Google Ads Changes in 2022 What You Need to Know

google expanded text ad changes in 2022

For many business owners, keeping up with Google’s Ad requirements and optimization tips can be more than a struggle, if not completely impossible. You spend your time in your day to day processes focusing on your sales and bottom line issues, not whether your ads contain sitelinks, location extensions and the right compelling copy to squeeze out that last bit of juice from the orange in your conversion optimization efforts.

Businesses rely on their advertising agencies, in-house marketing teams and trusted professionals for the advice on how to best allocate marketing budget for maximum ROI. Proper ads optimization can make the difference of whether a business will have flat sales, fall-on-its face with negative revenue growth, or become the growth gazelle that owners dream of.

Google Will Change Ad Types Options in 2022

Google is also in the business to make more profits and they’re always finding better ways to make more money from advertisers, at the expense of your bottom line.  We’ve read about why SMART campaigns are awful for advertisers, and how we can avoid for now giving google our money to let them spend as they see fit.  This new ad type will require some strategy to ensure optimal performance to get the best price and best ROI to positively impact your profit margins.

In a move to push advertisers closer to the ad automation platforms, Google has announced that they will be removing the option to use enhanced text ads beginning July of 2022.  Most advertisers using any advanced campaign setup are using structures built with expanded text ads, so eventually a large majority of all of the ads campaigns will need to be rebuilt.

What You Will Need to Change

Typically when Google “sunsets” a product feature, they allow advertisers to continue to run their legacy features for some time before removing the feature all together.  This could be 6-months, 1-year. They haven’t announced plans around the next steps for the feature but advertisers should prepare in advance in order to be ready for the change and to enable the right setup to take advantage of any optimization opportunities.

google sunsets expanded search ads for dynamic search ads

How Will This Change Impact Business Performance

There are a few implication this will have on ads campaign performances, setups, ad copy options and in the end how much ROI/ROAS you might see.

  1. Increased costs to advertise over time – as more businesses rebuild their ad campaigns and more new ad types are built, we should expect more campaigns to be build using SMART campaigns. Even the largest agencies are getting lazy and using SMART campaigns which they can create instantly with little resources on there end.  The problem with this is that it gives Google the ability to bid on their own auction, so they will drive cost-per-clicks from $10 to $30 for top positions whenever they get a chance.  This is commonly seen in the Orthodontist and Dental keyword realms.
  2. Less relevancy between searches and ad content – as campaigns are bundled into automated platforms, google will show less relevant ad copy on searches for advertisers who do not carefully map out campaign builds.  SMART campaigns will use machine learning to help show the best ad type based on the search but if the ad isn’t setup to work in that environment it will never perform well; moreover, even the ad copy options that are setup to work well in a SMART campaign will have to test with bad variations at the cost of the advertiser.  There are ways to avoid this.
  3. Less control for A/B & multivariant testing: If your p-hat volume is large and greatly impacted by a few % points that influence CTR, then you know the importance of testing ad variations to optimize not only user experience but factors that make up your optimization score in Google Ads.  Without fully optimized structures you will pay more in the bid auction then you would if you were showing ads that performed even marginally better in the ad-relevancy and CTR categories.

expert mode for campaign ad optimization

How to Avoid Pitfalls of This Change & Gain Competitive Advantage

As more advertisers forego the option to use “Expert Mode” campaign setup options, in liue of cheaper and what may seem like easier setup features in Google, theyw will fall victim to decreased performance from less relevant, less compelling ads.

You can still plan to use manual campaign settings to control ad group level builds wich can ensure that you show the right ads for the right searches.  Build your campaigns the right way, or pick an agency that is well adept at using expert mode builds.  The difference can literally mean $millions in revenues and tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend savings.

When building your ads using the new Responsive Search Ad type, be sure to include variations that relate to your keywords.  Separate ad groups by search grouping and control the search query matches through match types and careful optimizations with analysis and negative keyword options.

In the end, after this change is rolled out for everyone, you may end up gaining a net advantage if your diligent and setup your account to succeed!

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