Google Ads in 2023: What Can We Expect

Digital marketing and PPC in particular is one of the fastest evolving marketing channels. Something that was only launched in the year 2000, is now fundamental to some businesses’ rise or fall. Google Ads make up the lion’s share of digital marketing ad spend per year, but what has changed with Google Ads most recently and how do we keep up? The campaign structure and strategy that would be used 5 years ago, is now completely transformed and wouldn’t create the same results today as it would then. With an evolving industry and user behaviour, keeping up with those changes is fundamental for success in 2023 on PPC. Those who are fighting against the change and still structuring accounts the old way are being left more and more behind. Google is evolving to help advertisers and if you don’t keep up, then your accounts will ultimately suffer – the moral of this story being: don’t fight the system, find a way to work within it.

So, what are the main changes and things to be aware of in 2023:

Google Ads Optimisation score

Google’s optimisation score was introduced in 2018 as a tool to estimate how well the Ads account will perform on a scale of 1 to 100. How accurate and useful this tool is has been a topic of hot debate among advertisers but before we dive into it, the most important thing to remember is that no two accounts are the same. We have some examples on PPC accounts where the recommendations are incredibly useful and have helped drive forward optimisations and strategies for success. We’ve also had some examples where if we accepted all the recommendations it would be completely destructive for the account – imagine adding on a target ROAS of 80% to your campaigns, who’s winning there?!

So where do we find the balance with the optimisation score? While Google is pushing more and more for the auto-apply on recommendations, it’s still very important to consider how beneficial or detrimental some changes could be to your account. If you or your client has a target CPA of £20 for example, and auto-apply could apply a target CPA of £100 to your campaigns, how are you going to achieve your KPIs?

To add another layer to the topic of optimisation score, as a Google Partner it is important to maintain an optimisation score of at least 70% across your managed accounts to maintain partner status, so high optimisation scores are essential. Drop the ball, drop your status. Simple.

While auto-apply doesn’t need to be used in our opinion, we check in on all our accounts at least once a week. If the recommendation isn’t right, it can be dismissed, and the score goes up all the same. In a world moving more and more towards automation, there is still a place for review of these suggestions and understanding what will be the most, if any, value to your client’s account and success.

Extensions renamed assets

No change to the actual logic, just a name change. If like me, you took years to drop the ‘Words’ from ‘Adwords’ when Google rebranded as Ads, then don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.

Auto-bidding

A prime example of where advertisers need to embrace change. Having started in the industry almost a decade ago, I remember manually updating bids for clients in excel based on the previous performance and blocking out 2-3 hours to do so. Now we can use the power of Google’s AI to understand which auction should be entered to achieve your goals.

While Google will usually recommend launching a new campaign with an auto-bidding strategy, I’d still stay on the side of caution here. Drawing on my earlier example, how can a campaign achieve a CPA of £20 if it has never run and doesn’t have any data to know how to achieve this? I’d always start a new campaign on enhanced CPC, optimise it to get to the goal you want whether this is leads, revenue, or traffic, and then apply the relevant auto-bidding strategy.

While some are still very hesitant to make the switch and trust ‘the power of Google’ to reach their goals, we can’t take into account 100s of different signals for each auction and decide which auction is most likely to achieve results, we can however as humans review the suggestions and performance and make the call on which bidding strategy will help reach the correct goal.

New columns for campaign health

New for the columns in Google Ads, you can now pull data on eligible ads, disapproved ads, ad strength and more. These columns are especially useful for health checks on the accounts and making sure campaigns have all the correct assets available.

All the available columns include:

Useful for making sure accounts are in good health, and there are no errors.

Performance max negatives

Yes, you heard right, it’s in Beta and being tested at the account level currently. While it’s not the perfect solution (wouldn’t we all just love to do it at the campaign level) it is a step in the right direction where advertisers are being given back a bit more control over what queries they appear for.

Changes to match types

Match types have hugely evolved and each one of them is gradually getting broader. The exact match of the past is now closer to phrase match, and phrase match is moving closer to broad match, so which is the correct one to use?

Again, it does depend on the account in question. Some industries have less chance of triggering the ‘wrong’ keywords if used on broad match while some industries have a much larger risk of showing for the wrong keywords and wasting ad spend.

While there have been rumours of Google Ads moving all keywords over to broad match, there’s no sign of it in the imminent future. We can still very much use exact, phrase, and broad as we choose, just be mindful that the definition of each of these 3 match types has changed, and is changing.

Bing vs Google

Google has had one of the biggest threats to its stronghold with the launch of the new Bing and ChatGPT but how the market share split will evolve will be a matter of time. Bing Ads overall can be neglected as a platform on PPC, but its importance may shift over the next year with more advertisers moving marketing budgets over to the platform… watch this space!

GA4 and attribution

Of course one of the biggest changes coming in 2023 is the switch over to GA4 fully in July. Not done it yet? We highly recommend you to because it’s coming. While the interface is a huge disruption on the Universal Analytics, we’ve all grown to love, GA4 offers a lot of additional data and insights that will help companies understand their website traffic and grow in the evolving digital space.

So, what can we expect in 2023 from Google Ads? More automation, new features, new ways to look at data, and more! The key takeaway here is to embrace these updates from Google and find a way to make them work for you and your client. Run tests and manage expectations.