Google continues to push the automation of ads. Smart Shopping, automated bidding or Responsive Ads: A clear trend towards automation in Google Ads was already evident in recent years. And now this trend is being continued with “auto applied recommendations”.
Auto applied recommendations – what is that?
Google Ads recommends – individually for your account – changes to bids & budgets, keywords & targeting or ads & ad extensions – in order to increase the performance of your campaigns. This is nothing new at first.
But now Google can implement these recommendations automatically. Until now, the SEA manager had to actively agree individually which of the suggestions he or she wanted to accept. If he ignored the suggestions for change – none of them were implemented. With the auto applied recommendations, explicit consent to the individual recommendations is no longer necessary. Google automatically implements them itself.
The advantages according to Google? Of course, this feature is supposed to improve the performance of your campaigns – and save you time. However: If you activate auto applied recommendations, then a manual fine-tuning of your Google Ads account is significantly more difficult.
Where can you see what changes have been implemented?
Google already announced auto applied recommendations at the beginning of 2019 – under the motto “We’ll focus on your campaigns, so you can focus on your business”. But then we didn’t hear much more about this topic for almost two years. It wasn’t until early 2021 that the topic came up again and the auto applied recommendations were introduced.
In the beginning, it probably happened from time to time that SEA managers activated auto applied recommendations by mistake – and then wondered why expenses were suddenly incurred for keywords that had never been booked.
And in the beginning, auto applied recommendations were not visible in the change history – but only available in the “Control Center for Auto Applied Recommendations”.
In the meantime, however, the auto applied recommendations can also be tracked in the change history. Of course, this makes it easier to undo non-target changes.
Opt-in required: Auto applied recommendations are only activated after consent has been given
However: Auto applied recommendations is an opt-in feature. This means that SEA managers must actively agree if they want to apply this automation to their account.
In the control centre for auto applied recommendations, you can also actively determine which recommendations you want to implement. In total, there are 17 types of recommendations – and you can choose exactly which ones you want to apply automatically and which ones you do not.
Our conclusion on Auto applied recommendations
Auto applied recommendations can be a help – but all changes made by Google should be carefully checked. The SEA manager is therefore by no means “superfluous” – but must continuously check the changes implemented by Google – so the advantage of “saving time” can be discussed again…
In principle, we recommend the auto applied recommendations more for companies in which Google Ads play a subordinate role and only small budgets are used. The big advantage of auto applied recommendations is of course: less effort and manual work. But: If you activate the auto applied recommendations, you give the reins almost completely out of your hands.
For those who want to reduce the manual effort but still like to keep control – BiddingLab could be an interesting alternative. With our Bidder, full automation is possible – but those who want can still fine-tune. With BiddingLab, teamwork between man and machine is possible. The ideal solution for all those who are looking for automation – but still want to be in control. Would you like to learn more about the advantages of BiddingLab compared to other smart bidding solutions? Then read our blog post on the topic: Google Smart Bidding vs External Bidding Solutions – which solution is better?
