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Google Ads becoming MORE OPAQUE and LESS EFFECTIVE, with little Customer Support.
For many years our business used Google Ads and it was effective with a solid ROI.
In the last 18-24 months this has slowly degraded.
**ISSUE 1 : SEARCH TERM REPORT HIDES MORE AND MORE OF THE INQUIRIES**
The Search Term Report was a useful tool to gain feedback and action points on how the campaigns were performing. It was also helpful in that you could add in negative keywords to ensure your campaigns were effective. However, now Google hides 50% of my ad spend in the search term report into the category ‘Other’ – meaning I have no way of ascertaining what my money has been spent on.
**ISSUE 2 : EXACT MATCH NOW TRIGGERS UNWANTED OTHER PHRASES**
All campaigns run with EXACT MATCH, however, Google now uses AI to match ‘similar phrases’ to my exact ones – none of these are relevant, at least those that Google allows me to see in the Search Term Report. Some of those are clicked and therefore Google is costing me money for ads being displayed and clicked even though they were irrelevant search terms.
A Google support chap told me this was because ‘my business was too niche and the AI was confused’.
I have raised these issues with Google multiple times, the first one being 18 months ago. Each time it takes the same form: I send them all the information laying everything out clearly, the support person looks into it, we then either have a phone conversation where they demonstrate they do not understand the issues or they agree to pass my stated issues onto someone else… and then it disappears. And we begin again.
The most recent Ad Support person agreed that things weren’t right and offered me 2% of the money spent on ‘Other’ as a form of compensation. Pitiful.
As someone who has invested a lot of time and money into Google Ads, and really had faith in the system to generate solid ROI I am left feeling as if they really don’t give two hoots about anything or anyone now.
I’d be interested to hear other people’s experiences in this regard.
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1 Reply
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I’ve also noticed a lot more fuzzy logic when doing keyword matching. So I just keep adding more and more negative keywords based on the search terms report and it has gotten better over time. It is really annoying though.
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You are their customer and yet they make you work constantly to add negative words. They know perfectly what they are doing to rip you off and they do it because it’s a f*** monopoly
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While I can agree with your overall sentiment, this has always been the case. I was frustrated when enhanced CPC came out and we no longer had full control over the CPCs. Then automated bidding came out and we really have no control there. I can tell you that your search term issue has pretty much always been an issue. Now Pmax is what we have to move towards, so I would start testing that if you aren’t so you don’t have all your eggs in the search basket.
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