Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 96 - Control vs Automation

**Disclaimer: This transcript includes a previous recording and may contain grammatical errors and inconsistencies.

How has our job as PPC practitioners evolved with AI and what do we need to do to continue to get great results for our clients?

Fred Vallaeys, the CEO of Optmyzr recently invited me to be a guest on his podcast, PPC Town Hall. I've had the pleasure of spending time with Fred at conferences, including Google Marketing Live, and Optmyzr actually sponsored this podcast last year.

And so I was really excited to have the opportunity to sit down with one of the people who created AdWords back in the day. This is true! Do you know that Fred is the one who invented what we now know as conversion tracking? Kaboom! Mind-boggling.

In this conversation, we talk about AI, Performance Max, Smart bidding, and how AI has completely changed the game, moving from an era of control to one of controlled guidance.

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 96, Control versus Automation.

Let's get into it.

Fred: Hello and welcome to this episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I'm your host and also CEO and co-founder and Optmyzr of PPC Management Software. For today's episode, we have the great pleasure of welcoming Jyll Saskin Gales. She's a repeat guest to the show and she's one of the top educators in the Google ad space.

And she's been talking a lot about audiences. That's probably what most people know her for, but now she's also working on a book and courses related to bidding. So can't wait to have a great conversation and share some insights from talking to Jyll Saskin Gales.

Jyll, welcome back to the show.

Jyll: Thanks Fred, it's great to be here.

Fred: So yeah, Jyll, before we dive into some of the topics that I've teed up here, you do have a long background in Google ads. You worked at Google. You've written one book. You've built a whole bunch of five-star courses. So take people through what you've been up to. 

Jyll: Absolutely. I'm a Google Ads coach. My main business is working one-on-one with business owners, freelancers, agencies, in-house marketers, and helping them get better results from Google Ads. So sometimes that means, you know, literally walking a small business owner through setting up a Google Ads account, not doing the Performance Max campaign, and then setting up their first search campaign. And sometimes it's working with advanced practitioners, managing millions of dollars a month, advising them on strategy.

So coming out of being a coach, I have a lot of other ways that I try to help people get better results from Google Ads. There's my Inside Google Ads course, my Inside Google Ads podcast, my Inside Google Ads book, which is an Amazon bestseller. And then of course, I really enjoy creating content online, whether it's my YouTube channel or posting on LinkedIn,  speaking at conferences where I get to see you and members of the Optmyzr team. Writing for Search Engine Land. I just genuinely, genuinely love Google Ads. I love getting into the nitty gritty. I think it's fascinating. I genuinely think it's fascinating and I love it. And so I love being able to share that passion and excitement, but also that knowledge with practitioners of all levels.

Fred: Yeah, for sure. A fascinating and a fast moving field to work in. Now, being so into the weeds and loving everything about Google ads and these details. I think that these are the first conversation, but as automation and performance max and AI max continue to take hold and become bigger, we're looking at generative AI doing more of the work that we used to do. How does that fit in with someone who likes to do, who likes to have the control and control these things like… What's the big conversation here?

Jyll: It's really changed from controlling to guiding. And I know I'm not the first person to say that, but it's definitely a perspective I've been espousing a lot lately. You know, those of us who've been doing Google ads since it was called AdWords and even before, we were very used to the era of control. These are the exact keywords I want, and these are the exact bids I want. And then step three, profit. And that's just not the way it works anymore because consumer behavior has changed, because the SERPs have changed, because AI has changed.

So now getting in the weeds doesn't mean I'm trying to set a bid for every keyword and I'm trying to create 200 different ad groups to have control. Getting into the weeds means really understanding the way smart bidding works and how choosing a different bidding target can completely change the queries I show on. Really seeing all these pieces as interconnected and then it's our job as marketers to give the system what it needs, data, budget, assets, correct guidance so it can give us what we need, which is conversions, profit, et cetera. So controlling to guiding is the key theme and it's something I wholeheartedly embrace and preach, but I know that not everyone in the industry feels that way.

Fred: No, and that makes sense. I mean, it's the types of settings that we control have shifted. At the end of the day, it's the outcomes that we care about and it's how you get there that matters. And so it's just, you know, evolve along with the settings of Google ads and control the things you can control. And so speaking of the controlling things, let's talk about the first one and one that's near and dear to your heart. Audiences. So you've written a book about it. You've done courses on it, but do you think people sometimes over segment? And is that a risk?

Jyll: I don't see that so much in Google ads. Thankfully, I tend to see that sort of really specific audience segmentation and layering is more of a meta ads thing. I know that meta ads practitioners like to preach broad targeting, go broad, you don't need audiences at all. So I wouldn't go that far on the Google ad side.  But I find, you know, bigger mistakes people tend to make with audiences aren't going too specific or too deep. Instead, it's often thinking that the signals that they're giving a campaign are the actual targeting when very often that's not the case. I think people think they have more control over audiences today than they actually do in a lot of circumstances.

Fred: So explain that nuance a little bit more then. So I think with keywords, we're used to, this is the keyword we give you. That means you should show the ad for exactly that keyword. And that obviously used to be more the case back in the day. Now it's broad match and it's still very much up to Google. But how are audiences different in that regard? 

Jyll: The way audiences are different is you can still do exact matches in audiences if you want to. If I choose to target the audience in-market for Yoga apparel, my ads will actually only show to people that Google identifies as being in-market for Yoga apparel. It's not going to be a close variant. However, in a Performance Max campaign, we don't have that capability. We have audience signals, which means you can tell Google the kinds of audiences you want it to focus on. But ultimately, Performance Max cares more about your conversions and your bid strategy than your audiences. So let's say I give the audience signal to a PMax campaign of yoga apparel, and my bid strategy is to maximize conversions and I have proper conversion tracking. And it goes out there and it finds that actually people in-market for winter clothes convert better, then it's just going to show ads to people in-market for winter clothes. It doesn't care about the signal I gave it.

Whereas if it tries my signal and you know what, yoga apparel works well, okay, fine, it'll do it. And so that is what we call optimized targeting, where the algorithm is just focusing on who's most likely to convert, for better or for worse. And so when you launch a demand gen campaign, for example, you may not realize that you also have optimized targeting turned on. So if you have that turned on in your campaigns, then your audience targeting gets turned into a signal as if it's like PMax. But if you turn Optimize Targeting off, then you do get that exact audience control, which we definitely don't have on the search side anymore, even with Exact Match.

Fred: So that makes sense. So you at some level control whether you're specifically targeting that audience or whether that just becomes a signal. Now, as you described in PMax, it's not really a choice, right? It's just that's the way the campaign works. So it's always kind of a suggestion to Google. So then in your experience, to what degree does adding an audience even help you? Does it help you if they're just going to figure out anyway that there was this whole random other group of people that are buying this thing that you're selling? So why would someone put an audience in the first place?

Jyll: because it makes them feel good is my honest answer. I think that an audience signal is a beautiful way for Google to rebrand optimized targeting instead of optimized targeting, which is, check this box and give us leeway to show ads to whoever we want. No, thank you. But when you reframe it as we're going to show ads to whoever we want, but if you want to bring your intelligence to Google, come give us a signal. I can see you as a practitioner like that. 

I think the difference or the utility is more obvious on the search theme side of things in PMax because just like an audience signal, search themes are the kinds of searches you want it to show ads on and ultimately it can show ads on them or not. And what's really interesting is when you add search themes to a performance max campaign, it'll tell you if it's using your search themes or not. Like if that actually caused it to go to searches it wouldn't have been targeting otherwise. And my theory on this is that it's kind of a lose lose in both scenarios. Like if it wasn't going to show ads on those searches without your search themes, that means that it doesn't think those searches are related to your landing page on your website. So actually you've got some work to do. You weren't giving the algorithm the other information that was needed. And if it does, you know, start serving on those search themes and Google doesn't think those searches are related to your website, it's probably things that wouldn't convert as well or wouldn't do as well.

So my takeaway to be very clear is not saying don't add search themes, don't add audience signals, go for it. They can't hurt you, you know, they can only help, but don't think that because you're adding search themes and audience signals, you're controlling your PMax campaign. You absolutely are not. You can't control PMax. You can only guide it and then get transparency after the fact to see what it actually did.

Fred: Right. And I believe that transparency after the fact is still helpful, right? Because that's ultimately the thing that tells you, like you just said, you know, the search theme is just, it's not triggering at all. So maybe there is a mismatch in your landing page offers. So now you know, if that search theme was really important to you, then go and figure out a way to fix that, build a new campaign, a new landing page, set it up so that Google will see the relevance and show your ads for it. So it's obviously not completely useless as you're saying. But it just may be that the control is not upfront, it's at the tail end.

Jyll: Or even the creative, right? Like, maybe you weren't serving on that search because you didn't have assets that would perform well with that search. So, maybe it's a landing page, but it could also be that you need to improve your creative assets to be relevant to people searching for those things. But we can see after the fact, there have been a ton of great advances in PMax this year, channel performance report, search term report, audience insights, asset level performance. Like we can now see exactly what PMax is doing to the same level as search or shopping, which is great. But the control piece isn't there. So it's still trying to guide with our data and suggestions. And then after the fact, see what came in and then use that to decide what we want to do next.

Fred: Yeah. And so the asset level reporting, that is an interesting one because there is some modicum of control. If you see that a specific asset is not performing well, you can go and optimize that. Is that something... So if you had to think about maybe like your top three optimization levers for a PMax campaign, where would you start?

Jyll: My top three would definitely be the conversion settings, the bid strategy and the assets. And I say that because, you know, PMax can only run on a conversion based bid strategy. There's no manual, there's no views. And a conversion based bid strategy can't work without conversion tracking. So maybe it's purchases, maybe it's leads, but you know, maybe you're working with a really small business. And so actually you're going to set that PMax to optimize for begin checkout instead of purchase just to help it ramp up. So, you know, choosing the right conversion goals for the campaign at that point in time, Number 1, and adjusting those conversion goals can completely change what it does because that's like the compass of the campaign. 

And then next would be the bid strategy itself, you know, maximize conversions aims to spend the entire budget and then get conversions, whereas target CPA aims to hit a certain level of efficiency, and if we can hit it, spend the budget. like really different directions there just by checking or unchecking a target box. So that would be number two.

And then assets will be number three. The actual creative you use, I think is the real audience signal in PMax. If you have images and text that really appeal to a certain audience and really don't appeal to another audience, that's what's going to inform who your PMax shows ads to, much more so than the arbitrary audience signal or search themes you choose to provide. So those are the key three levers I would suggest folks focus on to optimize PMax and to guide PMax.

Fred: Yeah, and those first two, I think you would broadly set across all of your PMax campaigns because your conversion goal is probably pretty similar. The third one, the assets is pretty interesting, right? Because now does that mean you would have multiple PMax campaigns or multiple asset groups so that you can have a bit of segmentation for the different audiences that you're trying to appeal to? Or from a structural perspective, like what does a great campaign look like in your mind?

Jyll: What does a great campaign look like? I would say, you know, it really depends on the size of the business and the variability of the services. If we are working with a large advertiser spending millions, then yes, we're probably going to have multiple PMax campaigns and within them have multiple asset groups. If we're working with a smaller business, we may have one PMax campaign with a filter to only advertise five products. But the general guidance I can give is it’s the same for PMax or actually for any campaign type. The reason to start a different campaign is because you have a different conversion goal. You know, maybe some campaigns are optimizing for in-store visits and others are optimized for phone calls. Like that would be a reason to have different campaigns. Different locations. If you are doing different bid strategies or different budgets. So maybe have one that's really optimizing just maximize conversions, but another one's on ROAS. Or maybe if you have different services or different product areas, you want to allocate budget differently. Those are the key reasons. I'm sure I'm missing one or two, but those are the key reasons to have a different campaign.

And then within a campaign, a different asset group should be created when you're trying to reach a different audience or advertise a different product. And this is a common mistake I'll see as well when I audit accounts. It'll be like a PMax campaign, three asset groups, exact same assets in all three of them and just different audience signals. And I just want to shake them. It's just a signal! You're doing the same thing three times over. The way to actually do it, if you're going to have different asset groups is different assets in the different asset groups, which in turn means that your ads will appeal to different kinds of people and therefore serve to different kinds of audiences or searchers.

Fred: That's great advice. If you saw me taking notes, I want to make sure that that is one of the audits we do in Optmyzr to point out your mistake. So yeah, great advice. Now you talked about it depends. It depends is always the correct answer in PPC. And part of that comes from you saying, okay, sometimes you got a big account. Sometimes you got a small client SMB. And it's interesting because I think on your website, you position yourself as like, listen, I spent, what was it? Six or nine years working with Google. Six years working with the big brands and now I make all of that knowledge available to you. 

The question that I want to go through is how much of what they do should be the same and are there misconceptions in terms of like, that only works if you're a big brand. So what mistakes do you say SMBs make based on false assumptions?

Jyll: I think it is much easier to manage a million dollars a month than a thousand dollars a month, first of all, because the systems need data and the more money you spend, the more data you have, the easier it becomes.

So mistakes that I tend to see on the small business side really comes down to not knowing what you do. It's the unknown unknowns. It's a business owner who among the many things they have to do are trying to figure out Google ads. So they don't know that a broad match keyword is gonna match them to whatever Google feels like and not just their keywords. They don't know that a keyword and a search term aren't the same thing. So they don't realize what they're actually advertising on.  When you go to create a new Google ads account now, it spits you right into creating a performance max campaign. So they'll think they're running a search campaign when actually all their money is being spent on display. So these are like the small business owner mistakes where the gap is just education and then they can help themselves.

I would say with the larger businesses, they tend to struggle more with this transition we were talking about earlier from controlling to guiding, you know, folks who've been doing this for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, like we all have to change our mentalities and that's really hard to do. So I would say that mentality and strategy shift is what the larger advertisers struggle with. And I think as well, the promise of Google ads and digital ads in general is perfect tracking and attribution. You know where every dollar is going, you know exactly what you're getting in return. And in the past couple of years, due to a variety of reasons, privacy and cookies, that's not necessarily the case anymore. We have to model a lot more things. We're realizing that all the data we have isn't as perfect as we thought.  And so I find that can also be paralyzing for some of the more larger advertisers. They want guarantees. They want to know exactly what's going to happen. 

We don't know what's going to happen. COVID was unprecedented. Now with all these generative AI tools, it's unprecedented times. Like we don't really know what's happening. If you have the right strategy and mindset in place, I'm sure we'll figure it all out together. But there's a bit of this like leap of faith needed now that folks aren't really used to. And so that's something that is interesting.

The small business owners, like that's not even on their radar. They're chugging along. But for the larger advertisers, I find it's like the mental stuff that's more of a challenge than the actual platform stuff.

Fred: Yes. And I suppose aligning the whole business behind that strategy and then even little things, right? Like you may have your merchant feed, but that is derived from your inventory system. And now if you wanted to update the titles just for Google ads, does that impact all of the other channels that you're advertising in? so even a small decision becomes a big decision and a big impact. And you have to talk to a variety of other teams and that's where they often struggle.

Jyll: Yeah, absolutely. It's a lot more complex, but still, like, a large budget, although it brings all that complexity, I do think at the end of the day, that is easier than trying to have a shoestring and make it go really, really far. And I think that has become harder, I'll say. You know, the promise of AdWords, right, is like, get your business online and the ad auction is the great equalizer. And I do still think that's all true. I'm not saying it's not true anymore. But it is way harder today to take $20 a day and get results with it than it was five years ago or 10 years ago. Inflation, right? Inflation is real in Google Ads as well.

Fred: Yeah, exactly. And it's easier than ever to get online. If you look at Vibe Coding, for example, I mean, two minutes to make a beautiful, beautiful website.  But now is anyone visiting that website obviously, right? And so that's where PMax has done, like you said, it's a bit tricky because yes, it does get your business online, but a lot of SMBs want to see, they want to prove to themselves, do the search, see their ad. And if it's not there, it's like it doesn't exist for them, right?

There's so many other people that do see it and get that confidence level. And that's where you said it's an education problem as opposed to maybe a technical issue.

Jyll: Yep, exactly.

Fred: But your next topic now that you're getting into more, believe, and are you doing a course or a book on bidding?

Jyll: I'm working on my next book about bidding. Yes. So in my Inside Google Ads course, I cover all of these topics, but after tackling audience targeting with the first book, I knew bidding had to come next because… why? Because it's fascinating and so misunderstood,  because it hasn't actually changed that much over the last, like since Smart Bidding came out, aside from tweaks here and there, it's been pretty consistent.

And I just think bidding is so misunderstood. I think it's more important than your targeting. It's potentially more important than your creative. I think bidding and creative could duke it out. But I just felt like that was an area that was right for exploration. And when I write a book, part of it is explaining everything. But then I also get into my theories and advice and strategies to use and stuff like that. And so I just felt like there was a lot to say there. I'm working on it, about 40 pages in right now.

Fred: I have a lot of questions about that. Let's go first, what you said, targeting is probably less important. And I agree with that, but I want to hear your take. Why? Because Google ads was, the search marketing system was all about the keyword. That's where everything started. And now we're saying, well, maybe targeting is like number 17 on the list of the things we should actually worry about. It's not that bad, but like, why is targeting not as important anymore?

Jyll: When I think of Google ads, I think of a triangle - bidding, targeting, and creative - and trying to balance those three. And so I think targeting is the least important now because… I'll put it this way. If AI and automation takes over, and you can't control that piece, can you still get good results?

So if you can't control your targeting at all, but you can control your bidding and you can control your creative, then I believe, and have proof from my clients, that I can still get great results. That's literally PMax. That's how PMax works, right? You have to still have that great creative that will appeal to your target audience and, just as importantly, not appeal to your not target audience.  And you have to have the right bid strategy and it can do it. 

But if you play the triangle the other way, like what if I have bidding and targeting, but I can't control my creative? That's going to be garbage. You could put an ad in front of the exact perfect person who's the ideal customer. But if the ad just says, Shop now. No, you're not going to make sales. 

And then the other way, if you have your targeting and your creative, but the wrong bid strategy, you have no hope. I've seen campaigns completely do a 180, search campaigns on exact match keywords do a complete 180 in performance just by switching from manual CPC to target ROAS.

That was my long-winded answer to say that bidding, I see, is really integral in all these places.

And while targeting, of course, yeah, if you can target, great. But if we had to let something go, sorry to my book, but that's the one I would let go if I could keep control over creative and bidding.

Fred: Okay, that makes sense. And then the second question, I want to build on what you said. You see a lot of mistakes in bidding. What's the biggest mistake people make?

Jyll: Trying to control their bidding rather than guiding their bidding. Manual CPC is almost always a mistake nowadays. I'm not going to say always, there are some strange accounts I see.  But for the most part, it's a mistake these days because high CPCs aren't the enemy. Low quality traffic is the enemy. And I have just seen it time and time again in so many different ad accounts where we're on manual bidding. Our CPCs are $3 to $4 and then our CPA isn't good. Oh, we're not getting enough conversions. And it's like, you turn on max conversions. CPCs quadruple overnight. I've seen CPCs multiply by 10 overnight, but you know what? The conversions go up as well. So I've just seen it enough now that I am a true smart bidding believer.

I think AI creative has a long way to go. Not sure if you'll feel the same way about that. I think AI targeting is getting pretty good and only improving, but AI bidding, it's been there. It does its thing as long as you give it the right data and the right directions. And so when I see smart bidding not performing, it's usually more either user error or it's day two when you just haven't given it time to learn yet. 

And that's probably the hardest part. If you're switching from manual to automated, the first week or two might suck and you'll be like, see, I told you I can do it better. And it's like, well, no, no, no, give it time to learn before we judge.

Fred: Yeah, makes a little sense. And then how do you put guardrails in place to ensure that that two week period actually is a two week period and it doesn't roll into four weeks and $10,000 and then you still get no results?

Jyll: Yeah, it's not even a specific timeframe. Generally, my smart bidding path, it'll be like Maximize Conversions. I will even launch new campaigns on Maximize Conversions these days. And our goal is to get about 30 conversions in 30 days.  If we're not going to get that, it can take longer.

Like there's one Google ads coaching client. I've been working with her for years. She's my favorite. Don't tell my others.  And we recently launched a performance max campaign in one of her accounts and the first month was terrible. There was like… two purchases. And then the second month was terrible. There were like six purchases and we were like, I guess we knew PMax wasn't gonna work. But then, we went and looked at the business overall, not just the PMax campaign. And this PMax campaign was only advertising three of her products, three very specific products. Overall sales for those products had skyrocketed. Not attributable to anything else. Like the only change, she wasn't doing any other email or social, just we launched PMax and then within a week, sales for this thing went up by a ton and stayed there.  And so that's something else I say, I'm sorry, it's a little tangent from the question you asked, but just thinking about guardrails and giving the right guidance, especially with a campaign like PMax where ads can show everywhere, the in-platform data isn't always going to tell the whole story.

I'm happy to report that in this case by month three, even in-platform reporting, it showed PMax is profitable. But to give it the right guardrails, you have to feed it the right conversion data. For e-commerce that's purchases, for leads that's ideally an actual customer, not just a form fill or a phone call. And then you need to give it at least 30 conversions in 30 days. Or if you're a lower volume account where that's not going to happen, then it can take two, three, four months for the thing to learn. And if you give up on it too soon, you're just, you know, it's like, I always say, if I look at my one year old baby and be like, well, why isn't he talking yet? I talked to him every single day and he can't even talk yet. What an idiot! But that's what we're doing to our campaigns. And we only give them four conversions and say, what an idiot. It's not doing the CPA I was able to get.

Fred: That's a great analogy. So, and then like these low volume campaigns, so you said, just give it a couple of months. Are there other techniques you'd like to use? I mean, a lot of people talk about micro and macro conversions. Is that a good way to cycle these campaigns up a little bit faster and then eventually switch into the conversion you actually care about, or do you see that as a danger?

Jyll: I do find micro conversions very helpful. And so to clarify for those who may not have used them before, a micro conversion is something that happens before conversion that isn't the final thing you want, but must happen on the journey. So in e-commerce, someone has to start checkout before they can purchase, but someone doesn't necessarily have to view your about page. So that wouldn't make a good micro conversion. 

So yes, for e-commerce, if we're starting with a small business, sometimes I'll make add to cart the conversion for the campaign just as a starting point. I might set it so that only the first add to cart counts. So if someone adds 20 things to cart, you know, the campaign doesn't go crazy. But then once we have enough, and then keep the other actions in there as well. And then once we build up enough of the next action, for example, add to cart, begin checkout, purchase. So we might be optimizing for all three of those things. Once begin checkout reaches enough, which is sort of like 30 conversions, then set add to cart to secondary. And then once purchase reaches that 30 to 50 conversion threshold, then set begin checkout to secondary and that we can still see that data in there. You can understand if some big drop off is happening.

In lead gen, I mean, a form fill arguably is a micro conversion. Then you're waiting for that offline conversion data to come in later. So that can be very helpful for smaller businesses, but like, it can be tricky. Sometimes there's a business that they're only gonna get three or four leads a month and they don't have the capability, they don't even have a CRM, they have a spreadsheet. So offline conversion tracking has gotta happen. And so in those circumstances, you can use things like on-page engagement or clicks or scrolls or things like that. But ultimately that might be a scenario where, well, we know the bidding isn't getting the information it needs, so at least let's make sure the targeting is super dialed in, exact as much as we're able to. It's tricky.

Fred: It is. You wrote on Search Engine Land about signal duplication as well as signal fragmentation. Talk a little bit about what that means and how your structure can basically help or hurt your data levels and how to make sure that, like you said, you're not counting 20 card ads as individual conversions, but making sure that you count what matters.

Jyll: Yeah, so this is in relation to what we spoke about earlier with audience signals, like not having four different ad groups to test different audience signals.  If you're running a Demand Gen campaign and you have three different ad groups that are genuinely targeting different audiences, then by all means. But even in that scenario, you would want to make sure that your audiences are different enough or in search, making sure that if you have your different ad groups, that they're different enough and not all just stealing from one another.

I was on a coaching call earlier today with a client who had one ad group of people looking for houses for sale and another group of people looking for new houses for sale. And so we had a long conversation about, do we consolidate those together? Do we try to split those apart? What does it depend on? And that's, there's not like a one size fits all answer for that. It's similar in intent. Does it make more sense to have it together? Or do we think that people looking for a new home are just so fundamentally different from other home buyers that it deserves to have its own?

So I don't have a blanket, you know, here's what you should do but I would look at your keywords or your audiences and make sure that they are different enough. If you put them into different ad groups and that the creative is different as well and conveys the different messaging that will appeal to those different searchers or those different audiences. And yes, signals are just signals, not targeting.

Fred: Great, so that's bidding. Let's talk a little bit about the broader topic of automation and what are your thoughts around strategic automation versus blind delegation?

Jyll: Strategic automation versus blind delegation. I guess something I do notice with some newer Google Ads practitioners who've grown up in the world where it's AI first. You know what I mean? They're never touching exact match. They're never touching manual bidding. They're all in on the automation. And I love that. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but then the challenge is not knowing what that actually means under the hood.

You know, so broad match keywords, like, yeah, broad match keywords can absolutely be the right choice. But if you look at your search terms report and 90% of it is irrelevant, maybe there's something going on here we might want to look into. 

So I'm very much, with people and with Google ads, I am a trust, but verify kind of gal. So I like to make sure I give the automation good directions via the conversion tracking and the bid strategy, but then I will be checking the reports, which we now have on all campaign types, to see what it's actually doing. 

The key is if it's not doing what I want, I don't sit there and curse Google or say Google is shaking the cushions. Why would they match me to this search? It's like, no, it's doing exactly what I told it to do. That might not be what I want, but it's doing exactly what I told it to do. And so the gap between what I told it to do and what I want, I, as the practitioner, need to figure out how I adjust my directions so that those become the same, what it's doing and what I want. 

And if you're just all in on automation, when it's going well, that's great. But if it doesn't go well, then you don't know how to fix it and you don't know what's wrong and you don't know how to do that troubleshooting process. So that's where it can become dangerous to say, turn my PMax on. All right, I'll check in on that in 30 days. I'm sure it'll be fine. Like, well, it might be fine, but it might really not be.

Fred: So good reason to take those courses and build a really strong foundation in how Google Ads works, because ultimately, yes, I completely agree. You have to understand what these automations are doing, what they are controlling, so that if it doesn't work out, you have recourse. You can actually dial it back and understand what wasn't working. And the other thing I love about understanding how things work is now you can start piecing things together in unique ways. You can say, okay, well, let me use the best of bidding automation and let me maybe figure out how to use GPT to help with the creative components that you were talking about and let me string these things together so that I can scale my output tremendously. And I suppose that's where we get into strategic automation. It's about thinking where is it we can add the value? And then the delegation goes to the machine. But like we're saying, don't blindly delegate, have checks and balances, have humans in the loop, have controls, because ultimately, these systems are not dumb, but they can be very literal in following instructions, right? And then that doesn't always end up with the right result.

Jyll: I always say, remember it is artificially intelligent. I think we always focus on the “so intelligent” part that we forget about the artificial part.  So even another, you know, coaching call I had today, had four calls today before this, this client had used ChatGPT to write all the headlines. You know, she's a business owner, so ChatGPT gave me some headlines, boom, I did it. 

And looking at them, I could tell because they were just so generic. This person runs a personal training gym. And I said to her, literally any personal training gym in the entire world could use these exact headlines, which is why they're not the right headlines for you. So you need to give ChatGPT or Gemini information about what makes your gym unique, what's unique about your services. Give it your customer reviews, give it your landing pages. Have it go deep research on your competitors to see what they emphasize, you know. And then based on all that, okay, have it help you write headlines that uniquely position your personal training and aren't just generically, yay, personal training is great.

Fred: And that's interesting. So you mentioned deep research. So what exactly did you have deep research do?

Jyll: It's my Gemini sweatshirt I'm wearing right now. So I use Gemini deep research and it just, rather than trying to spit an answer out to you right away, it'll go and check like 30 to 50, it puts a research plan together. You can adjust the research plan, then it goes out and checks all these different sources and comes back with an answer for you. And so I use it selfishly in my business. I'll be like, I'm a small business owner and I need help with my Google ads. Who should I hire? 

And I love seeing not just the final answer of who it comes back with. But looking at all the steps it takes. This is actually something I learned from Steve Toth. I attended SEO IRL last week, an SEO conference in Toronto he runs. And in his talk, he mentioned how useful this is for SEO. I think it's great for PPC as well  to see how it decides to research certain factors. What if it's looking at, know, what is the payment model? and is it online or in person? and what about time zones? and what else is included? and is it a subscription? or and all these things that I wouldn't even thought of that that's how people decide. He gave great examples how in the B2B software space, what is it compatible with and what does it have these key features? 

And so looking at how deep research thinks can be really helpful because it can tell you what your potential customers might be considering and searching for as they're looking at you versus competitors. And so, I mean, as a business owner, that's super helpful info for me. But then specifically when it comes to ads, that's really helpful to see the kinds of features or talking points to include in your ad text.

Fred: Yeah, I love that. Any other examples of using Gemini or others to do amazing things? Anything that as a business person or as a human being we might find interesting?

Jyll: For Google Ads specifically, yes. I mean, I use Gemini quite a bit in my business. I think the main way I'm using it now is I will speak to it, ideas, and then it kind of cleans it up for me. So if I'm, you know, writing an article, like I write for Search Engine Land and Word Stream and other publications, I will just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk about my ideas. And then it cleans it up for me. So it's not going out and researching and pulling anything else in, but just helps me organize my ideas in a new way. 

Same when I'm writing issues of my newsletter, I have a bi-weekly newsletter called The Insider where in every issue, I share a real story from a real Google ads coaching call, like what the challenge was and how we solved it. And so again, I'll give Gemini the transcript of the call. And then I'll say, you know, I really want to focus on this part and make sure we mention that and I think this is interesting. And then it drafts it for me. So it is a thought organizer. I would say it is a really key way I'm using AI.

And then something else that I just started testing with my Inside Google Ads course members is I created a JyllBot using Notebook LM. Have you played with Notebook LM at all? Or I guess you're way beyond that in your AI skills.

Fred: Well, I played with it a long time ago.

Jyll: Yeah, so I gave Notebook LM for now just public, all my podcast transcripts, all my Search Engine Land articles, all my stuff. And I'm letting my members beta test it and about 25 of them are, and they're saying like the feedback it's saying exactly what Jyll would say, because it's only trained on exactly what I give it. No more, no less. So I'm really excited about the potential there to scale my expertise and knowledge through AI because, man, I've seen the Google ads advice that Chat GPT can give and it is sad. It is good for my business, but it is sad for the people who trust the advice.

Fred: Interesting. And maybe that speaks to the point then, like you were saying before that, you just need to ask it the right questions and give it enough context. Yes. Because I agree if you just say, hey, how should I improve my PPC campaign with no context of any sort? Well, like, yeah, then it's going to rehash the 10 most common things that everybody would have said, but these AI systems get better if you put constraints on them and tell them what is your business? What have you tried in the past? What has worked? What hasn't worked? And it can be really helpful in terms of suggesting some things.  But of course, always be careful too when you give it numbers about your business because that math may not pay now.

Jyll: I'm curious what you think, Fred. I've also thought some of the issues might be because Google Ads changes so quickly and they're trained on everything that's ever been published ever, that they have stuff in there from three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, and probably way more of that than like the more recent stuff. So because of that, I find they don't know that exact match doesn't mean exact match anymore or that demand gen is a campaign type and I'm not talking about the concept of Demand Generation. You know these systems better than I do. So do you think that might be contributing to it or are they pretty good at knowing the importance of recent versus older data?

Fred: Now, I don't know that the recency of the post gets taken into account when they calculate the weights. And I suppose that's a good reason to force it to use its search capabilities or to do deep research so that it actually goes and finds what's relevant. There's even like new search engines. So you can specifically say, give me things that have been announced in the last 30 days and factor that into how we should manage these campaigns. 

Currently I'm playing with vibe coding to give me a difference of what's in the Google help materials so that I can point out, okay, here's a little nuance of how they've changed things and okay, we should talk about that. We should integrate it into our help materials for Optmyzr obviously and articles that we write. 

Again, I think it goes back to understanding how these systems work so that you can take the limitations and not be bound by the limitations but actually figure out how to do it better than anyone else. Because obviously there is the ability of these systems to do amazing work. You just have to know how to pull that out of it. And if that's what you can do, you're just going to scale yourself so much faster than anyone else.

Jyll: It's true, I have to say, I know, AI is an average maker because it allows people who don't have the skills or knowledge to get average results. So the way to get amazing results with AI is for you, the human, to bring your amazing expertise to the AI to accomplish amazing things together. But just AI on its own is not amazing. It's average. It's literally the average of everything we know. So don't forget your human amazingness amplified with AI.

Fred: Exactly. Well, good. Let's wrap up. I want to talk about one more new shiny toy from Google. I'm not sure if you have much of an opinion about this, but AI Max. So the replacement in some way for DSAs, automatically generated creatives, it is an add-on to search campaigns. It's not a separate campaign. But where does this fit in for you? Like, has it been useful or are we still waiting?

Jyll: It's early days. I mean, the fact that you mentioned AI Max means we're not going to get twice as many views because it's literally all anyone wants to know about nowadays. Actually, my first LinkedIn post to ever get a hundred thousand impressions was when I posted about AI Max, the day it came out. fact. 

But yes, AI Max is one of those things where it's just so new. We don't, we don't know. We don't know. Like when Performance Max first came out, it was terrible. It was terrible and it learned and it got better and now it's less terrible. Now it's pretty good if you have the right things in place.

AI Max is in the early terrible phase, not because the product itself is terrible. I want to be really clear, but because we don't really know how to use it yet. Again, I bring it back to the like, it's humility and human error, not that the tool is wrong. AI Max's job is to go out and basically find whatever searches it wants that it thinks will work well for your business. And so it really grinds my gears when I see people posting on LinkedIn. You know, I turned on AI max and look at these search terms on the first day. It's so stupid. And again, to bring it back to the baby analogy. It's like, I gave birth to this baby yesterday. He can't walk yet. He's so stupid. Like, yeah, you literally just turned it on. Of course it's going to be stupid. It hasn't learned anything yet!

So I think there's great promise with AI Max, but I also don't think most advertisers need AI Max right now. So I'll turn this into an action. If you have maxed out your impression share, which for non-brand usually means 30 to 40%, but of course it always depends, and you want to spend more budget, but you've just maxed out the opportunity on your current keywords and you're already using broad match, then sure, turn on AI Max and potentially expand even further.

But you're going to want to have your conversion tracking in place. I would say more than 30 conversions in 30 days, probably more like 50 to 60, at least Target CPA, Target ROAS is more finicky so maybe more Target CPA actually in search, and you don't have all those things in place. And you know, if you're a small business owner spending $30 a day, limited by budget, less than 10% search impression share, and then you turn on AI max, like, yeah, you're not going to like it, but the problem's not AI max, the problem is you.

Fred: And with that, Google Ads is complicated for as much automation and new campaign types are coming out. It just means more decisions for us, knowing exactly what parameters to put in place to make these new campaign types for selling successful. And that's why sometimes we need a coach. So, Jyll, thank you for sharing all your great insights. If anyone who's listening wants to get in touch with you, what should they do?

Jyll: Thanks, Fred. The best place to find me is my website, jyll.ca. You'll find everything about my coaching, newsletter, courses, et cetera there. And you can also follow me on LinkedIn. I post every weekday about Google Ads. And that's where I get to meet and get to know lovely folks like you, Fred, and others in the industry so we can all share ideas and grow and learn.

Thanks for tuning in to this special crossover episode of Inside Google Ads and PPC Town Hall.

You can follow Fred Vallaeys on LinkedIn. You can follow Optmyzr on LinkedIn or YouTube to stay up to date with future episodes of PPC Town Hall.

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