it. 

And then in the second half of the conversation, we shifted focus to explore how you can get better results when using Broad Match, which of course is an essential component of how AI Max operates. There's so much to take away in action from this one, so let's dive in.

Jyll Saskin Gales, welcome to the Paid Media Lab, it's great to have you on.

Jyll: Thanks for having me.

James: The last thing that I saw in your LinkedIn that is relevant, I think to the conversation that we're going to have today. And it was a post that you'd made and it was talking about why when it comes to Google Ads, the house always wins. And in this case, the house being Google. And it was getting to the point that when Google announced a new major change or update, there can often be quite a lot of disgruntled marketers who try to fight against it and maintain the status quo. And in that video, you explained why that's never a good move. And by moving with the change and trying to understand it, you're not simply being an apologist for Google or as you said, “drinking the Google CoolAid” or whatever that was. But could you maybe talk a bit more about that as I feel it is relevant to the main topic we're about to get into today, which is all about AI Max, one of the bigger announcements from Google in recent years.

Jyll: Before I post anything online, whether it's you know, a LinkedIn post or a YouTube video, I always ask myself, what is the unique value I have to offer to the audience here? Because if I'm not going to share something unique or helpful or interesting, what's the point in adding more noise to the cacophony that's all around us?

So this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently as someone who used to work at Google and then someone who got invited to go to Google Marketing Live, meet with product managers. I do have an unprecedented level of access, and I want to use that access in a way that helps people get better results when their Google Ads campaigns because that's what we will all want. And so something I've noticed is that the way a lot of people in this space communicate is “here's this hack that Google doesn't want you to know,” or “never trust Google with this. They just want to steal your money.” And I just personally don't find that helpful, and I don't think it makes people feel good about the work we do.

I like to take this perspective of Google as this huge, moneymaking corporation. Yes. Like a casino, the house always wins. Google will make money and you can make money too. It's not a zero sum game. So the way that I like to teach and the way I like to analyze updates is if it is going to make Google a lot of money. How can I work with that and understand that so that I can make money too, so that it can help my clients make money too. Rather than saying, oh, Google is gonna make a ton of money. I need to figure out how to steal as much as I can from them. You just won't win. The house always wins. That doesn't mean you can't win as well. And so, I've always been a proponent of how I can work with the system rather than against the system to drive sustainable, scalable results in Google Ads. 

James: Yeah, I think that's a really balanced and fair way to look at it. And if Google weren't delivering results for advertisers, you know, people would vote with their budgets. So, definitely along the right lines there. As I mentioned today, one of the main focuses of our conversation is going to be on AI Max, which is definitely one of the hot topics, at the moment in the world of PPC and shortly after it was announced, you wrote a really good LinkedIn post, which is why I wanted to reach out and invite you on the podcast. 

In that post, you were debunking some of the myths and misconceptions that were proliferating widely around the time that the announcement was made. I thought to start the interview, it would be good to go through some of the key points that you touched on in that LinkedIn post and make sure that everyone's on the same page in terms of what AI Max is and what it's not.

The first element in your post was why AI Max is not necessarily the same as Search Max. So it does get a little bit confusing there, but could you clear things up? 

Jyll: Absolutely. So the product we now know as AI Max was called Search Max when it was in closed beta, and a couple months before AI Max was announced. There were a lot of rumors going around about what Search Max was and people were posting about Search Max and getting a ton of attention for it. And then people were using chat GPT to write posts about Search Max. It was just blatantly made up stuff and it really frustrated me, as someone who likes to share facts online, because at that point, unless you were in the closed beta and under NDA you didn't know what Search Max was yet. Everyone was already giving advice about this thing that didn't exist yet. 

So Search Max is what it was called. It has evolved a lot in the years it's been in beta and now it's coming into open beta under the name AI Max for Search campaigns. So that's really the key difference there. Search Max did exist in closed beta. It was a rumored thing. It was constantly changing. Now this bundle of features is called AI Max for Search campaigns, and it is actually happening and rolling out to accounts. 

James: Nice. That's super helpful for me. I was just confused by that as I saw the mentions of Search Max and then I was like, oh, this is a new separate thing. But no, super helpful to clear that up straight away. Two of the other points that you raised was AI Max is not a new campaign type and it's not a new keyword match type. So could you maybe talk about those elements? 

Jyll: These are both rumors that people were talking about when they saw Search Max show up under the Search Terms Report. Oh, it's gonna be a new match type. But no, it's not a match type. It's not a campaign type. AI Max for Search campaigns is simply a bundle of features that you can opt into or out of in existing Search campaigns. It's actually replacing something in the Search campaign settings. 

Right now you may have seen something called the Broad Match setting, which by default is turned on if you're using a conversion-based bid strategy. That's going to go away in the interface and instead you will see AI Max for Search campaigns. It will not yet be on by default though. I'm sure at some point it will be. And within that feature, within your Search campaign settings, you can choose text customization, or keywordless targeting, whatever they're going to call that part, and final URL expansion. It's these three features that already existed elsewhere in Google Ads, just brought together under the fancy name AI Max within your Search campaign settings. 

James: Nice. And then the final couple of points that you raised in your post were referring back to the point that we just made in the introduction about some people being quite disgruntled and they were saying, oh, AI Max is just an example of Google taking away control or it's a a black box technology and we have no transparency over what's going on here, and why is that kind of line of reasoning not, fully fair.

Jyll: Well, it's true that with many feature releases over the last couple of years, Google has given us less control and transparency than we're used to. The theme that I've observed in 2025 from Google is that they're actually giving us more transparency and more control than we've seen before. 

For example, in Demand Gen campaigns, you now get channel performance reporting and the ability to change it. In Performance Max campaigns, we're getting a Search Terms Report and the ability to add negative keywords. So with AI Max for Search campaigns, this is actually giving control because it's not all or nothing like many features are. You could, for example, just opt into final URL expansion, not the other two parts of it.

And on the transparency side, we're actually going to be getting more transparency in Search Term Reports than we have now because what Google tells us about AI Max is not only will you see the search terms that come through, but you'll also see the RSA headline or headlines that served with that search term, which is not something you can see now.And then you'll be able to see the specific landing pages associated with each search term, which is not something you can see now. 

James: Interesting. Yeah that RSA increased transparency is going to be a thing that a lot of people are interested in for sure. On LinkedIn, I think it was Fred from Optmyzr that described AI Max as combining Broad Match and DSA, but smarter as a kind of way to simplify what we're talking about. Do you agree with that framing and is Fred along the right lines there? 

Jyll: I do agree with that framing. It's keywordless targeting, which is a phrase Google has never used until now. Keywordless targeting, which DSA, dynamic search ads. But the key difference there of course, is that as of right now, if you're using Dynamic Search ads, then you can't use RSAs with it. You're using that special dynamic ad that just has the dynamically generated headlines and the fixed descriptions.

Whereas, when you use something like Broad Match, it often feels like keywordless targeting, although you do still have a keyword there. But that of course, is then compatible with full RSAs. So I use a similar analogy.

Another analogy I like as someone who likes audience targeting is it's like optimized targeting for search. Then something else when I was at Google Marketing Live, all the Googlers I interacted with called it Search Only PMax, and so I was like, well, if that's how they refer to it, and they designed the product then Search Only PMax works for me. You can see why the name used to be Search Max.

James: Nice. Yeah, that's a useful rule of thumb there to kind of conceptualize this in your own brain. We’ve touched on it, the keywordless future of PPC. I've been working in this industry now since late 2022, and there've been rumblings of this since then. It does kind of feel like now we're really starting to get to the beginning of that, whereas before it all felt a bit speculative. And yes, maybe we'll get there one day. It kind of feels like this is a transitional moment where we can see that it's not too far away. It's not too big a jump to get to a keywordless feature of PPC. I'd be really interested to get your perspective on what you see as being the biggest opportunities and the biggest risks, when we start to move away from traditional keyword control to more AI-driven query matching.

Jyll: I actually see this as the second phase of the “keywords are dead” future. Because the first phase was when the definitions of the match types all changed. You know, Exact Match today means what Broad Match meant in 2020. And so in a way, keywords have already died in the way that we knew them. You can't just give Google a keyword and say, I only want to show ads when people search for this. That capability just does not exist and hasn't existed now for years. So that was kind of phase one, loosening all the match types up. 

Now we have the evolution of keywordless targeting because again, keywordless targeting itself is not new. What really stands out to me though, is when I hear people at Google talking about how we're moving away from keyword matching and towards predicting intent because in this world where we're talking back and forth with Gemini or Google or Chat GPT or whatever, you know, keywords just break down. The idea that people type a few words into a search engine and expect one specific result, it's just not the way consumer behavior is going, and we really have to follow that.

It's much more about understanding who that person is, that's where the audience targeting comes in, and then inferring and predicting what they might need next to proactively serve it to them to be more helpful to them. So I don't know exactly what that future looks like, but I know that if advertisers want to play a role there we need to hand over more of the keys to Google to give Google the leeway and flexibility to figure out the best times to surface our ads in those search results or conversations or videos or whatever it might be. But it's definitely not the way we've been used to operating for the last 20 to 25 years.

James: Yeah, for sure. And one of the other important components of AI Max, which you've touched on in your answers, is the final URL expansion components. Moving from PMax to Search and its final URL expansion is something that's come up on this show, quite a few times in the past because it is an interesting feature and sometimes. If you're not careful, it doesn't always serve your end goals. I'd love to get your brief summary and explanation of what final URL expansion is and what marketers should be aware of if they are going to use it within AI Max. 

One of the things that we've spoken about, sorry, this is a very long winded question, but one of the things that we've spoken about on this podcast is for B2B lead gen businesses who have a huge amount of blog pages and they might have many different solution pages, and it's a very deep and complex site structure. Can they really use this effectively and do they need to be more mindful of other businesses? 

Jyll: Final URL, let's start there. The final URL is the final destination of your ad. So when someone clicks on your ad, where do you want them to go? So final URL expansion means you give Google permission to send those users to any page of your website that Google thinks will be most relevant and lead towards your goals, and that is the place where things can break down for B2B, for lead gen, for small budget accounts, is when you are not aligning your goal to Google's goals. 

What I mean by that is the way you tell Google your goals is by choosing your bid strategy, telling the campaign what you wanted to achieve, and then feeding Google the right data about whether it's doing a good job or not. So for lead generation, that often means trying to do something like Offline Conversion tracking, because the conversion may be filling in a lead form and then your sales team reaches out to them and they're qualified or not qualified and on and on and on and on.

And most businesses don't feed that data back to Google. Therefore, all your campaign is optimizing for is people filling out the lead form and it will go out and find the fastest, easiest, cheapest way to get people to fill out the lead form, which is spam. And so I just think that's a really helpful clarification.

It's not that final URL expansion doesn't work for lead gen. It's that most lead gen advertisers don't give Google the data it needs to give them the results they need. And so when we figure it out that way, rethink how we're thinking about the challenges we might face with tools like text asset customization or final URL expansion. It's just if you give Google the data it needs and you tell it your real objectives, then it will go out there and try to achieve that for you. If you can't give Google the data it needs, which is a challenge many, many businesses face, that's where a lot of this automation can break down. 

James: So in those cases where the business doesn't meet those prerequisite requirements to supply Google with the right data, is it best just to avoid, like you really need to do that work first before you try and even attempt to make this work? Or is there any way that you can put in some guardrails to make it work? 

Jyll: It depends on the campaign type and Performance Max. The whole point is you can't really put in those guardrails, you know? So probably not the best campaign type for you if you don't have full funnel conversion tracking.

If you're an ecommerce business and what you're tracking is a “purchase” then by all means turn the final URL expansion on and get those sales wherever you can get them. But for lead generation or maybe for very small budget ecommerce businesses that don't have a lot of data yet, it may not be the best solution. You're probably better off with a campaign type like Search or Shopping, if applicable, or Demand Gen where at least for now you have much more control over your targeting and are able to guide the automation much more that way in Performance Max. 

I think audience signals and search themes are a scam. Ultimately that campaign's going to do whatever the bid strategy tells it to do, according to your conversion tracking. It does not care what you give it as an audience signal or a search theme. 

James: Say a little bit more about that, just from what you've seen in terms of audience signals and Search themes. Like, well, why are they?

Jyll: Sure. So in Performance Max, you don't get to choose your targeting. App campaigns are the same way, but you don't choose targeting at all. You only get to provide signals to guide the automation. That's what Google likes to tell us, but ultimately, that campaign is going to show ads to whomever it thinks is most likely to convert or most likely to hit your Target ROAS, whatever of the four Smart Bidding strategies you choose. That's what the campaign will be singularly focused on.

So, if it turns out that those audiences on your audience signal align with that, then great. It'll show people to that audience. But it also would've done that anyway, even if you didn't give it the signal. It’s the same with Search themes. The whole point of adding Search themes to a Performance Max campaign is to tell its searches that it may not figure out on its own that you think will convert well.

For example, like, competitor names. If you want to advertise on competitor names, the keywordless targeting of PMax would not find that anywhere on your website. So you can feed it that, but the AI is smart. It would have figured that out anyway. And if that's actually going to drive good results, it will go do that for you. And so you are just giving it these signals, like if they're helpful, great, it probably would've found them anyway. And then if they're not helpful, it's just going to ignore them and do what it needs to do to hit your objective.

I think it's very smart branding on Google's part to say you get to guide the automation, because that's exactly what optimized targeting does. In a Demand Gen campaign you do get to actually pick your audience targeting and if you keep optimized targeting turned on, it takes those audiences you chose for targeting and turns them into signals, meaning it gets the show ads to whomever it likes. And nobody likes optimized targeting. No Google Ads practitioner wants that on. But we changed the branding. It's no longer optimized targeting. It's “you give us signals, you guide the automation,” and suddenly we like that and want to use it. 

And I mean it's the same with AI Max, right? Like so many practitioners talk about it, they hate Broad Match and it's so stupid and they don't want to use it. But, ooh, AI Max, of course I want to try that! And I'm sitting here thinking like, am I taking crazy pills? It's the exact same thing in a different package! But good for Google, you know, for changing the branding around it and making people want to test this stuff. Because people do need to test this stuff. This is where Google Ads is going. I do find that a bit funny. Sorry I took you on a bit of a tangent there. 

James: No. No, I think it's a really good point. And the Google team has to be given credit. They're true masters of human psychology and, you know, sometimes they are right, not always, not always. I'm sure. Yeah. You, you know a lot more about that than I do.

Before you mentioned Broad Match in your answer there and how AI Max is very similar in a lot of ways. We are going to get into Broad Match in just a second because I think there's some interesting points to make there. But before we do, just to close up on AI Max, a lot of marketers probably will be keen to experiment with it when they can. We are recording this episode at the beginning of June, so at this point, not many advertisers are going to be using AI Max. This episode will be released in mid-July. Probably have a few more people using it by then. But for people who are anticipating putting some budget into AI Max, what would you recommend they do in terms of testing it fairly and accurately to see if it is driving incremental improvements?

Jyll: If you are someone who only uses Exact Match keywords and you are skeptical of Smart Bidding, I don't recommend turning on AI Max. It's like going from crawling to running in a marathon. You are unlikely to be satisfied with the outcome.

If you are curious about AI Max and you want to test it, start with some of the existing similar capabilities. Try Broad Match. You can set up experiments in Google Ads to do that or try a dynamic ad group if you've never done that before. Run Performance Max and just put a really strict Target CPA or Target ROAS, which will force it into primarily search inventory. So there are lots of ways you can use the features of AI Max, even before you have AI Max in your account. 

Then, if those work well for you, you are likely to be happy with AI Max when it comes out. If they do not work well for you, by all means still go test AI Max. You are probably unlikely to be happy with the outcome.

I will say there are a few cool things that AI Max does that Broad Match doesn't. The Search Term Reporting I mentioned earlier. There's also this feature coming with AI Max where you'll be able to - not ad group level location targeting, but ad group level location intent. 

So, for example, you could be targeting the whole United States with hotel ads, but have one ad group where you want the focus to be on Los Angeles hotels, instead of having to adjust all your keywords to say, “Los Angeles hotels,” “where to stay in Los Angeles,” “Los Angeles Airbnbs.” You just have your regular hotels, places to say keywords. You set an ad group location interest for Los Angeles, and it takes care of that for you. 

I say that to say there are a few things like this in AI Max that are unique and are reasons that you specifically might want to test it. But in general, if you are an automation skeptic, I would love for you to test AI Max for Search. But it's full automation. So definitely try one of those walking steps before you try to run or else you're just going to curse Google all over again when the problem is you. 

James: That's wise advice I'd say. We'll switch gears slightly here and, and we'll get into how marketers can use Broad Match more effectively, as part of standard Search campaigns without AI Max enabled and we've touched on it in some of what we covered already, but could you maybe give us a rundown on why Broad Match has gotten a bad reputation amongst some marketers and why there are people out there who are hesitant to use it at all, even though it's been around for, for quite a few years now.

Jyll: So Broad Match just means you're giving Google permission to show ads to people who search for anything somewhat related to your keywords, and it uses your keywords as a guide. The other keywords in the ad group, your landing pages, it does take a whole bunch of signals into effect to try to figure out which queries to show your ads on. But if you are running Broad Match keywords and you look at your Search Terms Report, first, you're going to see at least 50% hidden other search terms, if not 80%, which means a lot of stuff you don't even know what you're advertising on. And then even what you can see, you're gonna see a lot of stuff that seems irrelevant.

Smart Bidding starts dumb, right? It has to get smart by learning. And Broad Match is the same. Broad Match is really this AI-driven keyword match type. Artificial intelligence is artificial. It starts dumb and needs data to learn to get intelligence. 

So if you first launch a campaign on Broad Match, even if you have Smart Bidding, sufficient conversion data, and great RSAs and a great offer on your website and all those things that it needs to succeed. It's probably going to do some stupid stuff for the first couple of days. So if you're going to leverage any automated solution, including Broad Match, you need patience and you need to give the system time to learn. 

My son is two years old, he's learning to talk. I always use this as an analogy with my Google Ads coaching clients. I'll say, my son, he doesn't say firetruck. He says “fire f*ck kuck.” Sorry. If you have to leave that out, that's what he says. Okay. And when he says that, we laugh because it's funny. But I don't turn around and yell at him and say, “oh, you didn't say the word right. Never try to say that again!” No, that would be crazy. We laugh and then I say back, “oh, fire truck. Yes, Leo. You want the fire truck?” And then the next day he says, “fire f*ck kuck.” And I say, “that's right. You want the fire truck.” Like it's gonna take him time to learn. I can try to guide him with my corrections. 

And so in our analogy, the guiding is your Smart Bidding and your RSAs and your conversion data, but I just need to give him the time and space to test, to gather his own data, knowing that he will learn to say fire truck the way we all say it. 

I find this a really helpful analogy. You shouldn't use any automated solution if you're not prepared to waste some money and waste some time giving the system the opportunity to learn. Because then once you do, while it's still always consistently learning, it can then drive these sustainable, scalable results for you, but you have to give it a chance to get there. You have to get through the “fire f*ck kucks” in order to get to the fire trucks. 

James: Nice. That's a great analogy from Leo there. He didn't know that he was going to be contributing to the Google Ads community and the knowledge here. But yeah, I love that. 

I think it's a great point that it's just, kind of like there is an impatience there, and as you said, the tendency is to immediately look at that and go, well, that money was wasted and I should have been able to avoid that waste. But as you alluded to there it's impossible. The learning requires that some budget is spent on keywords that just don't work out and that you need to understand that and put this kind of bigger holistic view on how to evaluate these things. So, with that said, are there any particular scenarios or circumstances where you'd like to use Broad Match with your clients or the campaigns that you're managing?

Jyll: I will advise clients to use Broad Match if they've been using Exact Match and they're maxed out on the opportunity. If they can't spend more, they're currently just capturing the opportunity. Their Search Impression Share is really high and we want to grow. I'll go to Broad Match.

I don't like Phrase Match anymore. Either get the control you can get out of Exact Match or get the additional signals and performance you can get out of Broad Match, rather than Phrase Match. It used to be my Goldilocks solution, now it's my good-for-nothing solution. That's the one scenario where I'll recommend it. 

Another scenario is if you're working with a large enough budget and you have the proper conversion data, then I say go Broad Match from day one. This happened to a Google Ads coaching client of mine. They're the head of paid search in an agency and they generally work with very small budget advertisers, $1,000 to $2,000 a month ad budget. It’s Exact Match. Very locked down because that's what works. And then suddenly, they got this client that wanted to spend $1,000 per day on Google Ads, not $1,000 a month.

They started with our usual Exact match, Smart bidding, et cetera, strategy and it just didn't work. And the client wasn't happy. They weren't spending the budget because it couldn't spend the budget. There were only so many searches out there. And so we spoke about that and I said, look, when you're spending $1,000 a day instead of $1,000 a month, you have to rethink everything you know about how to spend that efficiently. Start with Broad Match. Maybe the first couple of days will suck, but it's going to learn really fast.

And they did that and the client was very happy because they were able to spend the budget and get the quality lead volume they needed. And now, this thing can even scale further if they want to. There's more opportunity out there.

So Broad Match needs sufficient budget, sufficient time, and sufficient data. It can absolutely work. I think where a lot of people go wrong and miss is probably the people who aren't listening to a podcast like this. It's the small business owners who don't know what they don't know. Broad Match is the default. Or if they opt into auto-apply recommendations, everything will be switched to Broad Match and they're spending their $20 a day and not seeing good results and don't know why. So that's where Broad Match can really go wrong. 

James: Nice. Yeah, that's a good point. There may be a few of those listening today, but we don't know. You never know. The next question is one of the last questions, but I do want to give credit to Ben on the content team here at Lunio because he wrote this question. I did not come up with this question, which goes, If you were to rewrite Google's own documentation or onboarding flow for Broad Match in 2025, what key pieces of advice or guardrails would you add in that aren't emphasized enough currently? 

Jyll: That is an excellent question, Ben, and if anyone from Google is listening, I would love the opportunity to rewrite your documentation. You know, if I worked for Google, I probably wouldn't make any changes to the documentation.

If I'm Jyll, I would. If I'm Google, you know, Google designs these products and learns what works for large advertisers and what works when you have Smart bidding and RSAs and all these things working together.

So that's why I can't speak for Google. But as someone who worked at Google and has met with the Google product managers, my interpretation is that to the people who work at Google, it's working exactly how it should. It's getting a ton of people to test Broad Match and given the right time and data, Broad Match is the right solution for everyone.

Now I don't personally agree with that. I understand why Google feels that way. So, I think the one change I would make that, thankfully, should be changing right now is I would not have that Broad Match setting on by default. Because what that does, assuming you’re using a conversion-based bid strategy, which also is the default, is that if the Broad Match setting is turned on at the campaign level, then when you go to add your keywords, even if you know to add Exact or Phrase Match keywords, it'll let you add them and then strip the match type and make it all Broad Match. That's what the Broad Match setting does now.

So thankfully that is being replaced by AI Max, but I imagine something similar there will happen and so the one thing, if I could just get Google to listen to me and take something away that encourages Broad Match, is when you type in keywords that have Phrase or Exact Match, I would take away the warning that pops up that says Switch to Broad Match instead or upgrade to Broad Match instead. Again, from Google's perspective, I know why they do it, but that's one that just causes so many people to get confused and to waste money. They think that by clicking that button, that's how they add the keywords. They don't realize what it does. I think that part is very misleading.

To answer Ben's question, if I could change one thing, that's the piece I would take away. Like at the moment of adding the keyword, don't try to trick people into upgrading it to Broad Match. But like I will say, from a Google perspective, I totally get why they would do that. And if I worked there, I would do the same thing.

James: Fair as always, very balanced and, and considered in your response there, Jyll. 

Jyll: I try. Thank you, James.

 James: My last question on Broad Match is going to be on how you compare it effectively with First-party data, audience signals, offline conversion imports. You know, we've been talking about this that to make Broad Match work, you really do need to be supplying all this additional information to Google, so that it can focus on higher intent traffic and the right kind of leads if you're, if you're a lead gen business, rather than just chasing traffic for the sake of traffic.

Could you maybe talk through some advice or tips that you give to people to make sure that they're given the right kind of data to Google in the right way? 

Jyll: Absolutely, and I'll explain this, like whether or not you're using Broad Match, there's a few things that every Google Ads account should have. 

The first one is an obvious one, conversion tracking. Letting Google know what is the valuable action for your business that you want. I know you might say, oh, we just want traffic. Lies! If all your Google Ads did was drive traffic, you would cut off that investment immediately. For most businesses, you want action of some kind. It's either a “purchase,” a “phone call,” a “form fill”, or something. If it's a form fill then you want something like Offline Conversion Tracking, which we've been talking about. You want to give Google as much real business data about the real valuable things that make you money, and that is a paying customer, not just a lead. So that's first, conversion tracking. 

The second one that I think a lot of people don't realize is your customer list. Now, at least as of right now in Google Ads, in order to use your customer list for ad targeting purposes, you have to have a $50,000 spend history in your account, which many small accounts don't have.

However, there is still value in uploading your customer list to Google Ads, even if you're never going to spend $50,000. And even if the list is not large enough, usually you need around 1,200 records in order for it to start showing, even though it's not large enough to serve ads to, because just that customer list existing in your account means all your Smart bidding is going to use it as a signal, your optimized targeting is going to use it as a signal, which means your PMax will use it as a signal, or AI Max will use it as a signal, right? That data is still there, making all of your existing campaigns smarter, even if you're not explicitly targeting the list itself. And that was something that I did not know until I started researching my book about audience targeting. That's why I always like to share, upload that customer list at least once a month, even if you're not using it for ad targeting purposes yet, because that's really going to help you. 

Then, I guess the third thing I'll say that's really important to think about is we spend so much time as Google Ads practitioners focusing on our bidding and our targeting. That's what this conversation has really been about today, but there's this whole other piece, which is the only part the user sees, and that's your ad creative. And we are used to the era of just, like, you pick your keywords, you pick your bidding, throw up some stuff, and boom, people come to your website, but the ad creative is the part now that while AI can assist with, it cannot take over. 

We have AI targeting, we have AI bidding, we do not have fully AI creative because it's just not good. So, that's the third thing I would say, I would really focus on if you're a Google Ads practitioner who has never studied copywriting techniques, you should probably go do that.

If you have never tried your hand at learning anything at all about graphic design or video production, you might want to start learning about that because the creative is all the end user sees, and that's what helps them determine if I am going to engage with this ad or not engage with this ad. I would really encourage that third piece which is so important which is creative. 

You want your conversion tracking, your customer list and your creative. Those are the three C's that Jyll says you need for great Google Ads results.

 James: Nice. We love the alliteration and I can really attest to that third point of what creative. We were running ads for a webinar, with Fred from Optmyzr. By the time this podcast comes out, this webinar will have already happened, but we were running ads on LinkedIn and we used to always run ads that looked quite polished and professional and they were done by our graphic designer and they were very nice and you know, great. But they were quite obviously ads. and this is slightly different from Search, but what we wanted to experiment was can we make an ad that looks slightly more like a kind of native post that someone might actually make and looks less obviously like an ad from a SaaS company. We created that creative and it just blew the old creative out of the water in terms of cost per lead.

And it really hit home to me that the creative can have a massive influence on your results. Even the targeting and everything else was the same and what was driving the difference was the creative. So, good message to end on there. And I think for people to take away from that. We will have to leave it there.

But thank you so much for joining me today, Jyll. It's been great to connect. I'm definitely more clued up on AI Max now and I know a lot of listeners will find those insights useful as well, especially that point about Search Max because I think a lot of people got confused about that. 

Go subscribe to Inside Google Ads and check out Jyll's book on Amazon too. Thanks again, Jyll.

Jyll: Before I let you go for the day, a few updates since this episode was recorded. First, I have now used AI Max, seen AI Max, and talked to industry colleagues about it. And the general consensus is that… it's pretty good. If you're still a bit hesitant about testing AI Max, you can turn it on as an experiment and see how it performs versus your existing campaign structure.

If you want some more step-by-step tutorials about how to set up AI Max, I have a new lesson on that for my Inside Google Ads course members. You can learn more and join at learn.jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A. And it's also a common topic we're exploring in my Google Ads coaching sessions. So if you would like to book a call with me and get an hour of my expertise and brain on your Google Ads account, visit my website, jyll.ca, to see my availability and book a time that works for you.

Next episode, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming around here, where I answer three of your burning Google Ads questions. And we're bringing back the Insider Challenge, so stay tuned.

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