A Look Inside Google AdWords’ New Ad Suggestions Feature

Every advertiser takes immense pride in the ads they write.

After all, writing the perfect PPC ad takes time, creativity, coffee, the occasional beer, and months and months of testing. It’s more than writing a 140-character ad: it’s a monumental and never-ending task.

We know that writing ads is important and challenging, but busy advertisers and business owners know that their time is a precious commodity as well. How can hustling advertisers benefit from testing multiple ads per ad group without investing more of their limited time?

That’s the question Google is looking to answer with their new Ad Suggestions feature.

As of now, Google will begin to automatically suggest new ads to run within your campaigns. Once Google creates an ad suggestion, advertisers will receive email notification and then will be able to review, edit, or dismiss these ad suggestions within the Recommendations page. If they don’t act within 14 days, these ads will be applied to their accounts automatically.

Why Did Google Create Automatic Ad Suggestions?

While some might welcome the extra help from AdWords, many PPC’ers don’t love the idea of Google adding ads to their account (potentially without their involvement). So why would Google risk upsetting advertisers?

Well, Google is only going to surface these suggestions in campaigns already set to “Optimize” their ad rotation and have potential to improve performance.

In most cases, these ad suggestions will appear in ad groups that aren’t already currently testing multiple ads. For those advertisers, these ad suggestions may save hours of having to create and test multiple ads per ad group. Unfortunately, many advertisers have forgotten this best practice:

In ad groups with their ad rotation set to “Optimize,” sometimes simply having more ads with slightly different messages is enough to make a difference when it comes to performance.

Advertisers who have multiple ads average a 21% higher CTR than those that only have one!

Google hopes that by applying these ad suggestions to accounts with fewer ads, they’ll be able to deliver more relevant ads with a higher CTR.

What Will Ad Suggestions Look Like?

Google will create these new ad suggestions by creating ad variations of existing ad messaging within your account.

Google will not create new original content or messages within your ads.

That means these ads shouldn’t look or perform radically different from your other ads and your messaging should be safe for your brand.

Consider these four ads: Can you tell which were written by humans and which were written by Google’s algorithms?

Turns out most searchers can’t tell the difference either (it’s the first and third ones, if you’re curious). The automatically created ads have a 10% higher CTR than those manually written.

Once these ads are live in your account, they’ll appear like another ad, just denoted slightly differently.

These ads can still be changed, paused, or removed at any time, and you can filter to only view auto-applied ad suggestions as well.

When Google Won’t Create Ad Suggestions

There are some cases where the messaging in our ads is intentionally very specific and there’s not room for the creative variations that Google may automatically write for us.

Many industries, such as healthcare, pharma, rehab, or finance, may have to follow specific policies and laws when crafting their ads. For this reason, any ad groups with disapproved or limited approved ads will not be eligible for Google Ad Suggestions.

Ads by Bing

These changes aren’t unique to Google AdWords either.

Advertisers on Bing may notice the opportunity to opt in to Ads by Bing. Similar to Google’s Ad Suggestions, Ads by Bing will help improve your campaign performance by automatically creating variations of your existing ads.

Unlike on Google, these ads will immediately go live and start testing against your original ads. Bing will also change your ad rotation settings to “rotate more evenly,” so that you can more easily evaluate their performance.

How Can I Opt Out of AdWords Ad Suggestions?

Some advertisers will welcome the extra help and enjoy the expected performance boost of these ad suggestions. However, if you’d rather have complete control over the messaging in your ads, you can easily opt out of receiving Google’s ad suggestions.

Within your account’s settings page, simply expand the “ad suggestions” component and select “Don’t automatically apply ad suggestions” and then hit save.

If you use an MCC to manage multiple accounts, you can even opt-out multiple accounts at once by selecting the “Management” tab within your MCC.

From there, you can select any or all of the accounts in your MCC and then hit “edit” to change the ad suggestion settings for all of your accounts.