Advertising on Google has become a somewhat abusive relationship. The platform continues to take away control, while gaslighting you into believing it’s for your own good.
Today’s example, Final URL expansion.
It’s purported intent is to “optimize”. This word has been bandied about as a general catch-all at this point to mean “give us more control of your targeting so we can use it to advertise and spend more on ads”. It’s essentially carte blanche for them.
Quick primer:
- Performance max has a shopping campaign component to it that automatically advertises SKUs you might have on your site. This ad sits at the top of the SERP - like so:
- Typically, you’d want to have control over what products you want to promote. Maybe you have low margin bundle builders that could never turn a profit on their own and thus would make no sense advertising. You control that by telling performance max which products you want to include in the campaign.
Except there’s a vaguely worded setting that if you leave on, will obliterate this control.
This little seemingly innocuous checkbox screws this all up. Instead, you’re now telling the campaign “yeah sure, push whatever you’d like”.
Problem is, this messes up your campaign categorization and also starts pushing random parts of the site - wasting you money and creating overlap between campaigns.
Turn this off, and your campaigns will stay within the targeting you set it up with and you’ll have more control over what your dollars are spent pushing.
Share this with your Google Ads managers.
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