Adopting vs. hacking Google Ads features: The great debate

From your account reps to the interface itself, Google gives you plenty of recommendations on managing your ad campaigns. But are all of those good?

Should you ignore these recommendations and “hack” Google’s machine learning – or should you follow Google’s advice?

Two Google Ads experts – Ben Kruger and Anthony Higman – had an interesting debate on this topic at SMX Advanced.

Here are the key points from their discussion.

Performance Max (PMax) for non-ecommerce

Kruger, who was on the side of adopting, clearly took the stance that Performance Max is future and that all Google’s tools centers around it:

“My simple answer is that PMax is clearly the future of Google. It’s where everything is heading as, you know, if you’re talking to your reps, if you’re reading documentation, if you’re watching Gmail, which which happened, recently, everything seems to center around Pmax, and it’s talked about over and over again.”
“If you’re not learning and mastering the newest thing that Google is clearly pushing, then you’re potentially gonna get left behind when inevitably, whatever you’re used to gets sunsetted, deprecated or you’re forced to migrate over to PMax.”

PMax offers growth opportunities through AI-driven insights across various channels, but Kruger advised against relying solely on it, suggesting it should be part of a broader, strategic approach that includes learning from PMax to enhance dedicated campaigns.

Higman, who was on the side of hacking, said non-ecommerce brands, in particular, should avoid PMax. He sees “a lot of problems” with it:

“I do understand that Google is aggressively pushing PMax, But just because Google is pushing something doesn’t mean that everybody should jump on board.
“The more people that adopt PMax because of Google’s push for the new shiny object, the more they make it easier to deprecate certain things.
“My main beef with PMax is, again, the lack of transparency. They clearly wanna push everybody in automation, which I disagree with because not everybody fits into that box.”

Higman emphasized the importance of maintaining control and visibility over ad spend, especially for those with smaller budgets. He also expressed concern that widespread adoption of PMax could lead to the deprecation of more transparent tools.

Best match type

Kruger said there is a place for exact match, but if he had to choose, it would be broad match:

“Queries are getting way more, unique, specific and long tail. People are going to be conversing with Google search, asking it different ways, maybe using voice, maybe searching on Google Maps. Queries are evolving, and you’ll never be able to cover that with exact match.
“Broad match is analyzing past searches that this user has made, their location, thousands of other signals that only Broad Match has.
“With a growth mindset, it’s gonna find you new keywords. So with an exact match, your search terms are all your keywords, and you’re not gonna be able to move to that next frontier of growth to find new queries for you to acquire.”

Broad match is more effective in capturing the increasingly unique, specific and long-tail queries users are making, according to Kruger. It leverages Google’s AI to understand consumer intent and match ads to relevant searches by analyzing various signals, including the user’s past behavior and the content of landing pages.

Higman’s all-time favorite, of the present and past match types, is broad match modifier. But sticking to what is possible, he said he prefers exact match.

“This is another one of those control things. As Google removes control, their revenue goes up. Advertisers kinda get a little bit watered down results.”
“So I am a proponent of exact match, keeping things as tight as possible, and really targeting what you want to target.”

Kruger also noted that while exact match may be more expensive, it offers tighter control and more precise targeting compared to other match types. Despite still using phrase match for specific purposes, exact match is currently his preferred choice for achieving targeted campaign results.

Automation vs. control

When posed the question of automation versus control, Kruger said performance is what matters:

“That’s a trick question. I think the answer is performance, and I don’t care how I get there. That’s that’s all that matters to me, and I’m gonna use the best tools available to get the performance and the growth”
“That’s automation because it allows for performance at scale. I’m constantly finding new opportunities, for performance, and I’m able to find new levers of growth, to move my business along.”

While control is important, particularly for agencies focused on hitting specific targets within platforms like Google Ads, relying solely on controlled methods limits growth potential, Kruger said.

Balance is key, Kruger said, where strategic controls are combined with automation to drive significant business growth. In his experience, automation has consistently delivered the best performance outcomes.

Unsurprisingly, Higman’s stance is “1,000% control”:

“Google is pushing everybody into automation, which, again, it does have its use cases. I’m not saying that it does not, but we need to keep control to keep results.”
“I think that as privacy legislation meets automation, there’s gonna be a lot of problems down the road as there’s less data that can be fed to the the automation because of privacy legislation, things are gonna get wonky.”
“I also think from an agency perspective, control is extremely important. Client’s don’t want these weird things that are gonna happen with automation that bring in different kind of things that they’re really not going after.”

Higman is concerned that automation, with its lack of transparency, could lead to undesirable outcomes and urges others to resist the push toward automated systems that reduce control.

RSA (Responsive Search Ads) strategy

Maximizes all the headlines and descriptions that RSA’s have to offer, Kruger said:

“I completely max them out: 15 headlines, 5 descriptions, 20 images, all extensions, etc.
“I have seen first-hand that creative is targeting. You could have two different ad groups with the same keywords in it and if you change the assets in one of the RSAs to better match that keyword, the search terms that match to that ad group will move to the one that’s more relevant.
“Formats are completely gonna change. And by having a diverse set of assets in an RSA, you can increase your chances of landing different placements that those with an ETA definitely could not get into.”

As search engine results pages (SERPs) evolve, having a diverse set of assets in RSAs increases the chances of securing different placements, something expanded text ads (ETAs) cannot achieve, according to Kruger.

But Higman is not a fan of RSAs. He said:

“I think that the best RSA strategy is not RSAs. We still have accounts that have expanded text ads in them, and they outperform RSAs by miles every time, and they get all of the conversions.
“My RSA strategy is to keep RSAs as close to ETAs as possible.
“So we will only provide the minimum required headlines and descriptions, and we will pin those into place exactly where we want them based on past performance on expanded text ads.”

While Higman acknowledged the potential of RSAs to match headlines and descriptions to searches, that hasn’t been his experience. Overall, he has found that ETAs still significantly outperform RSAs.

Both experts agreed that ad strength scores may not be indicative of performance.

Nuanced perspectives

It should be noted that with each point each expert conceded that their “opponent” made valid points:

Higman conceded that automated solutions could benefit larger advertisers aiming for broad reach.
Kruger suggested that control-focused strategies might be more suitable for businesses with limited capacity to handle high lead volumes

The debate highlighted the ongoing tension in the PPC community between embracing Google’s automation push and maintaining granular control over campaigns.

The key takeaway is that while Google is clearly moving toward more automated solutions, the best approach depends on an advertiser’s specific goals, budget and capacity for growth.