Google Ads in 2022 [Secret Big Changes Revealed] How To Optimise Google Ads Correctly in 2022

If you want success with Google Ads in 2022, you need to be aware of two very significant changes that Google Ads has made. The first change relates to ad copy and the fact that Google Ads is removing the option for expanded text ads from 30 June. Now, Google has been very proactive with announcing this, so most people would be aware of that change. However, the second change hasn't been as widely publicized by Google and most people wouldn't even be aware that the change has actually already been live since, since about September in 2021. And this change has got to do with keyword match types. And if you're not aware of this and you're not actively making changes to your optimization schedule, it'll end up costing you lots of money. My name is Aaron Young and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And in this video, I'm gonna be giving you some step by step strategies on what you need to do to make sure that you're ahead of the game and that you're still gonna see success in Google Ads in 2022. Let's go. Hey, before we get into this teaching, why don't you right now quickly like and subscribe so you can get notified every time I release. Change that we want to talk about is the change that's coming on June 30, 2022, where you will no longer be able to create or edit expanded text ads. The difference between the two is just the way that you actually set up those ads in terms of what your customer sees or the people who are doing the Google search, they don't see any difference. So the ad that they're seeing is still the same. But what happens in the expanded text ad, you've only got the option to add three headlines, two paths, and then two descriptions. But in the responsive search ad, as we said, it still appears the same way to the customers who are searching for your ad. What the actual difference is is that rather than you just only being allowed to nominate three headlines and two descriptions, you're actually able to nominate up to 15 headlines and up to four descriptions, with Google still displaying the top three and the top two, which they feel will be the best for that particular searcher. Having Google split test your ads, that sounds amazing. It sounds like it's too good to be true, but unfortunately it is. And the reason for that is because for most small and medium businesses is they're not actually spending money for Google to be able to finish the split testing. So if you actually go into this asset status, what you can actually see here is that responsive search ads usually need around 5,000 impressions over 30 days for the display rating to appear in the performance column. So what that is actually saying is so that Google can actually completely finish its split testing, it needs 5,000 impressions in 30 days. So if you're not reaching that mark, which to be honest, most advertisers aren't, your ads are going to be going in a continuous learning loop and not actually having enough data for Google and its bots to be able to make the correct decisions. So how do we resolve this problem? And it is a real problem. Let me show you. In this real campaign, over a 30 day period, you can actually see here, we had two responsive search ads running and also an expanded text ad running. And if you look down at this cost per conversion column, you can actually see that the two responsive search ads were performing at 152 and 65 cost per conversion. Whereas the expanded text ad with the least amount of AI and least amount of Google split testing was actually outperforming the two responsive search ads. But what the problem is, is even now, even though we're not at June 30th at the time of this recording, is that Google Ads is prioritizing responsive search ads. So you need to be able to use this in your Google Ads campaign. So the solution is, and the way that you can get around this is that rather than just having one responsive search ad in your ad, what I'd recommend is, while we can still have expanded text ads, is to have multiple expanded text ads and also have multiple responsive search ads so that you can continue to do some split testing until you find what the market responds to the best. And in this case, what we found is that we only needed to make one really, really small change to our responsive search ad in order to improve performance. So you can see here, the best performing responsive search ad was at $65. We made one change and that has now actually reduced down to $29. So, so under $30. So that performance has been amazing. But what I want to let you know now is what the actual change was that we made. And it's a very, very small change from our split testing is that we were able to find that the market much preferred if we in every single ad included this call out text from just $39 per month. Now the reason for that is for this particular client, they're one of the only people in their market that actually run a monthly payment scheme at a lower cost, which allows their potential clients to have a low cost option of being able to use their software. So the data that we were able to get showed overwhelmingly that ads converted better when we actually had that $39 a month. But as we said earlier, Google's bots and its automatic learning weren't able to get that data because this ad wasn't spending enough money to actually get those 5,000 impressions per month. So the simple change of all you need to do, I would recommend while you're doing your split testing, at least 3, 3 responsive search ads and make one of them with no pinned headlines and descriptions so that Google can run its testing. And then for the other two responsive search ads, what I would recommend is that you start to pin some of the headlines and some of the descriptions so that you can actually see what the market is performing to best. And what we were able to find, as we said, is that as long as we had this one headline pinned in the third position, it increased our performance significantly. Now the other side note that I do want to make on this is that you will see up the top here is that Google actually does give you a predictor. And what we're saying here is as long as your ad strength is good or excellent, you don't need to do any further changes. Because as you can see from here, if I just quickly unpin this ad, Google has automatically changed our ad ranking from excellent to good. And once again if we pin it back again into position three, it removes our ad strength back down to good. But we know from our actual locked in data, long term data from August to November, we know that even though that this ad strength is is good and this one is excellent, that's the one without any pinned in ads, we know that we're getting a much better performance with that pinned ad in the third position. So in recap for the introduction of responsive search ads, what you need to make sure is that you continue to do split testing. Don't just rely on Google's automated testing, especially if you've got a smaller account that runs under 5,000 impressions per month. The second change I wanted to talk about, and this is the one that Google hasn't actually advertised as much, they've just quietly released this out in the back end of last year. Now this is one of those ones that doesn't sound like much, but this change is really, really significant. And the reason for why it is so significant and it can have massive impacts to your account is because we're talking about keyword match types. The reason why this change can be so significant to your account is because the main advantage of Google Ads is that you can be very specific with the keywords that you want your ads to show for. So as it sits right now, there's still three different types of of match types. So there's broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Now, broad match, that actually hasn't changed very much as it was previously in this example which Google is giving, which is lawn mowing service. If you had that lawn mowing service keyword set as a broad match, it could appear for any search term which was just related to lawn mowing service. So as it's got here as the example, it could include lawn alteration prices. Where it changes and where you need to be very aware is when it comes down to your first phrase match and your exact match. Historically, when you'd have a phrase match keyword like lawn mowing service, your ads would only appear when people had used those three words, lawn mowing service in that search query. So they could have lawn mowing service, near me service, lawn mowing, mowing, lawn service, whichever way. But it had to have those three keywords in it. It could have extra keywords, but lawn mowing service had to appear in the search term. What it's actually changed to is that it now has to include the meaning of your keyword so that that you could actually have things like hire a company to mow your lawn or landscaping service to cut grass. But where this gets even further is when we get down to this exact match. Now, historically with exact match, if you were targeting a keyword called lawn mowing service, and it was exact match, your ads would only appear in two circumstances. So the person not only had to use those three keywords, lawn mowing service, but they also had to be used in that order. But once again, similar to what the change has been with phraseMatch, exact match now shows on searches that have the same meaning of your keyword. So that then opens it up to more possibilities. So lawn mowing service or grass cutting service. Now, in this example that Google has given you, it all looks fine. It looks great. That's not going to affect our ads because lawn and grass means the same thing. But let me give you a real life example how this could end up costing you money. So the example we're going to use for this one is this is a company and they sell baby's earmuffs. But within their niche, their earmuffs are only for hearing protection. So as you can see through here, they run infant Ones they run for kids, but they're all only hearing protection. But you can see through in here in the search terms, they've actually got fluffy earmuffs, which are, you know, more of the keep your ears warm in winter. So they've got fluffy earmuffs and fluffy headphones and fluffy earmuffs with the space in there. Now, I don't have an issue with the earmuffs and the headphones and the earmuff space. That is okay. What my issue is is with the fluffy. Now, what I also wanted to show you is that we've actually added in a broad match and an exact match negative keyword for ear muss, Fluffy. But this is still showing and this is where the danger is. And this can actually cost you a lot of money. Now, thankfully for this account, we do these checks twice a week to make sure that this doesn't happen. And that's why we're getting this low amount of impressions and it's not actually costing us any money. But what the recommendation would actually be is two things. One, you want to be doing a search term audit at least every seven days. Now what a search term audit is, if you're not aware of that, is what you actually do is you go into your, under your keywords banner into search terms and then you want to pull in a period of three days or seven days, and you want to actually go through every single search term that has triggered your ads. Now, I've filtered this out so that we can see Fluffy, because this was the main one that was up. But if I didn't have that filter there, it would show me all of those keywords. So what we want to do in this situation is we want to select these ones and I'll do two things. You add it as a negative keyword. So we'll add all of those as a negative keyword. Because. Because as we said previously for this brand, they do not provide any Fluffy earmuffs at all. So we've added all of those as Fluffy earmuffs as exact match. Now the second thing that you want to do is if we just select one of these, we add this negative keyword. We then want to go and add it to our campaign. And then what we actually want to do is we want to actually go through and just add the keyword Fluffy. And the reason for that is because as we can see before remembering, adding in these broad match keywords wasn't getting rid of it. So what we're saying to Google is if there's someone searches any type of search and it includes the word fluffy. We don't want our ads to appear. So as we said, it's a very small change, but it's a very significant change. And you need to make sure that in 2022, you're doing weekly search term audits so that you can filter out those search terms which Google is saying have the same meaning. So as a quick recap what we learned today, so that even with Google Ads bringing in its responsive search ads, you still need to do regular split testing so that you know which headlines and descriptions are getting the highest click through ratio and more importantly, the highest number of conversions. And secondly, we went through how Google Ads has actually changed the keyword match types to include their meaning or their definition of those keywords. So what you need to do is make sure you're doing those regular search term audits at least once every week. Before you go, I want to give you a free gift, which is my Google Ads Optimization checklist. Now, this is a checklist that I've been developing over 12 years and I use it every single day. Because what it does, it actually gives you a strategy and it lets you know what you need to optimize every 72 hours, every week, every month, and every three months in Google Ads to make sure that you've got continued success. So if you follow the link below in the description, you can get my free gift. I look forward to seeing you on our next video.