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Tag : Google Ads

Google Performance Max Campaigns Make Revenue Attribution Critical for Life Science Marketers

Carlton Hoyt 11:19 pm , June 16, 2025

TL;DR Summary:

  • Performance Max campaigns are being promoted more aggressively to new advertisers.
  • While the setup of Performance Max campaigns may seem simple, life science marketers need to do the necessary groundwork to accurately track conversion value.
  • Google Ads’ AI will aggressively optimize for whatever goal it is set to.
  • Performance Max provide very little visibility into the audiences being targeted.
  • If life science marketers aren’t optimizing for actual business results, they will waste their ad budgets on ineffective campaigns.
  • We’ve seen Google’s attempts at self-optimization go wrong before 

  • 
 but executed correctly, Performance Max campaigns can significantly improve return on advertising spend (ROAS) compared to legacy Google Ads campaign types.

Google Ads AI is smart, but it’s your job to ensure it has the data it needs.

Google Ads AI: a Blessing and a Curse?

Performance Max (also known as PMax) a newer Google Ads campaign type which heavily leverages AI to achieve specific goals, such as sales, leads, or phone calls. By using all of Google’s advertising inventory, Performance Max campaigns often achieve a lower cost per action (CPA) than traditional search ad campaigns, and frequently even outperform retargeting campaigns in CPA. Performance Max campaigns are also wider-reaching, capable of advertising to customers through search, Google shopping, display, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, and the Discover feed on Android devices. They use the data you feed it through your conversion goals and Analytics connection, combined with Google’s own proprietary audience signals, to aggressively optimize for the stated goals. It will even mix-and-match ad assets to find the best performing combinations, create new ad assets for you, and find the best performing landing pages on your website. Sounds great, right?

It can be, but life science marketers who don’t have deep experience in Google Ads need to be careful. Performance Max campaigns are “black boxes” with limited visibility and control of keywords, placements, and audience targeting. Marketers who erroneously believe they can simply set up a Performance Max campaign, add some assets, and let Google’s AI handle the rest are going to burn money and see poor campaign performance. This is further complicated for many life science companies, which often conduct transactions partially or entirely offline (unlike e-commerce) and have complex buying cycles involving numerous stakeholders. As a result, revenue can be significantly disconnected from easily traceable online actions.

Furthermore, Google has not consistently proven that it is fluent in the language of the life sciences. We have seen this before, with product ads (for which Google chooses the keywords it believes to be relevant) for laboratory equipment showing in searches for drug paraphernalia and auto-applied recommendations jumbling search ad copy through obnoxious keyword stuffing devoid of context.  I therefore do not recommend blindly trusting Google Ads without providing significant guidance – and for PMax campaigns, that guidance primarily comes from your conversion data.

Conversion Tracking vs. Revenue Tracking

Implementing comprehensive conversion tracking is much simpler than setting up revenue tracking and feeding actual data on conversion values back to Google Ads. Is conversion tracking alone sufficient for most life science organizations who want to use Performance Max campaigns? Almost never. The unusual exceptions are if you only sell through ecommerce or if all your conversions have approximately the same value. Therefore, life science marketers should do one of two things in order to property attribute sales data:

  • Get actual revenue data and feed it back to Google Analytics and / or Google Ads. Since almost all life science companies have offline sales, this requires having the proper technology implemented to correctly attribute sales data to leads and then send this data back to Google Ads. Many CRMs do this, for instance. If you do not have a CRM, you can achieve this yourself using the Google Ads API, but it is non-trivial to set up properly.
  • Estimate the average value for each type of conversion event whose value you can’t automatically track (i.e., all but ecommerce events) and add those conversion values to Google Ads / Google Analytics. This can be done in a number of ways, but using Google Tag Manager is often the simplest.

Failing to provide Google Ads with some measure conversion value will lead to your Performance Max campaigns optimizing solely for the number of conversions. This can lead Google Ads to inadvertently optimize for lower-value conversions, which frequently have a lower cost per acquisition.

PMax vs. Shopping Ads vs. Search Ads vs. Display Ads?

If you are curious which campaign is correct for you, there is no universal answer. You can scour the internet for data and case studies and find a lot of conflicting reports (and even more anecdotes devoid of data). Google Ads performance is so sector-specific and even business-specific that no blanket statement can be made. In our own experience, however, this is what we’ve found:

  • Performance Max campaigns get far more clicks at a much lower cost per click (CPC) but have considerably lower conversion rates and conversion values than search ads. PMax traffic tends to be lower-quality, which is to be expected. It’s hard to get better traffic quality than people who are in the process of looking for what you are selling. When using Performance Max ads to replace or supplement search ads, the objective is to get decent traffic quality at a low enough cost that the higher volume of PMax traffic compensates for its lower quality. Achieving this will depend on your specific circumstances and thoroughly optimizing your campaigns.
  • Since Performance Max campaigns recently added search terms reports, there is little practical difference between PMax and Google Shopping ads if you are using feed-only data. However, PMax also allows additional assets to provide more cross-platform exposure.There isn’t a definitive correct choice here, as shopping ads with Smart Bidding are extremely similar to PMax.
  • Display ads are almost functionally irrelevant after the launch of PMax. Even for display retargeting, PMax is often able to achieve better conversion rates. PMax almost always generates more traffic, typically of comparable quality to display ads. Costs are usually similar, although PMax campaigns can be somewhat higher than most display ad campaigns depending on your display ad targeting.

Again, this is in our own experience, which is strictly in marketing to life scientists and closely adjacent sectors. The only way to definitively determine if Performance Max campaigns will work for you is to test them.

Tips to Get Your Performance Max Campaigns Performing

Properly Establish Campaign Priority

Campaign priority can be directly set for campaigns with shopping ads. For search ads, it’s less simple: there are automatically applied prioritization rules you can’t easily get around. The rules summarize to this: if there is an exact match, regardless of whether the keyword rule used is exact match, then the campaign with the exact match will be used (which for PMax would need to be a search theme since keywords aren’t directly set). If there are no exact matches, then Google’s AI takes its best guess. If AI can’t figure it out, then Ad Rank is used. For display ads, expect PMax to get priority.

Don’t Allow PMax to Cannibalize Organic Leads

Some things you just don’t need to bid on. For instance, if no one is bidding on your branded terms (and even potentially if they are), you don’t need to be bidding on them either. Ads for branded terms will perform extremely well, however, so Performance Max campaigns will aggressively pursue them, causing you to spend money on leads you would have acquired anyway. Stop this unproductive behavior by setting negative keywords for branded terms.

Closely Monitor Keywords & Make Use of Negative Keywords

This is crucial for all Google Ads campaigns, but particularly for Shopping and PMax campaigns where direct keyword control is limited. Be vigilant about your keywords and proactive about setting negative keywords to prevent wasted ad spend on traffic that is irrelevant or low-value.

Use Audience Signals

One of the biggest gripes about Performance Max campaigns is traffic quality. Force Google’s AI to optimize for higher-value audiences by feeding it audience segments, customer lists and remarketing lists. (In our experience, PMax campaigns are particularly effective for remarketing. We’ve largely stopped using standalone Google Ads remarketing campaigns in favor of PMax.)

Keep a Close Eye on Low-Volume Campaigns

Google Ads’ AI needs enough data and signals to be able to optimize itself, or else it may not perform well. The key question is: how much data is enough? Smarter Ecommerce ran an ROAS test for PMax campaigns with different monthly conversions to measure how they performed. The result? Less than 30 conversions per month leads to poor performance and the performance gets better the more conversion data that Google Ads has to work with within the Performance Max campaign. Even campaigns with over 1000 conversions per month performed slightly better than those with 500 to 1000 conversions per month. Their takeaway was that 150+ conversions / month was the sweet spot. Less than that and it might not perform. It is noteworthy however that in their experiment the number of campaigns with “below target” ROAS declined rapidly as conversions per month increased, but those performing above target stayed roughly flat. If their data is to be believed (and it is from 14,000 campaigns), then there is a roughly 30% chance that PMax campaigns will perform well no matter how many conversions you have. Either that or there is something uncontrolled in the data regarding how highly converting companies vs. low converting companies set their target ROAS.

Chart from Smarter Ecommerce

Use PMax as a Supplement for Search and Shopping Campaigns

It’s easy for PMax campaigns to be wasteful and burn through ad budgets. Run PMax concurrently with search and shopping campaigns until it consistently demonstrates superior ROAS

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

This is not a recommendation which is specific to Performance Max campaigns, but it is especially important for Performance Max campaigns. Your manual optimization efforts are what will keep the guardrails on and help Google Ads’ AI better learn what works. Create diverse creative assets, replace periodically underperforming ones, A/B test, and run experiments.

Segment Your Campaigns … But Not Too Much

PMax campaigns perform best when segmentation is used intelligently to guide Google Ads into doing what you want. For campaigns without product feeds this could mean segmenting by geography, audience signals, “similar to” segments, lists, etc. For campaigns with product feeds, you may want to segregate your best performing products, segment by overarching product types, new vs. returning customers, etc. It is also recommended to have a “catch-all” segment to include offerings that fall outside of your defined segments. The best segmentation to use will depend on the nature of your business.

You’ll need to segment your asset groups as well and ensure you have appropriate ad assets for each segment. PMax is decent at figuring out what assets make sense with what products or landing pages, but ultimately you should take responsibility to ensure that you have sensible, coherent ads.

However you segment, be sure not to over segment. Remember that PMax needs enough data to optimize, and if you are hyper-segmenting to the point where many segments have relatively few conversions, Google Ads’ AI won’t be able to optimize your campaigns well.

The #1 Thing To Remember for PMax Campaigns

PMax can be a powerful addition to almost any life science Google Ads account – if done properly. The #1 thing to remember is that Google Ads’ AI can only optimize for what it has data on. Without accurate tracking of conversion values, Google may make assumptions or optimize for suboptimal actions, negatively impacting your campaigns. With proper tracking of conversion values, however, Performance Max campaigns can help unearth leads and customers that might be untargetable through other Google Ads campaign types while delivering low CPAs and high ROAS.

Blog / Demand Generation / Digital Marketing 11:19 pm , June 16, 2025

Supercharge Your Google Ads With Every Possible Extension

Ćœeljislav Petrovič 9:29 am , February 19, 2025

Life science companies constantly face numerous challenges in capturing their audience’s attention on crowded search engine result pages (SERPs) with Google Ads. To make their ads stand out and attract their scientific audiences it is essential to present key information in a clear and engaging way. That’s where Google’s ad extensions (now called assets) come in as a game changer. They transform the ads from simple, inconspicuous text into rich, informative experiences by making them more noticeable, valuable, and engaging for the viewer. 

By leveraging a variety of ad extensions, you can present all crucial information related to the products or services you promote (from unique product features to product variants/service packages with pricing, physical locations, and more) directly on the search results page. In this post, we’ll explore the different types of ad extensions, their benefits, and the best practices that can help you maximize the impact of your Google search marketing ads and most effectively gain the attention of your life science audience.

The Benefits of Using Ad Extensions in Google Ads

Maximizing the use of ad extensions in Google Ads has multiple benefits for life science marketers, including:

  • Increased Visibility: Extensions make your ads larger and more prominent on the search results page, capturing more attention from viewers.
  • Higher Click-Through Rate (CTR): By adding more hyperlinks and valuable information to your ads, extensions provide users with more reasons to click, resulting in a higher CTR.
  • Enhanced Ad Rank: Ad extensions contribute positively to Google’s Ad Rank formula, leading to improved ad positions and potentially lower costs per click.
  • Improved Relevance: Extensions allow you to tailor your ads to specific user searches, increasing relevance and engagement.
  • Better User Experience: By providing quick and easy access to relevant information, extensions improve the user experience and encourage interaction.

Overview of Google Ads Extensions and Their Suitability for Life Science Companies

To help you prioritize which ad extensions will deliver the most impact for your campaigns, we’ve split them into two categories: All-Stars: Must-Have Extensions and Other Extensions to Consider. This will make it easier to focus your efforts on the extensions that will likely yield the best results for you, while keeping additional options in mind to experiment with as needed.

All-Stars: Must-Have Extensions

1. Sitelink Extensions

  • What It Is: Sitelink extensions are additional links (clickable text assets with headline and description) that appear below your ad, helping users navigate directly to specific pages or sections they may want to browse on your site.
  • Use Cases: Link to individual product or service pages, collection / category pages, a contact page, quote request page, or page with downloadable content. This allows users to navigate directly to relevant content, decreasing bounce rates while improving engagement and conversion rates.
  • Who Should Use It: Companies with multiple landing pages that highlight various aspects of their offerings, showcase specific products or services, provide access to valuable resources like case studies and white papers, or allow users to take meaningful action.
Example of Sitelink extensions for a distributor of lab homogenizers

2. Callout Extensions

  • What It Is: Callout extensions are short, non-clickable descriptive text snippets that allow you to highlight the key product/service attributes and benefits within your ad.
  • Use Cases: You can use callout extensions to emphasize distinctive qualities, such as unique product/service features, certifications, warranties, fast shipping, or the availability of expert support.
  • Who Should Use It: Companies with differentiating product or service attributes that aren’t easily conveyed in the main ad text should consider using callouts to highlight these strengths.
Example of Callout extensions for a distributor of lab homogenizers

3. Structured Snippet Extensions

  • What It Is: Structured Snippet extensions allow you to showcase specific aspects of your products or services in structured text format. Unlike Callout extensions, which highlight key benefits, Structured Snippets present categorized details like product types, or service packages, to clarify the offerings in the ad.
  • Use Cases: Use structured snippets to list various product types you offer (e.g., “Cell Counters,” “Microplate Readers,” “Triple Quad LC-MS”) or the exact services you provide (e.g., “Cell Line Development,” “In Situ RNA Seq” “Bespoke Oncology Models”).
  • Who Should Use It: Companies with a broad product line or service catalog that want to showcase a variety of options directly in the ad, making it easy for users to see their range of offerings at a glance.
Example of Structured Snippet extensions for a distributor of lab homogenizers

4. Call Extensions

  • What It Is: Call extensions are special assets that display a clickable phone number in your ad, encouraging users to contact your sales or support team directly from the ad.
  • Use Cases: Sometimes a scientist wants to get straight to the point. Call extensions facilitate direct contact, enabling outreach directly from the ad.
  • Who Should Use It: Companies with dedicated sales teams who have a consultative sales process.
Example of Call extension for a distributor of lab homogenizers

These are the extensions that should be prioritized in your Google Ads campaigns, as they significantly enhance the relevance, engagement, and performance of your ads.

Other Extensions to Consider

1. Location Extensions

  • What It Is: Location extensions allow you to display your physical business address, a map link, and distance (if applicable) to your location from the searcher’s location in the search results, which helps potential customers to easily find and visit your physical location.
  • Use Cases: When you serve customers in specific locations, you can use this type of extension to show your business locations on the map..
  • Who Should Use It: Companies that have brick-and-mortar locations that clients may visit (such as company headquarters, laboratories, research facilities, or regional distributors) can use this extension to demonstrate convenience and reassurance of local availability while improving ad relevance. For companies which only deal with customers remotely, this is less relevant.
Example of Location extension for a provider of lab instrument services

2. Image Extensions

  • What It Is: Image extensions allow you to add visually compelling images to your ads, which can significantly enhance the appearance of your ads and make them more engaging. 
  • Use Cases: You can use image extensions to visually showcase your products, team, facilities, software/app in action, or feature scientific images related to your scientific specialty. 
  • Who Should Use It: Companies that have a strong collection of images related to their products / services and want to provide potential clients with a quick visual preview of their offerings in the ads.
Example of Image extension for a distributor of lab homogenizers

3. Lead Form Extensions

  • What It Is: Lead form extensions allow users to submit their information and sign up for something you offer directly through the ad without leaving the search results page.
  • Use Cases: Capture leads directly on the search results page using Google Ads’ built-in forms, allowing users to request more information, sign up for demos, or access downloadable content like whitepapers, application notes, or brochures.
  • Who Should Use It: Companies focused on lead generation, whether by providing high-value downloadable resources, offering product demos or simply making it easier for potential customers to get in touch.
Example of Lead Form extension for a supplier of cell imaging systems

4. Price Extensions

  • What It Is: Price extensions allow you to showcase a list of products or services with pricing right below your ad, giving potential customers instant visibility into the price of your offerings.
  • Use Cases: Provide potential customers with a quick cost estimate of your offerings by displaying the exact prices of individual featured products and product variants or starting prices of specific product types, product lines, and service packages within your ad.
  • Who Should Use It: Companies with standardized product/service prices, especially those that list a wide range of products or service packages on their website and do direct sales through the site.
Example of Price extensions for a distributor of lab homogenizers

5. Promotion Extensions

  • What It Is: Promotion extensions allow you to highlight special offers, discounts, or limited-time deals directly in your ad, making it easier for potential customers to see and take advantage of your promotions.
  • Use Cases: These extensions can be used to highlight promotional offers with monetary or percentage-based discounts alongside your ad, and attract users looking for special deals.
  • Who Should Use It: Companies that sell tangible products, software/app subscriptions, or service packages online and run promotions with limited-time discounts.
Example of Promotion extensions for a distributor of lab homogenizers

6. App Extensions

  • What It Is: App extensions allow you to embed a direct link for downloading your mobile app into the ad, making it easy for users to install and access your app without the need to visit your site first.
  • Use Cases: If you offer mobile apps (such as LIMS, ELNs, reference management apps, or other apps that support research work), you can use this extension to promote your app within the ad and drive downloads for your app.
  • Who Should Use It: Companies offering iOS or Android apps designed for scientists, especially those offering subscription-based apps or free apps that provide them with downstream marketing opportunities.
Example of App extension for a vendor of Android/iOS app

Best Practices for Using Ad Extensions in Life Science Campaigns

To maximize your ad extensions’ potential, make sure to follow these best practices:

1. Choose the Extensions Based on Your Campaign Goal

Not all ad extensions will be relevant to your campaign and business type. For instance, if you’re promoting an automated cell counter and your campaign objective is lead generation, callout extensions can highlight key features like high accuracy and speed, while a lead form extension can help capture leads from researchers interested in learning more. Make sure to align extensions with your objectives, whether it is generating leads, driving sales, or increasing website visits.

2. Use Extensions That Are Concise and Compelling

Scientists often scan information quickly, so it’s crucial to use ad extensions that are direct, clear, and impactful. Instead of long, generic phrases, focus on specific, concise, benefit-driven messaging. For example, rather than “Advanced Cell Counting Technology,” try “Fast & Accurate Cell Counting”’ to immediately convey value. Keep language precise and focused on what will resonate with your audience.

3. Tailor Extensions to Your Target Audience

Different audience segments within life sciences have different intentions and respond to different messaging. For example, if you’re targeting an audience with more scientific queries, sitelink extensions could lead to a white paper showcasing your technology, while for an audience with more commercial queries, they could lead to a case study showing improved results or cost savings. By aligning extensions with keyword intent, you can ensure your ads deliver the most relevant content to each audience segment.

4. Keep Extensions Fresh and Up To Date

Outdated extensions can lead to poor user experiences, negatively impacting ad performance and overall results. Make sure to regularly review and update all extensions you use, especially price extensions that should display valid product prices, promotion extensions that should reflect current special offers and discounts, and sitelink extensions that should direct people to up-to-date pages with useful resources.

5.  Monitor Performance and Measure the Success of Extensions

Just like ad copy and keywords, ad extensions should be periodically evaluated for effectiveness. Use Google Ads performance reports to track and see which extensions drive the most clicks and conversions and which extensions do not generate any results. For example, if a callout extensions about key product features have a low engagement rate, consider testing different wording or replacing it with a more relevant extension. If your performance reports show that certain price or sitelink extensions drive meaningful results, try creating more extensions like these.

6. A/B Test Different Extensions and Messaging

Not all extensions will perform equally well in every campaign. To optimize performance and get the most from your ad extensions, continuously experiment with different extension types and messaging. For instance, test variations of callout extensions to see which callouts work best for your audience, or compare lead form extensions with sitelink extensions to determine which drives more conversions. Continuous testing and refining of your extensions will help you maximize ad visibility and engagement.

Following these practices will ensure you get the most out of your ad extensions. The ad relevance will be drastically improved, and you will see better engagement rates and more conversions coming from your campaigns.

Conclusion

Ad extensions provide a powerful way for life science marketers to enhance their Google Ads, providing more value to viewers, improving engagement, and ultimately driving more qualified leads or sales. After leveraging various extension types that are suitable for the products or services you promote and aligned with campaign goals, you will create a richer, more informative and engaging ad experience that resonates with audiences from the life science industry. Ready to supercharge your Google Ads campaigns with ad extensions? Contact BioBM for a customized Google Ads strategy tailored to the unique needs of your business.

"Want more cost effective Google Ads campaigns? Contact BioBM. Our deep search marketing expertise and fluency in the life sciences combine to give your campaigns an unbeatable edge. Know exactly how best to target scientists.Work with BioBM."
Blog / Digital Marketing / Search Marketing 9:29 am , February 19, 2025

Don’t Optimize for Quality Score in Google Ads

Carlton Hoyt 9:51 am , March 27, 2024

Sometimes you just have to let Google be Google.

Large, complex algorithms which pump out high volumes of decisions based in part on non-quantifiable inputs are almost inherently going to get things wrong sometimes. We see this as users of Google Search all the time: even when you provide detailed search queries, the top result might not be the best and not all of the top results might be highly relevant. It happens. We move on. That doesn’t mean the system is bad; it’s just imperfect.

Quality score in Google Ads has similar problems. It’s constantly making an incredibly high volume of decisions, and somewhere in the secret sauce of its algos it makes some questionable decisions.

Yes, Google Ads decided that a CTR of almost 50% was “below average”. This is not surprising.

If your quality score is low, there may be things you can do about it. Perhaps your ads aren’t as relevant to the search terms as they could be. Check the search terms that your ads are showing for. Does you ad copy closely align with those terms? Perhaps your landing page isn’t providing the experience Google wants. Is it quick to load? Mobile friendly? Relevant? Check PageSpeed Insights to see if there are things you can do to improve your landing page. Maybe your CTR actually isn’t all that high. Are you making good use of all the ad extensions?

But sometimes, as we see above, Google just thinks something is wrong when to our subjective, albeit professional, human experience everything seems just fine. That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Ultimately, you shouldn’t be optimizing for quality score. It is a metric, not a KPI. You should be optimizing for things like conversions, cost per action (CPA), and return on ad spend (ROAS), all of which you should be able to optimize effectively even if your quality score seems sub-optimal.

"Want to boost your ROAS? Talk to BioBM. We’ll implement optimized Google Ads campaigns (and other campaigns!) that help meet your revenue and ROI goals, all without the inflated monthly fees charged by most agencies. In other words, we’ll deliver metrics that matter. Let’s get started."
Blog / Demand Generation / Digital Marketing / Search Marketing 9:51 am , March 27, 2024

Google Ads Auto-Applied Recommendations Are Terrible

Carlton Hoyt 2:51 pm , June 13, 2023

Unfortunately, Google has attempted to make them ubiquitous.

Google Ads has been rapidly expanding their use of auto-applied recommendations recently, to the point where it briefly became my least favorite thing until I turned almost all auto-apply recommendations off for all the Google Ads accounts which we manage.

Google Ads has a long history of thinking it’s smarter than you and failing. Left unchecked, its “optimization” strategies have the potential to drain your advertising budgets and destroy your advertising ROI. Many users of Google Ads’ product ads should be familiar with this. Product ads don’t allow you to set targeting, and instead Google chooses the targeting based on the content on the product page. That, by itself, is fine. The problem is when Google tries to maximize its ROI and looks to expand the targeting contextually. To give a practical example of this, we were managing an account advertising rotary evaporators. Rotary evaporators are very commonly used in the cannabis industry, so sometimes people would search for rotary evaporator related terms along with cannabis terms. Google “learned” that cannabis-related terms were relevant to rotary evaporators: a downward spiral which eventually led to Google showing this account’s product ads for searches such as “expensive bongs.” Most people looking for expensive bongs probably saw a rotary evaporator, didn’t know what it was but did see it was expensive, and clicked on it out of curiosity. Google took that cue as rotary evaporators being relevant for searches for “expensive bongs” and then continued to expand outwards from there. The end result was us having to continuously play negative keyword whack-a-mole to try to exclude all the increasingly irrelevant terms that Google thought were relevant to rotary evaporators because the ads were still getting clicks. Over time, this devolved into Google expanding the rotary evaporator product ads to searches for – and this is not a joke – “crack pipes”.

The moral of that story, which is not about auto-applied recommendations, is that Google does not understand complex products and services such as those in the life sciences. It likewise does not understand the complexities and nuances of individual life science businesses. It paints in broad strokes, because broad strokes are easier to code, the managers don’t care because their changes make Google money, and considering Google has something of a monopoly it has very little incentive to improve its services because almost no one is going to pull their advertising dollars from the company which has about 90% of search volume excluding China. Having had some time to see the changes which Google’s auto-apply recommendations make, you can see the implicit assumptions which got built in. Google either thinks you are selling something like pizza or legal services and largely have no clue what you’re doing, or that you have a highly developed marketing program with holistic, integrated analytics.

As an example of the damage that Google’s auto-applied recommendations can do, take a CRO we are working with. Like many CROs, they offer services across a number of different indications. They have different ad groups for different indications. After Google had auto-applied some recommendations, some of which were bidding-related, we ended up with ad groups which had over 100x difference in cost per click. In an ad group with highly specific and targeted keywords, there is no reasonable argument for how Google could possibly optimize in a way which, in the process of optimizing for conversions, it decided one ad group should have a CPC more than 100x that of another. The optimizations did not lead to more conversions, either.

Google’s “AI” ad account optimizer further decided to optimize a display ad campaign for the same client by changing bidding from manual CPC to optimizing for conversions. The campaign went from getting about 1800 clicks / week at a cost of about $30, to getting 96 clicks per week at a cost of $46. CPC went from $0.02 to $0.48! No wonder they wanted to change the bidding; they showed the ads 70x less (CTR was not materially different before / after Google’s auto-applied recommendations) and charged 24x more. Note that the targeting did not change. What Google was optimizing for was their own revenue per impression! It’s the same thing they’re doing when they decide to show rotary evaporator product ads on searches for crack pipes.

“Save time.” Is that what we’re doing?

Furthermore, Google’s optimizations to the ads themselves amount to horribly generic guesswork. A common optimization is to simply include the name of the ad group or terms from pieces of the destination URL in ad copy. GPT-3 would be horrified at the illiteracy of Google Ads’ optimization “AI”.

A Select Few Auto-Apply Recommendations Are Worth Leaving On

Google has a total of 23 recommendation types. Of those, I always leave on:

  • Use optimized ad rotation. There is very little opportunity for this to cause harm, and it addresses a point difficult to determine on your own: what ads will work best at what time. Just let Google figure this out. There isn’t any potential for misaligned incentives here.
  • Expand your reach with Google search partners. I always have this on anyway. It’s just more traffic. Unless you’re particularly concerned about the quality of traffic from sites which aren’t google.com, there’s no reason to turn this off.
  • Upgrade your conversion tracking. This allows for more nuanced conversion attribution, and is generally a good idea.

A whole 3/24. Some others are situationally useful, however:

  • Add responsive search ads can be useful if you’re having problems with quality score and your ad relevance is stated as being “below average”. This will, generally, allow Google to generate new ad copy that it thinks is relevant. Be warned, Google is very bad at generating ad copy. It will frequently keyword spam without regard to context, but at least you’ll see what it wants to you to do to generate more “relevant” ads. Note that I suggest this over “improve your responsive search ads” such that Google doesn’t destroy the existing ad copy which you may have spent time and effort creating.
  • Remove redundant keywords / remove non-serving keywords. Google says that these options will make your account easier to manage, and that is generally true. I usually have these off because if I have a redundant keyword it is usually for a good reason and non-serving keywords may become serving keywords occasionally if volume improves for a period of time, but if your goal is simplicity over deeper data and capturing every possible impression, then leave these on.

That’s all. I would recommend leaving the other 18 off at all times. Unless you are truly desperate and at a complete loss for ways to grow your traffic, you should never allow Google to expand your targeting. That lesson has been repeatedly learned with Product Ads over the past decade plus. Furthermore, do not let Google change your bidding. Your bidding methodology is likely a very intentional decision based on the nature of your sales cycle and your marketing and analytics infrastructure. This is not a situation where best practices are broadly applicable, but best practices are exactly what Google will try to enforce.

If you really don’t want to be bothered at all, just turn them all off. You won’t be missing much, and you’re probably saving yourself some headaches down the line. From our experience thus far, it seems that the ability of Google Ads’ optimization AI to help optimize Google Ads campaigns for life sciences companies is far lesser than its ability to create mayhem.

"Even GPT-4 still gets the facts wrong a lot. Some things simply merit human expertise, and Google Ads is one of them. When advertising to scientists, you need someone who understands scientists and speaks their language. BioBM’s PhD-studded staff and deep experience in life science marketing mean we understand your customers better than any other agency – and understanding is the key to great marketing.

Why not leverage our understanding to your benefit? Contact Us."

Blog / Demand Generation / Digital Marketing / Search Marketing 2:51 pm , June 13, 2023