Google Ads Adds Automatically Created Assets & Loses Some Location Targeting Settings

Google Ads now supports automatically created assets, and the new customer acquisition goal is fully live. But also, in March, the “Search Interest” targeting and “Presence or Interest” exclusion will no longer be available in Google Ads.

Google Ads has now rolled out to all English advertisers the ability to use automatically created assets as an open beta. When opted in to automatically created assets, Google Ads will automatically created assets based on your inputs such as assets and keywords in the ad group and your landing page content. This will be based on when they are predicted to improve the relevancy to the query and performance of your ad, Google said.

Google said, “as part of this update, the following improvements will roll out in the coming weeks.”

• Ad Strength will take into account both automatically created assets and your existing assets when determining your rating.
• Automatically created assets will use inputs you’ve provided such as your keywords to customize your headlines and improve their relevance to the query when it’s predicted to improve performance.
• You will also be able to remove any automatically created assets that you’d prefer not to include in your ads.
• Google plans on rolling out automatically created assets in additional languages later this year.

Also, the new customer acquisition goal is now fully rolled out for Google Ads Search campaigns. With the new customer acquisition goal for Search campaigns, you can either optimize a campaign to bid higher for new customers or optimize to bid exclusively for new customers. The new customer acquisition goal enables you to acquire new customers through your Google Ads campaigns efficiently. You can either optimize the campaign to bid higher for new customers or optimize the campaign to bid for new customers only exclusively.

New customer acquisition offers 2 modes to support these goals:

• Bid higher for new customers than for existing customers (New Customer Value mode): Add additional new customer acquisition value for a customer’s first purchase conversion value. This is the recommended mode because this lets you maximize revenue across all customers but also drive more new customers to your business within a single campaign.
• Only bid for new customers (New Customer Only mode): Limit ads to only customers who are new to your business (as determined based on historical purchases and existing customer lists you have uploaded in Google Ads). We recommend this option only if you have dedicated acquisition-focused budgets or if you are running a non-purchase conversion-focused campaign, for example, lead-gen.

Then, starting in March 2023, “Search Interest” targeting and “Presence or Interest” exclusion will no longer be available in Google Ads. “Google is making this change to simplify the location targeting portfolio and to improve your ad performance,” the company said.

Campaigns that use “Search Interest” targeting will be migrated to “Presence or Interest” targeting, while campaigns that use “Presence or Interest” exclusion will be migrated to “Presence” exclusion. These changes will be consistent across Search, Display, Performance Max, and Shopping campaigns. You may experience an increase in reach after these changes go into effect, and we encourage you to monitor performance.

Here is what Ginny said about this:

In target settings, we’ll remove the “Search interest: People searching for your target locations” option, which had very low adoption. You’ll still be able to target “Presence or interest” or “Presence”.

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) February 27, 2023

This update comes after a testing period & interviews with dozens of advertisers and agencies of varying sizes across a range of verticals to understand current usage & performance impact. The changes will align location targeting settings across campaign types.

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) February 27, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.