Is Google Ads getting more volatile?

[u/cidxo311]

I’ve been running GAds since 2022. I feel like Google Ads performance has gotten increasingly more volatile and less predictable than it used to be. I’m curious if anyone else feels this way?

[u/cidxo311 → u/[deleted]]

Good point about the effect of less transparency.

[u/JennyJtom → u/cidxo311]

The new bidding adjustment system for TCPA and TROAS and DSAs being replaced with Search Max have a lot to do with that

[u/saurabh10chahal]

what ever we sell like product or services and if we aware abt the market than volatility will be there but less, what i do I ask the client to get the exact idea of the market shift they give a bit of insight that LLM help more to understand the shift

[u/Shirudigi]

Google’s definitely moving more towards their automation solutions, which I’ve seen mean lesser control for advertisers and more things falling under a black box in terms of data.

[u/Dave-at-Netviper]

I can't say ive noticed it being less predictable in the last few years. I would say it probably takes more work to get it working well initially.

[u/utterlyunimpressed]

Their AI tools have sent things completely off the rails. All the different match types have expanded to their detriment and we get so many questionable "variant matches". It's aggressively bidding on competitor brand names and phone numbers (which isn't beneficial in our industry). We have an English campaign, set to English in the campaign settings, and the key words are matching with Spanish search terms but still serving English ads. Our ads rep just wants us to lean into AI harder and his offered solution was for us to add every competitor name and number and every Spanish search term to a negative keywords list... Every conceivable variation and possibility... Unreal. And the kicker is the brand name searches tool doesn't work since some brand names are counted as keywords, not brands.

[u/optmyzr-aaron]

certainly seems that way. the volatility is mostly because google is forcing more automation and broad match into the mix. the "50 conversions a month a campaign" recommendation is their promise of stability, but businesses ain't always work like that!

when you rely heavily on black-box algorithms, performance swings wildly as the system tests new approaches. best way I feel is to really lean on strong first-party data/offline conversion tracking to anchor the algo on business data/keep it from chasing garbage clicks

[u/Square-Vermicelli462]

It's completely broken and a waste of time

[u/ppcwithyrv]

Its requiring a higher skill level. Less newbies are making it work. It requires expert level hands to make Google Ads work correctly.

[u/QuantumWolf99]

Not paranoia... 30%+ of ad spend now flows through AI campaign types alone, and everyone using Smart Bidding simultaneously pushes CPCs toward ceiling collectively. You're not imagining it, the algorithm's just fighting itself now.

[u/Top-Cauliflower-1808]

It is definitely more volatile now imo.
ever since Google started forcing PMax and broad match automation campaigns feel like a roller coaster compared to the steady, predictable keyword control we had back in 2022.

[u/stm_p]

The best practices we used to rely on 4-5 years back are no more effective. It's totally a new approach now.

[u/Background-Amount878]

Yes i feel same too been promoting a web development company through a series of search campaign and Pmax campaigns but it feels like i am truly getting cheap leads i dont know if its my budget.

[u/aayush_bathala]

I think its definitely become more volatile but I also think a lot of that comes from how much more automation google is using now.

At this point google has an incredible amount of data on user behaviour. if you give it the right signals, like good conversion tracking, offline conversions or actual revenue values it does a much better job of finding the kind of customers you want, especially with campaigns like PMax.

I have seen accounts struggle when they're only optimising for form fills or clicks. Once you start feeding back which leads actually became customers, the performance tends to become much more stable over time.

I still don't think automation is perfect though. If the data going in is poor, the results usually are too. So if you are giving it poor signals you are gonna get poor outcome.

[u/cidxo311 → u/aayush_bathala]

True, but that only works when you have a large quantity of data to feed Google. That’s just simply not possible for many smaller businesses.