Hey friends, in today's email we will be discussing:

Don't make daily ad changes: Why you don't want to make daily changes to your campaigns.

Google's cookie pivot: Google changed its mind on a cookieless Chrome browser.

Stop the Over-Optimization: Why Daily Changes Hurt Your Google Ads

Today I wanted to share something that I’ve seen many digital marketers do: make everyday changes to their Google Ads campaigns. When you’re just starting as a digital marketer you might think that this is normal. This is something that a lot of people do when they say that they work in digital marketing. Making daily changes hurts your campaigns and here is why you shouldn’t do this.

We’ve all been there, you look at the results of the past day and feel the need to make changes. Maybe you even have a manager who tells you that things need to improve and they ask you to make changes to your Google Ads campaigns. Great, you have just the idea. You go into the campaigns and increase or decrease the TROAS of the campaigns and wait another day to see the first initial results. The next day you don’t see an improvement, so you’ll make more changes. Your manager also isn’t impressed, so you make more changes.

Before you know it, you’re talking about the sales performance of the last day. As long as you’re not working with millions of dollars per month, you’ll probably be better off by not making too many changes.

Making changes to your campaigns daily will result in your campaign going into the learning phase and never coming out of it. The algorithms that these platforms like Google have, need a consistent flow of data. When you make everyday changes, the algorithm will never move from the learning phase to the normal phase. This would come down to an increase in cost, but not the increase in sales that you are looking for.

“But how do I then optimize my campaigns!”, is a good question! First of all, even when we didn’t have these algorithms, it was never a good idea to make daily changes. The reason for this was that you’d need enough data to determine if the changes had the expected effect. Before Google’s algorithms, I allowed myself up to 2 changes a week (with a big budget). This meant that I then had a couple of days of data to determine if my changes worked.

Instead of looking and reacting to the sales from the last day, try to determine if you see a change over a longer period. Sometimes you have 1 day in sales that are lower than all the other days. This doesn’t mean your campaigns weren’t effective, it just means that fewer people bought on that specific day.

Based on a bigger dataset, you’ll be able to make decisions. This doesn’t mean that you can’t try and figure out why the sales dropped on this specific day. It could be that something broke in your campaigns or on the website. So don’t feel that you can just disregard a drop in sales. But when there is nothing out of the ordinary, don’t make any changes. Just let the campaigns do their thing. Instead of focusing on your campaigns, it would be time to communicate the trends to your manager.

In the end, the goal is to be effective every day, but some days are worse than others. Communicate openly with your manager what you’ve seen in the data and make changes if needed.

ps. If you make big changes to your TROAS or budgets in Google Ads, you might trigger the campaign going back into learning. When I make a change, I try not to increase/decrease my budgets or targets by more than 15%. This would keep your campaign as efficient as possible.

Google's Pivot: Third-Party Cookies to Stay in Chrome, What It Means for Advertisers

Remember when iOS 14 was announced and third-party cookies were disappearing from Safari? That moment when Google announced that they were going to kill third-party cookies in their browser (Chrome) as well?

It was the time when every single CMO, marketing director and manager was talking about the ‘cookieless future’. It was a time when everyone was talking about this phenomenon, but no one knew what this future was going to look like. Both Meta Ads and Google Ads introduced their way of measuring conversions using first-party data (to make sure your tracking didn’t break).

Well, a couple of weeks ago Google announced that they will not be killing third-party cookies in Chrome. Instead, they will give users more control through the Chrome settings.

For advertisers, this is great news because the cookieless future might not come anytime soon. We can still measure all of our campaigns without being afraid of losing tracking.

For Google, this also makes sense, as they make money with their ads. If advertisers are less accurate with their ads there is a big chance that their spend on Google will decrease.

But for the users, this ain’t great. These settings will probably not prompt when you launch Chrome, they will be somewhere in your settings. By doing this Google can still say that people can choose for more privacy, but they have to know where to find it.

It’s an interesting development that will continue over the next few months or even years. Want to know more about this, have a look at Search Engine Land.

Podcast episode(s) you'd love

• ​Think Fast, Talk Smart: Listen Up, Leaders: A Record-Setting Coach’s Guide to Communication. In this episode, former NCAA basketball coach Tara VanDerveer shares her insights on leadership and communication. She emphasizes the importance of listening and collaboration over dictating orders.

Found any interesting articles? Please share them with me, as I am always interested in learning something new.

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