Well, Google would tell you that you approved months ago when they snuck an email to you telling you they were going to do this unless you opted out. If you accepted because you didn’t read closely, thinking it was just another update to their policy or something similar, or if you never even opened the email to opt-out, you may be at risk.  We are already hearing horror stories of Google making campaign changes (that don’t show up in your change history) that can do major damage to your campaign performance, typically in favor of paying Google more money for less success. If you want the gritty details, you can learn more here at Search Engine Land, but if you want the basics and where to go to change your settings, please just see below.

Where Do I Go to See What Google Has Changed to My Google Ads Campaign?

So the big question is obviously “How do I know what Google has done to my campaigns so I can fix them?”. Since the changes don’t show up in your change history but can have a pretty significant effect on your campaign performance, as you may have seen in the Search Engine Land article above, it is important to know what they did and check on the data. Of course, it may be worthwhile to look at your data and see if it helped. Google would say they are helping, so it is possible that they did, though I would lean toward unlikely. Most of their suggestions and rule adjustments tend to be to spend more money on less specific and targeted options.

So if you want to go see what has happened to your account, make sure you are logged into the account that controls your campaigns, and go here.  This will outline the change history and you can also see if your account is set up to allow these automatic adjustments and turn it off if you’d like. I would recommend turning off, though I’m sure there are some that have success with letting Google steer the ship.

Another Step Toward Removing Control of Our Advertising Spend

Add this to changes in definitions of keyword matching that remove control by the advertiser and we are creeping more and more to Google deciding how we pay them for advertising.  The slippery slope continues and it is more important than ever to work with someone that is up to date on the latest Google rules, definitions, and tactics, to keep you from wasting a lot of your precious ad spend.