Balance is key, Kruger said, where strategic controls are combined with automation to drive significant business growth. In his experience, automation has consistently delivered the best performance outcomes.
Unsurprisingly, Higman’s stance is “1,000% control”:
“Google is pushing everybody into automation, which, again, it does have its use cases. I’m not saying that it does not, but we need to keep control to keep results.”
“I think that as privacy legislation meets automation, there’s gonna be a lot of problems down the road as there’s less data that can be fed to the the automation because of privacy legislation, things are gonna get wonky.”
“I also think from an agency perspective, control is extremely important. Client’s don’t want these weird things that are gonna happen with automation that bring in different kind of things that they’re really not going after.”
Higman is concerned that automation, with its lack of transparency, could lead to undesirable outcomes and urges others to resist the push toward automated systems that reduce control.
RSA (Responsive Search Ads) strategy
Maximizes all the headlines and descriptions that RSA’s have to offer, Kruger said:
“I completely max them out: 15 headlines, 5 descriptions, 20 images, all extensions, etc.
“I have seen first-hand that creative is targeting. You could have two different ad groups with the same keywords in it and if you change the assets in one of the RSAs to better match that keyword, the search terms that match to that ad group will move to the one that’s more relevant.
“Formats are completely gonna change. And by having a diverse set of assets in an RSA, you can increase your chances of landing different placements that those with an ETA definitely could not get into.”
As search engine results pages (SERPs) evolve, having a diverse set of assets in RSAs increases the chances of securing different placements, something expanded text ads (ETAs) cannot achieve, according to Kruger.
But Higman is not a fan of RSAs. He said:
“I think that the best RSA strategy is not RSAs. We still have accounts that have expanded text ads in them, and they outperform RSAs by miles every time, and they get all of the conversions.
“My RSA strategy is to keep RSAs as close to ETAs as possible.
“So we will only provide the minimum required headlines and descriptions, and we will pin those into place exactly where we want them based on past performance on expanded text ads.”
While Higman acknowledged the potential of RSAs to match headlines and descriptions to searches, that hasn’t been his experience. Overall, he has found that ETAs still significantly outperform RSAs.
Both experts agreed that ad strength scores may not be indicative of performance.
Nuanced perspectives
It should be noted that with each point each expert conceded that their “opponent” made valid points:
Higman conceded that automated solutions could benefit larger advertisers aiming for broad reach.
Kruger suggested that control-focused strategies might be more suitable for businesses with limited capacity to handle high lead volumes
The debate highlighted the ongoing tension in the PPC community between embracing Google’s automation push and maintaining granular control over campaigns.
The key takeaway is that while Google is clearly moving toward more automated solutions, the best approach depends on an advertiser’s specific goals, budget and capacity for growth.
Watch: The great debate: Should you hack or adopt Google Ads features?
You can watch the full session from SMX Advanced here: