Why advertisers should reassess Google Ads recommendations - Search Engine Land

I have a new recommendation for Google Ads advertisers in 2023:

Turn off and pause the use of all Google Ads recommendations.

Why?

On Jan. 4, Google Ads fundamentally changed the definition of a recommendation that users previously implemented. And Google is only giving advertisers two weeks before the change hits.

Before we begin here, the moral of this article is neither that the content in recommendations is bad, nor that you should blindly dismiss all recommendations. The goal here is to make less work for you while increasing account performance.

Google Ads recommendations: what changed?

Nicole Farley covered an astounding change to what was a fairly tame Google Ads recommendation: “Remove Redundant Keywords.”

Advertisers had opted into the recommendation, allowing Google to remove keywords with the same match type that show for the same queries in an ad group in an effort to combat redundancy. There are reasons for and against this recommendation, but some advertisers would implement it due to the overall benefit of having one keyword in a match type show for the majority of terms.

The new change being rolled out to advertisers that have applied this will change the recommendation definition to cross match types – removing phrase/exact match types in favor of a broad match keyword in an ad group.

If you applied the previous recommendation, these new rules will be pushed through to your account by Jan. 19 unless you opt-out.

Google said this recommendation change “...

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