Google Ads is doing more of the work for advertisers than ever before. Automated bidding, broad match, automatically created assets, and AI Max can all help campaigns find opportunities that could otherwise be difficult to manage manually. In the right account, they can save time and improve performance. But the problem comes when Google starts making decisions that look good in the platform, while the quality of the traffic or leads declines on the other side.
Here are a few signs that Google Ads automation may need to be reigned in.
Search Terms Are Getting Less Relevant
Broad match can be useful for picking up searches you may not have thought to target, especially when there is enough conversion data for Google to work with. However, it can also stretch the meaning of your keywords a little too far, and you might start seeing searches from people looking for jobs, free information, services you don’t offer, or enquiries that just aren’t a good fit for the business.
This is why we still spend time reviewing search terms, even in heavily automated campaigns. Google automation may understand that someone is likely to convert, but it doesn’t always understand whether that conversion is actually useful to the business.
Conversions Are Up, But the Leads Aren’t as Good
This is one of the clearest signs that something needs looking at. A campaign might show more conversions and a lower cost per lead, which sounds positive at first. When you dive deeper into the leads data, it often turns out the enquiry quality has actually declined. By that, we mean: they’re below the minimum order value, looking for the wrong service, selling their own services, or job hunting. If Google is being told that every completed form is a successful conversion, it will keep trying to find more people who behave in the same way, regardless of their full intent.
That means conversion numbers need some context, and that lead quality is always the key performance indicator to look for over lead quantity.
We look at what happens after the enquiry comes in, as well as what Google Ads is reporting, and where possible, feeding better-quality conversion data back into the account can also help Google optimise towards the genuinely valuable leads.
Google Starts Sending People to Pages You Wouldn’t Have Chosen
Some of Google’s newer automated features can decide which page on your website to send somebody to. With AI Max, for example, Final URL Expansion can select a different landing page if Google believes it is more relevant to the search. That can work well on a website with lots of strong, closely related pages. However, it can also send paid traffic somewhere you would never have chosen yourself. A blog post, an old service page or a page with weaker messaging might suddenly become part of the campaign. This is one of the reasons we regularly check where traffic is actually landing, rather than assuming it’s still following the original setup.
Your Ad Copy Stops Sounding Like Your Brand
Google can also automatically create additional headlines and descriptions for you, using information from your website, existing ads and keywords. Sometimes the extra variations are useful, and sometimes the wording starts moving away from how you actually want your voice to come across to your audience. That really matters when there are specific details around pricing, locations, qualifications, product availability or the type of customer the business wants to attract. Therefore, we’d always advise that automated assets are still worth reviewing. An advert can technically be relevant to a search while giving the wrong impression about the business.
Performance Changes Dramatically After a Setting Is Switched On
When results suddenly change, we usually start by looking at what changed around the same time the data shifted. That could be something outside the account, such as seasonality, competitor activity or changes on the website. It could also be a Google Ads setting. New bidding strategies, automated assets, broad match, AI features and other recommendations can all change the way a campaign behaves, and if campaign performance drops around the same time a new feature was enabled, that gives us somewhere sensible to investigate further.
It doesn’t automatically mean the feature is the problem, though it does mean it deserves a closer look.
That’s why automation and AI features still need a real human watching over them. Google Ads automation can be very effective, but it works best when the account is giving Google good information, and somebody is still checking what those automated decisions mean for the account data. That means looking beyond clicks and conversion totals, and diving into account settings, search terms, change history, and lead quality outside of Google Ads.
We also prioritise feedback from sales teams to get a general idea of how things are going – you can learn a lot about advertising performance from the people actually handling the leads after they come in, and it’s not always just about the data. The aim is always the same: making sure the campaign is generating useful business, rather than just giving Google more conversions to report.
Need Help With Your Google Ads Campaigns?
If your Google Ads performance has changed and you’re struggling to work out why, we can take a look at what’s happening inside the account.
Book a free consultation with our friendly team today and find out how we can help improve your PPC performance.