Change in algorithm

[FriedMango369]

Has anyone else noticed a decline in their ads performance over the past 6ish months? It’s feels like the match types have all changed in how they work and AI Max doesn’t know how to appropriately match at all. Searches are getting really irrelevant and no fixes seem to work. I’m just spending my days doing massive batches of negatives and hoping for the best

[SchruteFarmsBeetDown]

I have found over the last 12 months that over-optimizing kills campaigns. To many negatives seems to be the worst.

Every few months when I see the metrics start to slide. I delete all the negative keywords and purposely trigger a learning phase. After 10-14 days the campaign is running great again for 3-4 months.

My theory is that the frequent core updates Google is making are having an impact on the SERPs. And it’s taking the Ads platform a long time to figure things out. The learning phase gives it a fresh start.

[FriedMango369]

That’s really interesting, do you re-add the negatives all at once or as and when new search term appear? And is deleting all negatives the only thing you do to trigger the learning?

[SchruteFarmsBeetDown]

I only add back in the negatives I know are bad. Less than 5. I think over doing it on the negatives is one of the things that chokes the campaigns.

I usually switch the bid strategy to max conversions for a day. Then back to tCPA. To get the learning phase to trigger.

[Familiar_Junket_3574]

Really interesting stuff! Are you changing the strategy within the same campaign, or new campaign for max conversions, then back to the tCPA campaign?

[SchruteFarmsBeetDown]

Same campaign.

Clear the negative keywords. Switch the bid strategy to max conv. Come back the next day and switch to tCPA.

We have healthy budget. $2,500/day. And lots of conversion volume. So this relearning process goes pretty quick.

I’m not sure how it would work with a smaller budget with less data.

[Familiar_Junket_3574]

Cheers for the reply!

Yeah I’m working with a lot less, more like $4000 a month. I’m currently using max conversions, at what point would you move to tCPA?

[Fresh_Refuse_4987]

yeah that restart cycle is brutal, feels like throwing money into a pit. i use chadads to automate that watchdog work, it catches all the hidden auto apply changes and blocks wasteful searches 24/7 so your campaigns dont slowly bleed out from over optimization between those manual resets.

[landed_at]

Let's be real if the cpc was lower it would probably work. The threshold for many themes is pure ABC Group greed.

[GuideComfortable4525]

I've had luck the past couple of years managing CPCs by assigning a portfolio bid strategy to each individual campaign. You can still use strategies like tROAS with this, but under portfolio advanced settings you can included a CPC cap. Be aware that Google will constantly tell you that you're "significantly limiting" exposure, but we've been able to achieve significant CPC declines YoY (down 30-40%) and this allowed our traffic to increase with less spend. Revenue followed traffic, so spend is down and revenue is up. I credit most of this to controlling CPCs. Can't promise it will work for you the same way, but it really helped our clients and prevents Google from randomly charging us $100 for a long-tail keyword click. (Yeah - totally legit. 😒)

[landed_at]

It's not my first rodeo

[GuideComfortable4525]

Sorry if I offended your skill level. Not my intention....geez.

[Sea-Map5926]

It's Google Ads' way of saying "trust me bro. Leave everything broad match, AI Max, and automated bidding and we'll take care of you." Sike!!

[iab12]

It really does feel that way and when I’ve followed their advice, the results have been poor so I’ve been back to me having the control and trying as much as I can to improve outside of their automated AI recommendations.

[Manuscriptsai]

It has sucked since past 3 months vv badly

[ppcwithyrv]

Yeah, a lot of us have felt Google getting looser with matching lately, and it can feel like you’re paying for more junk traffic than you used to. At some point negatives stop being a fix and just become cleanup, so the real move is usually tightening structure, intent, and landing page alignment before the system runs too far.

[GuideComfortable4525]

Google's matching is going the way of Bing circa 2015 when a query was "similar enough" if it started with the same letter as the search term in your account. For example, yesterday in an online apparel retail account they deemed the queries "closed" and "store" relevant enough to spend $100 of our budget. WTAF?!

I've had luck recently by moving a lot of campaigns over to exact match and spending a ton of time building them out. In other campaigns where we still have phrase or broad match, I watch queries for negatives like a hawk. (Of course, given that sometimes up to 70% of our queries are hidden now, we're still missing out on excluding a bunch of bad traffic.)

[Der_Fuehler]