Margin-based campaigns are still being recommended by people in the Google Ads space, and it constantly surprises me. It’s a broken strategy. The entire foundation for that campaign structure is full of holes, yet agencies and freelancers continue to build accounts on top of it. I’m here to tell you why they don’t work and […]

When a Google product manager showed me Smart Bidding Exploration in Mountain View, she called it the biggest smart bidding update ever. And honestly, I think she might be right. I was invited by Ginny Marvin as part of a small group of PPC practitioners to sit down with product managers and discuss new features,

This has long been one of the most misunderstood features Google has ever released. On the surface, it just sounds great. Everyone wants more new customers, right? Your entire business growth depends on it. The problem is that it’s just not that simple. I’ve seen enough accounts to know that most advertisers just flip a

I’m going to say something controversial: Smart Bidding has made negative keywords mostly irrelevant. For the last couple of years, some of our biggest performance gains haven’t come from adding negative keywords, but from removing them. Yep, I said removing. The reason is simple. Most advertisers are stuck in a 2018 mindset, over-using a tool

Let’s be clear: Smart Bidding is one of the best things to come out of Google Ads in years, second only to Shopping ads. It does a much better job at managing bids at scale than any human ever could. But it has blind spots. There are things Smart Bidding simply doesn’t know, and if

Intro Just like YouTube Ads shouldn’t defacto be run by your Google Ads agency (unless they know what they’re doing), it’s equally wrong to classify branded and non-brand keywords as the same. Just because they’re both within a Google Ads account does not mean they should be treated the same. In this article, I explain

Today, I want to explain a concept that sneaks past most PPC managers. But first, let me start with a story; In 2017, I took over an account in a high AOV industry. The previous agency had decreased the spend in the account from $90,000/month to $40,000 over a four-month period. This was back in

Smart Bidding has been a staple in the way we run campaigns since 2020. When I was first asked to update my 2018 article on Smart Bidding, I found it said that we weren’t very optimistic about it. Flash forward to 2024, and our internal directive since 2020 has been: “By default, Smart Bidding must

Summary There are actions you can take to significantly improve Smart Bidding Don’t try to outsmart Smart Bidding—it’s better at math than you are Work with the ROAS targets and the available budget Use the features available, including Portfolio bid strategies, Seasonality Adjustments, and Data Exclusion Try not having a target Always give it time