The New broad match AI Requirements for Adwords

[Mark_A]

I see in my account recommendations that things like broad match keywords are a requirement for AI - "an AI Essential" it says. My experience with broad match is that there is a lot of wasteful clicks which can't convert and it uses up our budget too quickly.

Anyone have any idea how G AI plans to work with broad match?

[Mark_A]

A year or so ago we had lots of broad match keywords and as a result were adding many negative keywords, a process where we always seemed to be chasing our tails.

The waste of money became too great (non relevant clicks) so we switched nearly all our KWs to exact match which resulted in a lot fewer but more specific KWs clicks..

Recently we decided clicks were too few from exact, and as we rarely hit our budget we switched all our KWs to phrase match. Recovery hasn't occurred, it seems G is trying to force us back to broad match! I can't confirm this yet but it seems possible .. but we don't want broad match again because it wastes too much money.

Grr

[Mark_A]

I see "Performance Max", and apparently serious advertisers are doing it.

Anyone here on a Performance Max arrangement? How is it working out?

[chewy]

PMax was miserable. Geotargeting failed. Keyword targeting failed. Robots were overtaking the system yet Google failed to block, acknowledge or refund.

Reps were horrible. Escalation was impossible. Help pages and chat were completely irrelevant. The whole system was rigged and they knew it.

They played every trick in the book. They should be held criminal.

I even tried to reach out to the Attorney General in our state to get this addressed yet they had no clue as to what I was talking about.

I bailed.

Good luck. They still call trying to sign me up. If only it was "goods as advertised" - this could be a great product. But it ain't. Not by a long shot.

Talk of suits usually gets edited by the mods here - wonder if they still do that.

A suit would also be nearly impossible as we all signed agreements that limit all issues to "arbitration" (no public record) and beyond that, it also prohibits class action suits.

Good for them. Not good for us. Any lawyers present? Love to hear about strategy here (if we can talk about it!)

[Mark_A]

Hi chewy, I did try a performance max effort, after a few weeks my boss deleted it on account of no enquiries :)

[chewy]

Good move. Did you look at GA4 to learn about the "user" behaviors coming in from PMax?

My favorite was the hundreds of clicks from places like Azerbaijan which were clearly robots.

I think the negative geotargeting was limited to a number of locations less than the total number of countries - but I could have that wrong.

Seems like just standard operating procedure.

And now, to go back to get a geo-report is 100% impossible because they deleted GA's acquired data over that period.

Anybody got a good "whole" data set going back 10 years?

Pretty hard to go after these guys when they hold all the cards.

[smallcompany]

I found Performance Max be wallet deplete machine and nothing else. Just as display for me. Waste.