Google’s ‘Remove Redundant Keywords’ Update

Episode Description

This is a video about Redundant Keywords and automatically applied recommendations in Google Ads with Greg Finn and Fred Vallaeys.

Google is changing what they consider to be redundant keywords on January 19th so advertisers need to understand what this change is and how it may impact their accounts.

Episode Takeaways

Google’s 2023 Auto-Applied Recommendation Change

• Google updated its “remove redundant keywords” recommendation to allow different match types in the same ad group, pushing broad match keywords.
• The sudden shift left advertisers with only 15 days to adjust, raising concerns over advertisers’ loss of control and transparency.

2. Concerns Over Changing Approved Settings

• Advertisers had previously opted in to recommendations under a different definition, and this change was applied without re-approval.
• Many fear this could set a precedent for future changes that might alter campaign outcomes unexpectedly, adding extra work for advertisers.

3. Risks for Small Businesses with Auto-Applied Recommendations

• Automated recommendations often push for higher spending by suggesting increased budgets or expanded match types.
• Small businesses without PPC expertise may unknowingly increase costs, lacking tools or knowledge to optimize or assess Google’s suggestions effectively.

4. Trust Issues in Google Recommendations

• Some advertisers view Google’s recommendations as financially motivated, since they rarely suggest cost-saving actions.
• Calls for more transparency and data-backed reasoning in recommendations are growing to ensure alignment with advertisers’ interests.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: We’re here today with Greg Finn to talk about one of Google’s recent changes that didn’t take long in 2023 for Google to say something that caused a huge uproar. So Greg, thanks for joining us.

Greg Finn: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. I have an agency Cypress North out of beautiful Buffalo, New York.

I helped put together some of the shows like SMX and do some of the paid tracks for those, those few shows each year, and I’ve got a podcast marketing clock every Friday as we kind of run through the news and rant and rave and just have a good time.

Frederick Vallaeys: So let’s rant and rave. So Google takes what four days into 2023 to make an announcement that you got people like taking a, doing a double take, right?

So what, what exactly did they announce?

Greg Finn: Yeah, so it was January 4th and they said, you’ve got 15 days for anybody that’s opted into an auto applied recommendation the remove redundant keywords recommendation. And initially this recommendation would remove redundant keywords that were the same match type.

Any ad group out there. And so basically, you know, people kind of judge like some of these recommendations and they’re kind of like, these ones might be a little bit safer than the other ones. And this was kind of, I think some people thought that this was a safer one, right? So that you have something in your account.

And then. And it’s an overlap. Yeah. You might just want one keyword there to, to kind of get all the volume and and not split it up between two. Like it sort of makes sense. So the email said, well, now we’re not going to it’s going to kind of cross over match types and you’ve got 15 days, so people that had opted in, they’ve got 15 days, and then that recommendation is, you know, changing as a whole, starting January 19th.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. And to break that. Down a little bit. So there’s really two things that has people concerned, right? The first one is you’ve opted in previously to allow Google to do automatically applied optimizations. Oh, and by the way, the thing that you approved us to do last year, we’re going to change the type of work that so, but that approval is still valid.

It’s kind of like going to a contractor and signing a contract to put to, to paint your house white. And, you know, then he goes on vacation, comes back from vacation, and he’s like, Hey, I’m actually just going to paint it red. You already signed the contract, but I’m going to change the terms of the whole thing.

I mean, that’s kind of what Google did here. Right?

Greg Finn: Yeah. Yeah. And, and I don’t want to like, I don’t want to kind of go too far. Like the change that they’re making isn’t, isn’t like an astounding change. You still would have had to have a broad match keyword. In the ad group, you still, but it’s going to prefer the broad match keyword now.

And so you wouldn’t have needed that in the ad group. But it is a substantial change to what you had opted into. So now you’re making more work saying like, Oh, I approved this. Now I have to go read these emails. I have to go reassess everything and make sure that this is still the case. So, you know, to me, there’s, there’s sort of like the two flavors of it, right?

One is it’s going to choose the broad match keyword, which Transcribed Face value, not that big of a deal, unless you’ve got some impression share or something or other you’re working on. But two, the bigger, I think, concern is that, you know, people approve this recommendation. That was a set recommendation and that’s not changed, you know, and you’re still have been approved for it and you only had 15 days to change.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. So if you happen to not have caught that email or this video, or many of the tweets that were out about it, you’d wake up January 20th, and all of a sudden your automatic optimizations would have been doing different work than what they did the day before. You hit the nail

Greg Finn: on the head. And then I’d say as well, it’s like, that’s a slippery slope, right?

Like that, that is changing. People applied it to kind of basically clean up the match type, the keywords in the same match type. Now you’re crossing over to different match types. And I, I, I guess naively didn’t think this would ever be possible, you know? So then I’m, I’m now thinking, well, what’s going to be coming next?

Right? Like this, this face value isn’t, isn’t a horrible change. But what’s next, you know, what can happen next to these keyword, to these recommendations and, and, and what’s coming down the pipe.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And I suppose it’s that whole theme. That’s sort of been an undertone of Google pushing more and more for broad match keywords and let the machine figure out the targeting and we should be more hands off on it.

We started seeing that a number of years ago when exact stopped being exact. As I said, I just want to point here to the, the screen share that I have, but I took this from, I think it was directly from Google’s email. But in the example, if you have two keywords, women’s hats in a phrase match and a broad match, ladies hats, like these are considered redundant keywords.

And so it’s not like duplicate keywords, but it’s redundant. And what they’re saying is, ladies hats is close enough to women’s hats. It’ll show for that. Query anyway. So we’re taking away the control over that keyword. Now, if you look at the previous slide and then I’d like, love you to comment, but so currently they say a keyword is considered redundant if it’s within the same ad group, destination, bid strategy, and match type.

Now they’re taking away the match type, right? So it still has to have the same destination URL. It has to be sort of like targeting the same ad group with the context of the audiences and with the same bid strategy. But like, to what degrees is taking away control that an advertiser in the past would have said, well, you know, women’s hats and ladies headwear is different enough at some level that I kind of wanted to do something different.

Or are the other things that Google looks at covering for those possibilities?

Greg Finn: Yeah. And, and, you know, everybody has their own preference for setting up campaigns. And for us, we don’t use auto applied recommendations. It’s, it’s, I like looking at the things, you know, taking what things, you know, might make sense and applying as needed.

But in that example where you’ve got like the women’s hats that’s in a key in, in the same campaign with something like a ladies hats, you, you might be an advertiser out there. That’s in, this is where I don’t exactly. Get why they’re making this change. But maybe, you know, women’s hats is your bread and butter and you see a much higher conversion rate and everything’s going well with it.

So what it’s going to do then is, you know, you’re not going to be showing for women’s hats anymore. And apparently even if your bid was higher. It’s going to be a redundant term, right? And it’s going to go back towards ladies hats. And then the thing as well that really could be a problem, right? In people’s accounts.

Let’s say that you know, you’ve you’ve. It just broad match in general, right? If you’re defaulting towards the majority of broad match you really want to make sure it’s, it’s, you’ve got smart bidding on, right? Like I don’t think anybody really likes having smart bidding but you know, if you’ve got a bunch of keywords in the same campaign, and you’re, Spending more because you’re bidding higher on things that are exact match.

Again, you probably, it makes sense because in order for this to hit you, you have to have that broad match term in there, but you’re gonna probably spend a lot more on broad match. Obviously, if your exact match terms are considered redundant, your phrase match are considered redundant and people might just not know that

Frederick Vallaeys: should people turn off the automatic applies for this and start managing.

Redundant or duplicate keywords in other way? Yeah. So I put a post out on,

Greg Finn: on search engine land and you know, the, the, the fact that I, I, again, naively, I thought if you play, you agreed to recommendation, you know that’s what you’re opting into. And the fact that, that this is going to kind of fundamentally change the way that the recommendation works.

I don’t know how anybody could feel comfortable, you know opting into these because you’re really going to have to. Pay attention now and see what the recommendation is changing, what it’s morphing into, like what’s going on, you know, and this, this wouldn’t be a problem if it was just a new recommendation that said, Hey, it’s redundant keywords across match types.

Would you like to opt into this? You know, and I think the problem that people have is you’re not opting into this. You agreed on something in 2022 and in 2023, that is changing and it’s making more work for you. And you know, That’s the, the slippery slope, I think this is kind of a dangerous precedent, you know, to, to, to have the ability to change these things that you’ve already agreed to in post and only have, you know, a few weeks to to see that.

Frederick Vallaeys: So you still stand by the tweets that we’re seeing on screen here, basically saying this sort of recommendation.

Greg Finn: Yeah, I think, I think, I think that’s fair. You know. The whole point of that first recommendation, the way that they got people to opt into it was the fact that they would help to remove redundancy within a match type.

That is not what the recommendation is here, January 19th, 2023. It is a different implementation. So, you know, I think it should have been something Added on, maybe it’s something that can be a pop up and, and, and, but to, to put it into somebody that had had approved a different recommendation on face value between the same match types.

I don’t think that that’s, I think that this is it’s dangerous.

Frederick Vallaeys: That makes it harder for people to in the future, accept some of the valid recommendations that Google makes, because there is worried that you’re not just accepting. What makes sense today, but that you’re opting into a lot more stuff.

And we don’t know what that stuff is. And it’s sort of also the theme and the ongoing automation of the industry. We’re all fighting for some modicum of control and some, you know, insurance that the system isn’t doing something crazy. And so this is yet again, a piece of control that’s being taken away, I think.

Greg Finn: Right, and it’s to me it’s that control and I think that there’s some distrust at least at least for me when we’re looking at these recommendations you know, and I wrote about in the article, but when you see all the recommendations load, it’s things like we should expand with search partners you know, you should raise budgets.

What is not a possible recommendation is lower budgets. Right. So when we look at these recommendations even things like upgrade to broad match, like some of these recommendations are probably going to make you spend more money as an advertiser or as a client. And unfortunately, it’s the small, medium sized businesses that either can’t afford a good consultant or kind of doing it on their own that are probably going to get taken for this.

So to me. Until you start seeing that where it’s like, hey, lower your budgets on this campaign. I just don’t think that the recommendations are fully aligned from like a fiduciary standpoint for advertisers.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And part of the reason for that is that the system looks at the headroom opportunity, and that’s how it decides to make a recommendation.

And so headroom is always about additional opportunity. So Google kind of comes at it from the assumption that we all want more conversions, but oftentimes not from the perspective that maybe we would like those conversions to be cheaper per conversion. Or have a higher return on investment. And so that’s where the directionality is always like spend more, increase your budget, add more keywords, make your keyword match type looser because that opens up the funnel.

And then, so yes, additional conversions are great, but there comes a point at which the cost for those additional conversions is just like off the charts. Right. And that’s actually, so an Optmyzr. The tool that we have, we think about that very hard because we, we actually do show some of Google’s recommendations in our tool as part of the workflows.

Because if you’re using Optmyzr, it makes sense to do all of your work in there, but we take those Google recommendations that we apply one more layer of logic on top of that and say, well, only. Tell you to increase the budget. If we can also calculate that the incremental incrementality, the incremental CPA is well within or very close to what you’re currently doing, right?

And then it makes sense because if you’re already happy with a 20 CPA, then why not give you more at 20 and raise your budget? But if it means raising your budget, then all of a sudden, now your, your cost per acquisition on average is going to go up to 25. Well, then, Yeah, maybe those are not extra conversions you want.

And so it’s kind of like that whole thought process that, like you said, if you’re not a sophisticated advertiser, if you don’t have an agency, if you don’t have a good tool, you’re kind of being led down this path that’s maybe not doing exactly what it is you were hoping.

Greg Finn: Exactly. And that’s one thing like Optmyzr, you have, you have the data and share that data, you know, out in the public.

And you know, with this change, I think that there was maybe one sentence that it was the equiv should have equivalent performance or something like that, you know? And, and I think, I think that that’s, that’s another aspect, right? Like, like making the case with data, showing people that showing that extra layer makes sense.

In this case, I just don’t think it was enough. Yeah. From Google directly.

Frederick Vallaeys: I know there was a little bit of chatter then on Twitter. So I love this one here from Anu. Yeah, right after they pressed send on that email and listen, I was at Google when we did some of the changes around quality score and it was like, yeah, we, we knew there was no.

Good way to do this. And you were just hoping for the best and maybe dancing like these two here.

Greg Finn: I think if, if somebody is listening to this after the 19th and is like worried or something, this isn’t a huge, huge change to the you know, redundant. Recommendation here. So there might be somebody at Google doing this dance, but this isn’t like a super egregious, again, you still would have to have that broad match keyword mixed in with the different match types in an ad group.

It’s just a change of the definition.

Frederick Vallaeys: And maybe we were all just a little bit bored after the holidays and we’re like, Oh, come on, Google, say something that we can jump on. Here was Amy’s tweets and then a number of people pretty highly respected people there weighing in and saying that they’re not a huge fan of that particular change.

And then of course, Google did come back and weigh in. So thanks to Ginny for always being on the pulse of what we are worried about. So she provided a few answers. Was there anything in this? Tweet that you thought was interesting maybe worth covering.

Greg Finn: I mean, I think it was pretty, pretty much PR speak.

So there was a tweet from Mike Ryan at Mike Ryan retail on Twitter and him and his company had actually seen this as what appeared to be a test into his account. So they identified it. We’re talking with the rep, the rep said that it was a bug and there might be some compensation potentially due to this being in his account.

And I thought that that was interesting in general too, that, that, that was the case and then Ginny replied to that and tried to clarify it as well saying that there are some tests that go out there was also probably a bug within this test, so sort of like everything’s true but I thought that that That just kind of look into things as to how some of these tests are going on is pretty enlightening.

If you look at some of those responses from her honor at ads, liaison account, and then also the fact that they’re always experiments running. So I guess, again, naively, I didn’t know that. Some of these auto applied recommendations have these tests baked in that, you know, you you’re signing up for when you you know, have those set up on your account.

Again, not a big auto applied recommendation guy over here.

Frederick Vallaeys: Very interesting. Hey, well, Greg, thank you so much for sharing. Folks watch marketing o’clock or listen to marketing o’clock and follow Greg on Twitter and all of the other places. We’ll put it right there on the screen, but thanks for weighing in and your thoughtful response to this big change from Google.

Greg Finn: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I had a blast.