Google Ads Roundup & Industry News Feb 2023

Gonzalez Vs Google

It’s been an interesting month for Google, with the Gonzalez Vs Google trial coming to a head. The case focused on the ability of social media platforms such as YouTube to influence criminal behaviour, specifically terrorist attacks, following the death of Nohemi Gonzalez at the hands of Islamic State extremists in Paris.

The case centres on Section 230 of the Communications Act, which provides broad immunity for social media companies against prosecution for the actions of individuals using their services. The plaintiffs in the case argue that YouTube is responsible for content creation, and therefore can be held responsible. The outcome of this case, and a similar lawsuit involving Twitter, could have implications for social media companies, who could become liable for content posted by individuals and groups. It remains unclear where the justices stand on the central issues, but they seemed to be struggling to draw a line that encourages responsible practices without fundamentally changing how the internet works.

Location Targeting

Google are making a few changes to simplify location targeting. Gone, will be the days of checking that you haven’t accidentally clicked “people interested in” my location, as this option will be disappearing in the realisation that it hasn’t added value to advertisers. This was the result of testing and interviews with dozens of agencies of varying sizes.

Automatically Created Assets

If you opt in to this new feature, automatically created assets will use your keywords and assets in the ad group and landing page content to improve the relevancy of the query and performance of your ad. At Lomax PPC, we are dubious of this feature and are likely to be cautiously testing it, whilst maintaining our policy of human eyes on everything for the majority of our accounts.

Customer Acquisition For Search

You will now be able to set your Search Campaigns to optimise to bid higher for new customers or exclusively bid on new customers only.

Performance Max Updates

This month saw the announcement of new features for Performance Max including campaign level brand exclusions which will include misspellings & searches in a foreign language. We should also be getting page feed support to direct Search traffic to a specific set of landing pages, giving more control over the campaign. Asset group level reporting will be added to the platform, although at Lomax PPC, we have already been able to extract that information through the use of scripts.