Holiday PPC Guide 2025: Advanced Strategies For Smarter Bidding, Budgets & Audiences via @sejournal, @siliconvallaeys

The holiday this year brings more competition than ever, but the shopper journey is also shifting. Consumers begin research weeks earlier, often starting in October, and rely on conversational AI or chatbot-style searches to compare products. Microsoft’s holiday insights show that shopping behavior kicks off in October, with many November and December conversions originating from clicks made weeks earlier.

The funnel is changing shape: wider at the top as more shoppers browse early, but shorter at the bottom as they move quickly once urgency kicks in. The key lesson is that PPC strategy must nurture intent early and be ready for compressed buying cycles when urgency arrives.

Holiday shoppers are beginning earlier, researching longer, and converting later. The funnel is wider than ever, but also shorter once the urgency hits.

Bidding: Winning The Ad Auction

Don’t Fear Expensive Clicks, Fear Unprofitable Ones

Holiday auctions bring higher cost-per-click (CPCs), a natural result of more advertisers competing for limited inventory. Success is not about avoiding CPC increases but maintaining strong return on ad spend (ROAS) and protecting profit margins. Teika Metrics’ Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) data confirms that CPCs climb seasonally, especially on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Smart Bidding goals should be tied to profitability, not just revenue, and portfolio bidding can help balance volatility across campaigns. Microsoft and Google also recommend applying seasonality bid adjustments before major holidays so automation anticipates conversion spikes.

Pro Tip: Set seasonality adjustments 24-48 hours before and after Black Friday and Cyber Monday to help Smart Bidding avoid over- or under-reacting.

Smart Bidding With Guardrails: Train The Machine

Automation is powerful, but it is not infallible. It needs monitoring and guardrails. Trust tROAS or tCPA when conditions are stable, but ensure you have bid limits (through portfolio bidding) and guardrails to alert you about unusual performance during peak periods when volatility spikes.

Real-World Example: Last BFCM, a large retailer client of ours using offline conversion import (OCI) saw conversions suddenly vanish. Optmyzr automation flagged the anomaly right away, revealing a Google-side glitch in OCI reporting. Without that safeguard, Smart Bidding would have assumed conversions had dried up and slashed bids during the most important shopping week of the year. Guardrails prevented disaster.

Key Take: Automation doesn’t eliminate risk; it changes the type of risk. Without guardrails, a data glitch can quietly sabotage your bids. With guardrails, you catch it before it becomes a disaster.

Inventory And Feed-Aware Bidding: Don’t Burn Budget On Out-Of-Stock

Holiday shoppers expect items to be in stock, priced competitively, and available with fast delivery. Automating feed hygiene to pause out-of-stock products is essential. Structuring campaigns by margin allows for different tROAS bids that achieve your target profitability.

Pro Tip: If your price is not competitive, shift spend toward SKUs where you can compete on both offer and margin.

And before you worry about bids, ensure the feed can win the impression. Tighten mobile-friendly titles and human-readable attributes (e.g., use “light brown,” not obscure color names), add seasonal terms like “Black Friday deals,” and fix disapprovals early so you don’t lose visibility when auctions heat up.

Create label taxonomies that align with your profit strategy, like “hero products,” “doorbusters,” “low-margin,” “last-chance,” so you can direct bids and budgets to what actually drives profits.

Case Study Insight: When Amazon briefly exited the Google Ads auction, Optmyzr’s analysis showed other advertisers gained clicks at lower CPCs, but ROAS did not improve. Shoppers were expecting Amazon, and when they did not find it, they often failed to convert with alternatives. Winning an auction is meaningless if the offer and expectations do not align.

Budgeting: Flexibility Wins

Turn On Campaigns Now And Control Delivery With Budgets

I normally recommend pausing campaigns that are not needed, rather than reducing their budgets to a very low amount to keep them active. Advertisers sometimes use budget rather than status to “pause” a campaign because they fear the dreaded learning period that may kick in when a campaign is enabled after an extensive period of inactivity.

Pausing does not erase Google’s memory, since “learning” reflects new auction contexts rather than forgotten history. Longer pauses, however, risk drift as consumer behavior shifts. The bigger issue is that paused campaigns with new ads will not undergo review until they are re-enabled, which can delay serving during crucial moments.

So during BFCM, there are good reasons to use budget rather than status because it keeps campaigns actively learning about shifts in consumer behavior, and it ensures new creatives go into the approval process.

Holiday Pitfall Alert: Do not pause campaigns with unapproved creatives close to Black Friday. Get ads reviewed in advance.

Intraday Pacing: Don’t Get Fooled By Conversion Lag

Static daily budgets can be damaging in volatile holiday conditions. Dynamic pacing using scripts or APIs is a better approach, especially when aligned with key milestones like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, shipping cutoffs, and last-minute windows.

On Black Friday and Cyber Monday, pacing must be monitored throughout the day. Hourly reporting in Google Ads makes this possible, but advertisers must also account for conversion lag.

Looking at last year’s data, conversions appear smooth by the hour because lag has already resolved. On the day, however, conversions will often appear behind pace even when clicks and impressions are aligned. Saving hourly reports as the day unfolds will provide a baseline for analyzing lag in future years.

Pro Tip: Do not confuse lag with poor performance. Cutting budgets midday can mean missing the evening conversion surge.

Lock in your total Q4 budget and earmark a supplemental pool for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the biggest shopping weekends. Expect higher CPCs and raise day caps accordingly so campaigns don’t exhaust at noon. Finally, audit your automations – safety scripts that pause or cap spend are helpful, but if they fire at the wrong time during BFCM, they can suppress profitable traffic.

Targeting

Audience Signals Are Your Multiplier

First-party data goes beyond CRM lists. It includes your business’s unit economics, such as pricing and profit margins, which can guide automation toward profitability rather than vanity ROAS.

Key Take: First-party data is not only about who your customers are, but also includes all your business data, including how you price. Leverage this to guide when you run ads and how much you bid.

Microsoft has a unique feature that Google doesn’t have: impression-based remarketing, which allows advertisers to retarget users who saw their ads but did not click. This expands reach to pre-qualified audiences and often reduces costs. Combining CRM imports, impression-based remarketing, and profit-based bidding provides automation with richer signals.

Keywords And Keywordless Targeting

With match types getting broader every year, and the growth in keywordless campaign types like Performance Max, advertiser control over queries is eroding. This trend will continue as users shift from keyword searches to prompting, and Google eventually replaces synthetic keywords with a more precise targeting system.

Performance Max is performing well, and we shared details about what trends are working best in our PMax study. AI Max, on the other hand, doesn’t feel quite as ready for primetime, though there is unverified speculation that a September 2025 algorithm update improved performance significantly. Test AI Max using Experiments before setting it loose on your BFCM traffic this year.

Creative: Stand Out In Crowded Auctions

Ads That Win Auctions: CTR Beats Clever Copy

Auctions for bottom-of-the-funnel search ads reward click-through rate (CTR) and predicted CTR, not witty copy. Coverage and clarity matter most. Ad headlines, descriptions, and assets (formerly ad extensions) should be updated with current promotions, shipping cutoffs, and urgency messaging.

However, with 15 potential headlines that Google can choose from for your ad, controlling what is most important to include in messaging requires pinning during BFCM.

Optmyzr’s soon-to-be-published 2025 Responsive Search Ads (RSA) study shows that advertisers who pin multiple variations to the same position achieve better ROAS. Pinning one element restricts the machine too much, while no pinning gives it too much freedom. Multi-asset pinning balances human guidance with algorithmic optimization. Google’s RSA guidance confirms that variation improves performance.

Pro Tip: Plan RSAs in waves and use multi-asset pinning to balance brand strategy with system optimization.

Keep It Fresh: Creative Burnout Happens Faster In Q4

Shoppers tire quickly of repetitive ads, especially in Demand Gen campaigns. But even search ads should be kept fresh, and ads should be staged in waves to appeal to Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers, and reflect shipping cutoffs, last-minute gifts, and post-holiday clearance as the holidays approach.

Pre-loading assets ensures they are reviewed and ready to serve. Countdown customizers and promotion extensions can reinforce urgency, but messaging must stay consistent with site offers to maintain trust.

Pro Tip: Schedule creative waves in advance. Do not wait until Cyber Monday morning to swap assets.

Competitive Insights

Competitor Surge Alerts: Auction Insights As A Warning

Auction Insights is a powerful diagnostic tool. Google’s Auction Insights report reveals shifts in competitor behavior, such as impression share surges. Monitoring these trends in November helps advertisers react quickly, whether by increasing brand defense or positioning directly against rivals.

Auction Insights is your battlefield radar for Q4. Ignore it, and you could be blindsided.

Post-Holiday: Turn December Buyers Into January Fans

January Is Your PPC Lab: Retain, Don’t Just Acquire

Holiday buyers are the most expensive to acquire but can become the most profitable if nurtured in Q1. Segment holiday-only versus year-round buyers using customer relationship management (CRM) and ad data, then run loyalty and cross-sell campaigns. Feeding learnings back into bidding and audience systems ensures automation improves over time.

Holiday buyers are the most expensive you will ever acquire. Retarget them in January to make them more profitable.

Final Thoughts

Holiday PPC is the ultimate stress test. CPC inflation, automation, budgets, audiences, creative, competition, and fraud all converge at once. Winning requires guiding automation with better inputs, protecting profitability with strong signals, and owning your message at a time when keyword precision is fading. Prepare early, pace carefully, and place guardrails everywhere they matter most.

Checklist Summary

• Expect CPC inflation in Q4. Optimize for profit and ROAS, not cheap clicks.
• Set seasonality bid adjustments and add guardrails so Smart Bidding doesn’t misfire on BFCM.
• Treat budgets as fluid with intraday pacing. Don’t confuse conversion lag with underperformance.
• Use first-party data beyond CRM lists. Profit margins and pricing strategy are key signals.
• Microsoft’s impression-based remarketing lets you retarget high-intent searchers who never clicked.
• Make creative your control lever in a PMax and broad-match world. Use multi-asset RSA pinning.
• Monitor Auction Insights, watch for fraud/MFA, and turn expensive Q4 buyers into Q1 loyalists.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

PPC Trends 2026: AI, Automation, And The Fight For Visibility via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

If you manage PPC campaigns, you’ve seen it. Platforms are making more decisions without asking you first.

Campaign types keep consolidating into AI-first formats like Performance Max and Demand Gen. The granular controls you used to rely on keep disappearing or moving behind automation.

A year ago, Performance Max still felt experimental. Now it’s often the default option, with AI generating ad copy, and automation selecting audiences based on signals you can’t always see. When performance drops, you have fewer levers to pull and less visibility into what’s actually happening.

It can be disorienting to some, and the trend isn’t reversing.

We asked PPC professionals how they’re navigating this shift. Most aren’t pessimistic about AI-first campaigns. Many have found ways to work with platform automation without surrendering the strategic thinking that drives results.

You can use AI tools without losing your expertise in the process.

4 Key Findings From Industry Professionals

We surveyed professionals from agency, platform, and consultancy backgrounds for this year’s report. Clear patterns emerged in how they’re adapting to AI-first campaign management.

1. AI Tools Save Time But Still Need Babysitting

Most professionals now use AI daily for tasks like keyword research and ad copy variations. The tools are good enough to integrate into workflows.

But there’s a catch. Over half identify “inaccurate, unreliable, or inconsistent output quality” as the biggest limitation. AI accelerates production, but it hasn’t replaced the need for human oversight.

One contributor noted that in regulated industries where legal review is required, AI outputs often can’t be used without heavy editing.

The professionals who get results are the ones treating AI as an assistant, not a replacement.

2. “Control” Means Something Different Now

You can’t control exact search terms the way you used to. You can’t set precise bids on individual keywords or force campaigns to follow rigid parameters.

Several contributors argue you still have meaningful control, it just operates differently than before. One Google Ads coach compared it to giving a teenager the destination address and trusting they can navigate there, even if they take a few wrong turns along the way.

The new version of control means setting clear business objectives and providing high-quality conversion data. If your conversion tracking is messy or incomplete, AI will optimize toward the wrong goals.

3. Measurement Got More Honest (And More Uncomfortable)

Cookie deprecation was canceled in Chrome, but measurement challenges haven’t disappeared. What’s changed is how practitioners talk about attribution.

One agency founder admitted that focusing too heavily on perfect attribution might have been a strategic mistake. “Your marketing strategy should hold up even if granular tracking disappears.”

Other contributors emphasize that first-party data collection with proper consent is now essential for survival, especially in lead generation models.

Revenue remains the most reliable source of truth when platform-reported metrics conflict.

The most durable measurement approach involves choosing a limited set of reliable lenses rather than attempting to reconcile data from every available source.

4. Platform-Generated Creative Performs Better Than You’d Think

This finding surprises people. Several contributors report that AI-generated creative assets can perform competitively with human-created versions when they’re prompted effectively.

But “when prompted effectively” is doing substantial work in that sentence.

Quality depends heavily on how well you prompt the tools and how much brand context you provide. The tools still struggle with maintaining consistent brand voice and meeting legal compliance requirements in regulated industries.

Visual generation continues to need improvement, though contributors note it’s getting better for ecommerce product photography.

Most teams have settled on a hybrid workflow where AI handles idea generation and creates variations while humans manage final approval and anything requiring nuanced brand voice.

What Makes This Report Different

Previous years focused on specific platform changes or new features. This year’s questions dig into strategy.

How do you maintain visibility when platforms reduce transparency? What measurement techniques still work when attribution is murky? How do you adapt creative workflows when AI can generate assets on demand?

The contributors include:

• Brooke Osmundson, Director of Growth Marketing, Smith Micro Software.
• Gil Gildner, Agency Co-Founder, Discosloth.
• Navah Hopkins, Product Liaison, Microsoft.
• Jonathan Kagan, Director of Search & Media Strategy, Amsive.
• Mike Ryan, Head of Ecommerce Insights, Smarter Ecommerce.
• Jyll Saskin Gales, Google Ads Coach, Inside Google Ads.

The answers reflect an industry adapting in real time. Some contributors have embraced AI-first workflows fully, while others remain cautious about surrendering too much control. All are experimenting constantly because the platforms aren’t slowing down.

Why Download This Now

If you’re managing campaigns, you’re already wrestling with these challenges. Are you approaching them with a clear strategy, or just reacting to each platform change as it happens?

This report will show you how experienced professionals at agencies, platforms, and consultancies are thinking through the same problems you’re facing right now.

Download PPC Trends 2026 to see how industry professionals are adapting their strategies, maintaining accountability in automated campaigns, and finding ways to make AI-first advertising work without losing the strategic expertise that separates successful campaigns from mediocre ones.

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Get Your Ad Campaigns Ready Before Black Friday via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson

For most PPC marketers, the weeks leading up to Black Friday aren’t just doing busy work. They’re loaded with decisions, deadlines, and last-minute requests.

If you’re managing Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or any ad platform in between, this time of year can either be a strong finish or a missed opportunity.

The difference usually comes down to planning.

If you’re looking to approach Black Friday with a more structured and thoughtful strategy, keep reading. This article focuses on what you can control (like budgets, campaign builds, and feed readiness) and includes specific examples across platforms to help you avoid common pitfalls.

Let’s start with what to revisit from last year.

Take The Time To Audit Last Year’s Wins And Pitfalls

Before building anything new, it’s worth taking a closer look at last year’s performance.

The strategy here isn’t about copying old campaigns; it’s about understanding where they overdelivered, where they stalled out, and how the landscape might have changed since then.

In Google Ads, start with the attribution reports. Look beyond just last-click conversions and examine how various campaign types contributed throughout the funnel.

If Performance Max campaigns played more of an assist role, that should inform how you structure them this year.

If Standard Shopping capped out early or certain product categories were underrepresented, those are fixable issues.

You can also use auction insights to see when competitors ramped up spend, or whether you lost impression share due to budget or rank. These reports offer useful context if you’re planning to scale this year but didn’t last year.

If you’re using Microsoft Ads, review audience and device performance to see where volume shifted.

Holiday behavior isn’t always the same across platforms. What worked well on Google may not have translated to Bing or Meta, and vice versa.

The goal is to identify specific opportunities, not just assume last year’s playbook will hold up.

Build Early, Even If You’re Not Launching Yet

There’s value in building out your campaigns well in advance of Black Friday, even if you don’t plan to activate them until closer to the sale.

Whether you’re launching new campaigns or just updating ads in existing ones, getting ahead on structure gives you time to QA creative, troubleshoot disapprovals, and coordinate across teams.

If you’re planning to reuse existing campaigns, you can still stay organized using labels. For example:

• Apply labels to new Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) that include holiday-specific copy or promotions.
• Label sitelinks, callouts, or promo assets that reference Black Friday offers.
• Tag ad groups or asset groups that are tied to limited-time sale messaging.

Using a clear naming convention makes it easier to filter, review, and schedule changes across campaigns without confusion.

If you want to automate this even further, you can create automated rules based on labels.

For example, you can set a rule to enable all ads with your Black Friday label at 12:01 a.m. on November 28. You can also set up rules to pause those same ads at the end of the promotion, reducing the chance that outdated messaging stays live.

You’d also want to create an automated rule to run to pause all non-Black Friday ads at the same time. This ensures that only your promo ads are running during Black Friday season.

If you end up creating Black Friday-specific campaigns, you can easily set start and end dates on them to ensure they only run during the allotted time.

While you don’t have complete scheduling control at the ad or asset level across platforms, you can use a combination of labels, automated rules, or campaign/ad group start and end dates. These give you enough flexibility to manage most scenarios without scrambling the morning of your launch.

If you’re running Meta Ads, be sure to upload your Black Friday creative and audience setups well in advance. Platforms are slower to review and approve ads during peak periods, and early delivery data will help the algorithm optimize once you start increasing budgets.

Give Smart Bidding Better Direction

Most advertisers are using some sort of Smart Bidding for their campaigns, especially around Black Friday. That doesn’t mean you should take a hands-off approach, though.

If you’re using Google Ads, consider seasonality adjustments if you’re planning for a short-term sale or expect a sudden fluctuation in conversion rates. These adjustments tell Google to expect better-than-usual performance during a specific window, and can help avoid underspending during flash sales.

Seasonality adjustments are currently available for these campaign types that use either a Target ROAS or Target CPA bid strategy:

• Search.
• Shopping.
• Display.

If you’re using seasonality adjustments for conversion rates, then you can choose between these campaign types:

• Search.
• Display.
• Shopping.
• Performance Max.
• App (in beta).

That said, they’re not suited for every situation. If you’re running a longer sale or have limited historical volume, the adjustment could cause more volatility than good.

For broader holiday performance, make sure your campaigns have enough data to support Smart Bidding decisions. Review the “Bid Strategy Report” and watch for signs of limited learning or constrained budgets.

Pushing into a critical promo window without stabilized bidding can lead to inefficient spend, especially with newer campaigns.

Check Your Product Feed Before It Becomes A Problem

It’s easy to focus on campaign settings and forget that your product feed is powering everything from standard Shopping campaigns to Performance Max. If it’s not accurate or timely, your best offers might not show up correctly.

In Google Merchant Center, navigate to the Diagnostics tab and resolve any disapprovals or mismatched pricing issues. These often spike around holidays when sale prices don’t sync correctly or out-of-stock products remain active.

Make sure your feed includes items like:

• Up-to-date GTINs and product identifiers.
• Attributes like ‘sale_price’ and ‘sale_price_effective_date’ for promotions.
• High-quality images that meet platform guidelines.
• Clear shipping and availability details.

If you’re running Performance Max campaigns, review the Listing Groups report to ensure your most valuable products are getting served. Many advertisers find that certain SKUs get minimal impressions due to budget spread or structural issues.

This is also a good time to upload holiday-themed creative assets, including lifestyle images and product videos. These can improve performance in placements like YouTube and Discover, which tend to ramp during PMax campaigns in Q4.

The more you control the feed and asset side, the less you have to worry about automation making subpar choices when competition is highest.

Expect Things To Break, And Plan Around That

Black Friday campaigns don’t always go according to plan.

Promo pages fail to update. Budgets cap out early. Tracking drops off mid-day. It’s worth thinking through what could go wrong now, while you still have time to build a backup plan.

Start with some of the basics in campaign planning:

• Double-check conversion actions in Google Ads and Google Analytics 4. Make sure no duplicate events are being counted, and key actions like purchases, add-to-cart, and email sign-ups are being tracked.
• Test final URLs on mobile and desktop. If you’re using promo pages, confirm they’re live and loading quickly. A slow checkout experience during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) will almost always tank performance.
• Pre-schedule creative updates where possible. You don’t want to be manually swapping sitelinks or headlines in the middle of a surge.
• Double-check your automated rules. If you’re using rules to enable sale ads and pausing evergreen ads, make sure to have the platform(s) email you with any changes so you can confirm with confidence the right ads are being shown at the right time.
• Set up alerts for unusual activities. If campaigns showcase a sudden ROAS drop, zero conversions, or unusual spend, you’ll want to be alerted in real-time. Even something as simple as a budget cap hitting before 10 a.m. can throw off the day if it goes unnoticed.

The more you can troubleshoot before launch week, the fewer fires you’ll need to put out when things are moving fast.

Don’t Shut Down Campaigns The Minute Cyber Monday Ends

It’s common for brands to ramp hard through Cyber Monday, then pause everything until January. But, many shoppers are still active well into December, especially those looking for last-minute gifts or deals that weren’t available earlier.

Based on previous personal experience, Google Ads auction data may show that competition could dip after Cyber Monday and shopping intent doesn’t disappear. Conversion rates often stay steady through the first two weeks of December, particularly for brands with fast shipping or digital products.

Rather than winding down completely, consider updating your messaging to reflect the urgency. Swap out “Black Friday” language for “Still Time to Save” or “Guaranteed Delivery Before Christmas.” Countdown ads and shipping deadline assets work well here.

If you’re running remarketing campaigns, exclude recent purchasers and focus on users who visited key pages but didn’t convert. These audiences tend to convert at lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA) during post-Cyber sales, especially if you’ve got gift cards or bundled offers to promote.

December also gives you a chance to build audience pools for Q1. Visitors from BFCM campaigns can be remarketed to in January for loyalty or cross-sell efforts. Just make sure your campaign structure allows for clean audience segmentation.

Planning Ahead Is Still Your Best Defense

Black Friday doesn’t reward last-minute execution. It rewards structure, preparation, and proactive troubleshooting.

The platforms are going to do what they do. Smart Bidding will make the best decisions based on your inputs. Asset groups will mix and match in ways you can’t fully control.

But, what you can control, like budgets, tracking, and product feed health, still has a major impact on your campaign performance.

Getting your campaigns in order early gives you the breathing room to monitor performance, scale what’s working, and catch issues before they snowball.

And when something inevitably breaks or shifts unexpectedly, you’ll already have a plan in place.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Finding The Perfect Balance Between AI And Human Control In Google Ads

Google Ads in 2025 looks nothing like it did in 2019. What used to be a hands-on, keyword-driven platform is now powered by AI and machine learning. From bidding strategies and audience targeting to creative testing and budget allocation, automation runs through everything.

Automation brings a lot to the table: efficiency at scale, smarter bidding, faster launches, and less time spent tweaking settings. For busy advertisers or those managing multiple accounts, it is a game-changer.

But left unchecked, automation backfires. Hand over the keys without guardrails and you risk wasted spend, irrelevant placements, or campaigns chasing the wrong metrics. Automation can execute tasks, but it still lacks an understanding of client goals, market nuances, and broader strategy.

In this article, we’ll explore how to balance AI and human oversight. We’ll look at where automation shines, where it falls short, and how to design a hybrid setup that leverages both scale and strategic control.

Measurement First: Feeding The Machine The Right Signals

Automation learns from the conversions you feed it. When tracking is incomplete, Google fills the gaps with modeled conversions. These estimates are useful for directional reporting, but they do not always match the actual numbers in your customer relationship management (CRM).

Chart by author, September 2025

Conversion lag adds another wrinkle. Google attributes conversions to the click date, not the conversion date, which means lead generation accounts often look like they are underperforming mid-week, even though conversions are still being reported. Adding the “Conversions (by conversion time)” column alongside the standard “Conversions” reveals that lag.
Also, you can build a custom column to compare actual cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS) against your targets. This makes it clear when Smart Bidding is constrained by overly strict settings rather than failing outright.

For CPA, use the formula (Cost / Conversions) – Target CPA. The result tells you how far above or below the goal the campaign is currently hitting. A positive number means you are running over target, often because Smart Bidding is being choked by strict efficiency settings. Smart Bidding may pull back volume and still fail to reach efficiency, or compromise by bringing in conversions above target. A negative number means you are under target, which suggests automation is performing well and may have room to scale.

For ROAS, use the formula (Conv. Value / Cost) – Target ROAS. A negative result shows Smart Bidding is under-delivering on efficiency and not meeting the target. A positive result means you are beating the target, a signal that the system is thriving.

For example, if your Target CPA is $50 and the custom column shows +12, your campaigns are running $12 above goal, typically because the bidding algorithm is adhering too closely to constraints put in by the advertiser. If it shows -8, you are beating the target by $8, which can mean that the system could scale further.

To get real value from automation, connect it to business outcomes, not just clicks or form fills. Optimize toward revenue, profit margin, customer lifetime value, or qualified opportunities in your CRM. Train automation on shallow signals, and it will chase cheap conversions. Train it on metrics that matter to the business, and it will align more closely with growth goals.

Drawing Lanes For Automation

Automation performs best when campaigns have clear lanes. Mix brand and non-brand queries, or new and returning customers, and the system will almost always chase the easiest wins.

That is why human strategy still matters. Search campaigns should own high-intent queries where control of copy and bidding is critical. Performance Max should focus on prospecting and cross-network reach. Without this separation, the auction can route more impressions to PMax, which often pulls volume away from Search. The scale of overlap is hard to ignore. Optmyzr’s analysis revealed that when PMax cannibalized Search keywords, Search campaigns still performed better 28.37% of the time. In cases where PMax and Search overlapped, Search won outright 32.37% of the time.

The same problem arises with brand traffic. PMax leans heavily toward brand queries because they convert cheaply and inflate reported performance. Even with brand exclusions, impressions slip through. If you’re looking for your brand exclusions to be airtight, add branded negative keywords to your campaigns.

Supervising The Machine

Automation does not announce its mistakes. It drifts quietly, and you have to search for the information and read the signals.

Bid strategy reports show which signals Smart Bidding relied on. Seeing remarketing lists or high-value audiences is reassuring. Seeing random in market categories that do not reflect your customer base is a warning that your conversion data is too thin or too noisy.

Google now includes Performance Max search terms in the standard Search Terms report, providing visibility into the actual queries driving clicks and conversions. You can view these within Google Ads and even pull them via API for deeper analysis. With this update, you can now extract performance metrics, including impressions, clicks, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and directly add negative keywords from the report, helping to refine your targeting quickly.

Looking at impression share signals completes the picture. A high Lost IS (budget) means your campaign is simply underfunded. A high lost IS (rank) paired with a low Absolute Top IS usually means your CPA or ROAS targets are too strict, so the system bids too low to win auctions. This tells us that it’s not automation that is failing; it’s automation following the rules you set. The fix is incremental: Loosen targets by 10-15% and reassess after a full learning cycle.

Intervening When Context Changes

Even the best automation struggles when conditions change faster than its learning model can adapt. Smart Bidding optimizes based on historical patterns, so when the context shifts suddenly, the system often misreads the signals.

Take seasonality, for example. During Black Friday, conversion rates spike far above normal, and the algorithm raises bids aggressively to capture that “new normal.” When the sale ends, it can take days or weeks for smart bidding to recalibrate, overvaluing traffic long after the uplift is gone. Or consider tracking errors. If duplicate conversions fire, the system thinks performance has improved and will start to bid more aggressively, spending money on results that don’t even exist.

That is why guardrails, such as seasonality adjustments and data exclusions, exist: they provide the algorithm with a correction in moments when its model would otherwise drift.

Auto Applied Recommendations: Why They Miss The Mark

Auto-applied recommendations are pitched as a way to streamline account management. On paper, they promise efficiency and better hygiene. In practice, they often do more harm than good, broadening match types, adding irrelevant keywords, or switching bid strategies without context.

Google positions them as helpful, but many practitioners disagree. My view is that AARs are not designed to maximize your profitability at the account level. They are designed to keep budgets flowing efficiently across Google’s limited inventory. The safest approach is to turn them off and review recommendations manually. Keep what aligns with your strategy and ignore the rest. My firm belief is that automation should support your work, not overwrite it.

Scripts That Catch What Automation Misses

Scripts remain one of the simplest ways to hold automation accountable.

The official Google Ads Account Anomaly Detector flags when spend, clicks, or conversions swing far outside historical norms, giving you an early warning when automation starts drifting. The updated n-gram script identifies recurring low-quality terms, such as “free” or “jobs,” allowing you to exclude them before Smart Bidding optimizes toward them. And if you want a simple pacing safeguard, Callie Kessler’s custom column shows how daily spend is tracking against your monthly budget, making volatility visible at a glance.

Together, these lightweight scripts and columns act as additional guardrails. They don’t replace automation, but they catch blind spots and force a human check before wasted spend piles up.

Where To Let AI Lead And Where To Step In

Automation performs best when it has clean signals, clear lanes, and enough data to learn from. That is when you can lean in with tROAS, Maximize Conversion Value, or new customer goals and let Smart Bidding handle auction-time complexity.

It struggles when data quality is shaky, when intents are mixed in a single campaign, or when efficiency targets are set unrealistically tight. Those are the moments when human oversight matters most: adding negatives, restructuring campaigns, excluding bad data, or easing targets so the system can compete.

Closing Thoughts

Automation is the operating system of Google Ads. The question is not whether it works; it is whether it is working in your favor. Left alone, it will drift toward easy wins and inflated metrics. Supervised properly, it can scale results no human could ever manage.

The balance is recognizing that automation is powerful, but not self-policing. Feed it clean data, define its lanes, and intervene when context shifts. Do that, and you will turn automation from a liability into an edge.

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