Google Ads Auto Apply Recommendations - The Recommendations You 100% Must Have Turned Off!

I hate Google Auto Apply recommendations. I hate when I see accounts get fleeced by Google because they turned them on without knowing what they actually are or they had no idea they were even enabled because of some sneaky Google email or setting that was flipped over. So in this video I am going to show you what Google Auto Apply recommendations are, how to turn them off, and I'm also going to go step by step through each recommendation that Google gives you and I'm going to give you my response to it. I've built out a complete cheat sheet that you can use for future reference as well alongside this video. So let's dive in. Okay, so I am inside of an account now at the account level. So you see all the campaigns that are running to get to to the auto Apply recommendations and to be able to control whether you want to turn them on or turn them on. You're going to want to go over to this recommendations tab on the left side. Now this recommendations tab and this optimization score, it's, it's its own thing. I have an entire video on that and, and why that's there to fleece your money. And the optimization score is a giant lie. So I will put that in this video as well. Go check that out to learn more about that. However, with the option Auto Apply recommendations, you're going to want to actually go to this Auto Apply icon. You can really only get there from this recommendations tab. But now if I click Auto Apply, this is where if these are turned on, Google can actually automatically make changes and apply these changes in your account, which is what we want to avoid. So here you'll see maintain your ads, there's nine recommendation types and grow your business. There's 14 recommendation types. This is where it's going to give you the recommendations and then these boxes next to them, if you have them checked, they basically give Google full control then of making those changes automatically as they see fit. And if you have them turned off or not checked, then Google won't be able to to do that. You'll notice in this particular account, most of them are turned off. This is how we recommend most accounts. Look, there's only a few that should be enabled. I have an entire cheat sheet that I've built and I go through each one of these 23 recommendations. I give you Google's definition and then I give you our recommendation on why it's good or bad and whether or not you should have it turned on or turned off. So let's go ahead and hop into that sheet. So here we Are the grow my ads Google Ads Auto apply recommendation cheat sheet. This will be available in the description of the video for you to check out. So I am not going to go one by one here. I will go through each section. 90% of these, if I just flick through here, we have set to no, you do not want Google making money. Most changes automatically. In fact, I asked people or accounts when I see the auto apply recommendations on and Google's making changes, I'm like, why did you have that on 90% of the time they had no idea. So Google did some sneaky thing, usually through an email or a Google rep where they just enable that. And if you're not super experienced in Google Ads, a lot of times it sounds good, right? If you get an email from Google saying, hey, you should turn on Google auto apply recommendations because we believe it can improve your account by x percent or whatever they do, you're going to say, okay, yeah, why wouldn't I do that? However, Google is there to make Google more money. That's exactly what you're doing in most these recommendations. If you have enabled, you're giving Google the ability to go make changes as Google sees fit. Well, Google wants to make Google more money. Increase their stock price for the shareholder. That is Google's entire intention. They don't care about you. They just care about how do we continue to make more money from our ads since Google Ads does make about 80% of the revenue for Google. So you have to be very, very careful. Your goals and Google's goals are different. And so that's why there's agencies like us out there that we take what Google says with a grain of salt. We, we manage accounts at a higher level than most of what these recommendations are doing. So let's just go through them and you'll notice the first one says yes. And you're probably like, what the heck? You just were dogging on all of these Google and all these recommendations. All right, the first one is okay, so first one under ads and assets. And again, if we're here in this applied section, you would see that right here. Use optimized ad rotation. This is a yes. In most cases, running optimized ad rotation, especially with Google smart bidding algorithm is the way to go. Now, years ago, before Google's algorithm smart bidding was as good as today, we would have that turned off. We would be, you know, sort of a b testing our expanded text ads and 50 kind of the indefinite sort of split of traffic between those. You don't really need to do that. Anymore. And that was before responsive search ads were even out. So in Today's World in 2023, the optimized ad rotation is just a given. So we recommend just having this enabled. Then if you look at the other recommendations for ads and assets you have ad responsive search ads improve responsive search ads. We have no's checked on that. We do not want Google ever controlling our ad creative. Their suggestions are fine if you manually want to review their their suggestions for your ads or ad creative. However, you do not want Google automatically creating ads in your account. Most of the time they're horrendous. You want full control of your ad creative always. So we say no to both of these keywords and targeting. We've got a depends. So expand your reach with Google Search Partners. Search partners is going to vary by account. It's going to vary campaign by campaign. So at our agency we manage, you know, lots of client accounts. It is an sop for us to be reviewing search partner performance every single month. And we're doing that at the campaign level. So. So you would want to be going in and looking at your campaigns. So I'm at the campaign level right now. You would go to the segment setting and then you would hit network with search partners. Then you would be reviewing search partner performance up against your regular Google search performance. Search partners tends to perform less than what Google normal Google searches. Not always. And in some cases it's actually it performs just fine. It hits the goal and it adds a little extra volume there. So again it varies case by case. So you don't necessarily want this turned on unless somehow all of your. You're running a smaller account with only maybe one or two campaigns and you've already tested search partners and you know it's fine. The performance does well. If you have a larger account with lots of different campaigns, then I would say keep it off and and manually be reviewing that smaller account. So you could possibly get away with that. Again, you still want to check the performance there though. But Google will usually, if you have this enabled, Google will always opt you into search partners then because it just means usually more ad spend, more ad exposure. Then we have remove redundant keywords, remove non serving keywords, remove conflicting negative keywords, and use optimized targeting. Use optimized targeting is a bit different than these keyword ones. So I'll go into that a little more specific. The keyword ones are all set to no, you don't want Google control in your keywords ever. And so you want to be manually reviewing that. If you get a recommendation from Google that's keyword related, review it. A lot of times it's not going to be something you actually want. But there are cases where Google's like, hey, you should expand your keyword targeting. Here are some keywords that we recommend. Or you accidentally added this negative keyword that actually is a conflict and you do want to remove that. Never have any of these things set to automatic because you don't want Google doing that. We've seen cases where Google's adding broad match keywords into campaigns that were already low performing and all of a sudden it throws in a broad match and then spin goes up and the performance just tanks. You don't want that, you want to avoid all that. So these are all settings that you should be manually reviewing and implementing yourselves. And so no to anything regarding your keywords, then the use optimized targeting. Optimized targeting is a display targeting setting. So if you are running a cold display campaign and let's say it's performing well and you you're targeting an in market audience of some sort. Optimized targeting, if you enable that allows Google to go find more people that look like those that are converting within your current campaign. The reason we have this set to know is if you're running any sort of remarketing campaign efforts, which hopefully you are, you want to be targeting only the remarketing audience. If you set optimized targeting on or if you allow Google to automatically apply that because the auto apply recommendation is enabled for optimized targeting, what's going to happen is your remarketing campaign is no longer remarketing. All of a sudden now Google's going to be showing your remarketing campaign ads to cold audiences with this optimized targeting on. So we do not recommend having this set on at all. You do not want Google controlling increasing the targeting for any of your display campaigns that should be manually reviewed and implemented on your own. Then we have measurement upgrade your conversion tracking. We have this set that depends. This is 90% of the time a yes. So all this is, is basically Google wants to switch over your conversion tracking to data driven Attribution. I'm making this video in 2023. Data driven attribution should absolutely be the attribution model you have set for your conversion tracking. There are cases where you don't want to. Those are usually unique cases. I would assume 99% of the people watching this video aren't going to fit that category. So. So yes, you should always be running data driven attribution Unless you have a unique case. Like we have a particular company that has a very long sales cycle and very high ticket price on their products, we actually are using a first click on that account. So we, we steered away from Data Driven. That's one out of a hundred. So it's a very unique case. Most of them are using Data Driven. Now with that said I, you know we put this in this recommendation, this little asterisk here. Google is actually getting rid of first click. They're getting rid of linear time decay and position based attribution. Anyways, so what that's going to leave you with is last click and Data Driven. So the case that I just told you of a client that we're using first click, we're actually going to be forced into Data Driven at some point in the future anyways right now we're still using it. So we have this set to depends. For most of you watching this, this is going to be a yes. Now keywords and targeting, you're going to see no's across the board. I've already mentioned you do not want Google controlling any of your keywords. It's fine to manually review, but you do not want Google actually making those changes for you. So these are all set to no, I'm not going to go by one by one for these. And then we have display expansion. This I really hated when Google started setting this up. And in fact if you, if you build a brand new campaign today, they like force it into the campaign and they make it annoying to try to exclude the display expansion. We have this set to no as well. All this is is if you're building a search campaign or if you have a search campaign, Google saying well we also want you to show your ads on the display network too. Here's why you don't want that. Search behaves completely different than display. And so if you're going to be doing any sort of display efforts, we always recommend keeping Display display and search search. So you would have display specific campaigns. You do not want to just lazily expand your search campaigns by doing this display expansion. Again bit of a money grab years ago by Google. So we always have this check to know as well bidding. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You'll see our recommendation here. This is basically this setting should be called give Google more money. That's all they're asking for. You don't want Google doing anything with your bidding. I'll have future videos later all about how to choose the right bidding. What bidding? You should be Using and everything else that goes into all the different bidding options. There are no to allowing Google to do anything with your bidding. In fact, most of the time they don't even know what your goal is. It's, it's very funny. In fact, let's bring up an example here. This is an account that I had saved for this moment. They're saying, adjust your ROAS target. So this is a performance max campaign and the average target right now is 900%. For this particular campaign, the goal is 900%. We need about a 900% return on ad spend for this particular campaign for these products in order for this to be profitable. That's a very high roas, but still, that's what needs to be hit to make money on, on this account. So Google's saying and recommending, hey, let's just go ahead and lower that from 900 to 774%. Okay? It's saying you'll get more conversion value from it all. Of course you're going to get more conversion value from it. You're going to be bidding and spending more, so you're going to lose that efficiency. So Google doesn't know what your goal is. It's not like they're calling you and doing strategy sessions with you and saying, hey, what's your return on ad spend goal and what's your, what's your margins on your different product types and where do we need to be hitting in order for you to grow, in order for you to then want to spend more money on your advertising? And in this case it's just saying, yeah, lower your goal. You'll make more money or you'll get more sales. Well, what if 700% is unprofitable like it is in this particular case? So sure, we got more sales, but we did it with less efficiency and now we're unprofitable. This is why you have to be careful. Google doesn't care about your profitability. It just cares about you spending more money. Now let's flick back to the sheet. So no to all the bidding. And then the last one is simply add store visits as an account default goal. This is set to depends. The reason we have this set to depends because this really just pertains to brick and mortar physical store locations. So car dealerships and hair salons and restaurants. So if that's you, then fine. If you want to track store visits, if that's important to you, probably is, then this is a fine setting to have on. However, if you're E commerce and you don't have a physical store setting, or if you're some sort of lead generation B2B or B2C service provider, you may not care about this. So this really only pertains to sort of those local brick and mortar stores, then fine. Adding store visits is fine. So that's why we have that set to the Depends. Okay, so again, you're going to get this cheat sheet on the recommendations that we say you should or shouldn't have in regards to the auto apply recommendations that Google has. I hope this was beneficial to you. I hope I saved some people out there some money by them going in and checking their settings and hopefully turning off most of these and only leaving those one or two that should be potentially enabled on. If you like the video, please hit the like button. Please subscribe and I'll see you on the next video. Thanks, Sam.