Google is asking for your trust - Are you freely giving it

Paid search is dead, long live Performance Max and trusting the machine.

It’s been quite an interesting few years in Google Ads, how things have changed!

Exact Match heavy campaigns, beautifully crafted in Excel, are falling by the wayside as the all powerful AI, combined with Performance Max, conquers all before it - with a surprising cameo from a new more powerful Broad match (I never thought I would even consider diving back in for that sequel) adding to the plot twists.

As we lose manual control, (oh how I miss proper Search Term performance reports, I even want Average Position back, and if I could only see what crazy websites my display through Performance Max was showing on, happier I would be) the equation we are dealing with is fundamentally:

Give up control - Gain performance.

Right?

There’s more to it though. To give up control, you need to trust where that control is going. Google is asking you to do the following:

TRUST - GA4 data driven attribution

TRUST - Audiences as a signal, not a limiter

TRUST - Sharing your 1st Party Audiences

TRUST - PMax will spend to meet and exceed your targets (not meet your targets then waste the rest of the spend).

and if you are clinically insane

TRUST - Google to add all sorts of automatic adjustments to your campaigns - landing pages, product, extensions, ad text etc etc

Now why does this matter?

Well Google probably does want to drive the best performance possible from Google Ads spend in the long term. Good performance means you will spend more.

To get the best performance you need to trust Google and do things like Data Driven Attribution and provide 1st Party audience data. you also need to trust the results (of course you can see your bottom line, but you need to trust that this is being driven by the Ad Spend, not incorrectly attributed).

But Google has a trust issue. Beyond our natural scepticism of trusting one of the worlds biggest companies, there have also been lots of scandals bubbling away (manipulating the auction anyone?).

If Google wants to really nail this, drive even more performance for advertisers, and therefore open up even more ad spends coming into Google Ads, it needs our trust. Remember when Google was almost seen like a charity or The Good Guys - it feels a long time ago now to many. Will we see a return to the days of “Don’t be Evil?”. What happens if there is a lack of trust, and more choice (Monopoly allegaitons are growing what feels like a bit of a head of steam)?

Any thoughts?