PPCChat | If I were in charge of Google Ads

Posted May 6th, 2026 by Amita & filed under PPCChat.

During this week’s PPCChat session, host Jyll Saskin Gales discussed changes, features and improvements experts like to see in Google Ads this year.

Q1: What features or changes would you like to see around keywords and keyword-less targeting?

Make it clear what’s what and how it works now. @revaminkoff

Google can roll out as many keywordless targeting features as they want, but I’d love for them to offer an “absolute exact” match type that truly is exact match. @Jordanfry

I do wish the naming conventions made a bit more sense. I spend time explaining to clients what ‘exact match’ actually means and how keywords can be matched with queries. @JuliaVyse

@revaminkoff you’d like Google to make it more clear what the various features are and how they actually work now? (I agree – it’s quite a convoluted mess!) @JyllSaskinGales

I’d also like clear, easy to parse rules on negatives. The chocolate milk vs milk chocolate problem is real. @JuliaVyse

as mentioned above, an actual exact match type
Better visibility into search terms
(pie in the sky) option to turn off Close Variants like we used to have @beyondthepaid

upon a star, I wish for: a learning box, where when I add/exclude search terms it can ask why (I know I know, it could be awful without the right guardrails) but I’d love the option to teach the machine how a seemingly close variant actually does not work for us. @JuliaVyse

Keywords can’t be the same because of how LLMs operate – vector embeddings. It’s the reason why some links show up in AI Overviews, and others show up in serp. If we can’t get more positive targeting control, understandably. We would need negative targeting to work much better @alimehdimukadam

@JyllSaskinGales both. It’s the fact that the communication and clear explanations are lacking. @revaminkoff

The announcements from Google seem to be ‘trust us’ and they make a valid point that their signals allow them to see conversion intent even if the terms don’t perfectly match. Agree! But Google isn’t meta. Keywords that should not be matched aren’t always a simple ‘but this person could convert’ question. There are brands to consider, geos, privacy rules that turn off signals. We need at least the option to teach the machine. @JuliaVyse

As long as I can continue to correct Google with negative keywords, I’m comfortable with a keyword-less future. If that get’s taken away, Google Ads becomes a borderline liability for brands to advertise within. Or, perhaps, it becomes Meta, where “targeting” has all but evaporated. @teabeeshell

Could not agree more with @JuliaVyse . This is especially an issue for B2B where there are unique nuances. @beyondthepaid

Make exact match,… well exact match again. That is all. @duanebrown

I know they will never change it, but of course having match types back as they were before. Knowing keywordless is coming very soon, I would hope good targeting via topics or something like that will come about. Maybe even targeting via professions or things like that like LinkedIn has which would be a huge win for someone like Google for B2B stuff. I like Microsoft has some of that targeting in their campaigns. @Ichasse

Q2: What features or changes would you like to see around YouTube ads and Demand Gen campaigns?

I’d love an explanation of why an audience has 0 members. If we’re running YouTube ads and have thousands or hundreds of thousand of views, why is the audience made up of viewers of those videos 0? @beyondthepaid

This is very niche, but I’d like a way to see new YT subscribers due directly to DG that would not have subscribed otherwise. Lets see a subscriber lift study pls!!! @JuliaVyse

Also better category exclusions would be nice, eg games, kids, etc @beyondthepaid

and Demand Gen as a product. Like it’s not YT exactly, but it’s only YT videos, and now it does conversions like PMax, but it’s not PMax, but it’s not just video, but it’s not just display….WTF is it? @JuliaVyse

I would like to see tighter controls around placements. On the one hand, if advertisers simply cherry picked their favorite channels, prices would skyrocket. We don’t want that advertiser/brand subjectivity negatively influencing auctions. On the other, it’s extremely frustrating for brands and advertisers to opt in/out of certain “categories” of content, only to continue showing up against children channels, food blogger in India (for US-based campaigns), mobile apps (when undesired), etc…all because Google needs to monetize the attention on those outlets. There is a huge mismatch today. @teabeeshell

Pretty happy with Demand Gen but better reporting, something like the PMAx Channel report but for Demand Gen would be nice. Targeting and settings on YouTube campaigns have changed a lot. I just hope Google doesn’t decide one day to get rid of YouTube only campaigns as an option. With how big YouTube is, I wish you could target youtube channels or get way more granular with who see’s your video ads. @duanebrown

Oh and you know what? DG Lookalikes can’t be reused in search or pmax. I want to build consideration, let me make an LAL. @JuliaVyse

ES – bring back lookalikes! @beyondthepaid

@JuliaVyse, sadly, Lookalikes are dead now, even in DG. They are only treated as “signals” even if Optimized targeting isn’t turned on @JyllSaskinGales

but my wishes…my wishes! @JuliaVyse

Demand Gen has been amazing! The default auto creation of video assets – can get tricky & default outputs have been subpar. If someone wants to utilize only image assets – they should be able to do so. @alimehdimukadam

Q3: What features or changes would you like to see around bidding and budgets?

Okay, this is like, deeply unlikely, but I’d love a monthly target budget I can load in. it really helps against manual pacing @JuliaVyse

Not a fan of the ad scheduling pacing changes, but we’ll adapt. Wish list? Max CPC caps for all bid strategies @beyondthepaid

@JuliaVyse Yes, please. Account level, we have been able to. campaign level is always put an end date – surprisingly Google ends up spending. @alimehdimukadam

I would have said what @JuliaVyse and @beyondthepaid said, so just add me as a x2 to those. @Ichasse

Missing Enhanced CPC….@alimehdimukadam

this will sound like a song I’ve sung before, but: use all your data, and signals, and smarts, and math, and what have you, to support long-cycle conversions. Campaigns can’t all get 30 conv in 30 days, and for B2B and other low conv campaigns, please just make a product? Haven’t tried total budget yet, but excited to try it against some upcoming promos @JuliaVyse

Offline conversion imports is the only solution to solving that @alimehdimukadam

Some ideas: @teabeeshell

Put a graduating/step-wise spend cap on campaigns over time. There are many instances where a budget increase, bid type change, or individual bid change results in massive spikes in spend. This is not conducive to advertisers/brands maintaining trust in the system, and it can be damaging to performance.
Create open auctions. I suppose I don’t understand enough about the merits of closed, second-price auctions, but if I knew that X and Y brands are willing to bid Z, I can have conversations with my brand(s) to determine where our bid should lie. The constant guess and check game is infuriating at times.
Allow for ad groups spend limits/caps. There are times when the fluidity of spend, within a campaign across ad groups, is detrimental. Google wants consolidation, but there are factors like inventory limitations that conflict. The only outlet is to fragment into separate campaigns to guarantee certain splits in spend.

@alimehdimukadam but my wishes…my wishes @JuliaVyse

Wish we could remove the 200% above your daily budget because not all brands can afford that. @duanebrown

ad group spend caps would change my whole life. yeah, the avg monthly is a broad rule that can raise all heck for 6wk long campaigns @JuliaVyse

Huge second to @JuliaVyse comment about long sales cycles. Fine if you can’t look back more than 90 days (although, come on), but please understand that B2B cycles are rarely if ever that short @beyondthepaid

Q4: What features or changes would you like to see around Performance Max?

For me being able to exclude certain things like Gmail, Display, etc… if you wanted would be awesome. There are some brands where I want everything and there are some where I would prefer just to have shopping/search due to budgets or results. In leu of that, being able to put limits on spend for each would also be really nice. @Ichasse

If Demand Gen can have placement opt-outs (Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover), so too can PMax. I hold the opinion that anyone still advocating for display advertising today has some ulterior motive/incentive to do so. Many studies show this inventory to be poor, ignored, etc. I want to be able to opt out of it. Or…Google, create a better product/ecosystem. I’d opt into Gmail too, if it generated meaningful performance for a brand. View-through conversions are not enough, given how poor average inventory quality remains. @teabeeshell

I would say ability to exclude channels, but then.. what’s the point of PMAX? @Jordanfry

Also, I think that PMax still is on the roadmap to replace Standard Shopping. The recent addition of AI Max (text-based ads) to Shopping…is appalling. The ultimate goal is to merge products into a centralized few, and advertiser controls will be reduced as a result. PMax is the horse Google is riding on that front. @teabeeshell

Still advantages of it if you wanted to just exclude say Discovery or something IMO. I do get what you are saying though. If you have the budget getting the additional exposure can be helpful, but some brands have pretty small budgets or they have pretty tough ROAS goals to hit, so you have to limit yourself to just the high converting channels. I am also considering Google will eliminate some of the traditional forms of campaigns in the future, so we may not have the option to just run shopping campaigns and then separate remarketing campaigns, etc…@Ichasse

Yup, it’s all converging to one unified Max campaign with shopping being the exception but with AI Mode that separation has faded. Still sometime to go. @alimehdimukadam

We are getting closer to the days of setup billing and give me a url and you are done. @Ichasse

@Ichasse That’s where DG is superior to PMax – The flexibility of inventory type control. Also, perhaps yours was just a random hypothetical, but never never exclude Discover… it’s the highest-quality, highest-impact inventory type outside of YouTube. @teabeeshell

@Ichasse we already have that with smart campaigns 😉 @alimehdimukadam

Oh, I was just giving an example. @Ichasse

I think an incremental focused bidding strategy for pmax would be useful. similar to meta’s incremental attribution @Jordanfry

Not exactly pmax, but for store visit purposes, just give me Waze options pls. either in it’s own campaign, via the team again, or as a channel. @JuliaVyse

I think pMAX needs a rebrand. Personally, I still have certain negative associations with it given how the initial roll out was. There’s some hesitation when you hear pMAX that is subconscious. @alimehdimukadam

@alimehdimukadam it does deserve a better name @JuliaVyse

I was at Google and part of the focus group when the product team was coming up with the name. i take partial blame for the naming @Jordanfry

Q5: What features or changes would you like to see around measurement?

We need better troubleshooting support for offline conversion issues. Current support is inadequate and their work hours are 1 am to 8 am EDT which is unacceptable. I do like that Google has so many connectors – sure beats what Bing offers. And the built-in troubleshooting is also super helpful. @beyondthepaid

More server-side default options – that needs to be made more prominent. I recently audited an account for a brand – SaaS company spending $60-70k a month but no S2S, and it’s not that difficult. And make it easier for small businesses to set it up if they want to use GCP @alimehdimukadam

Cloudflare Zaraz has been the best option so far and it has a one-click setup with Google Tag @alimehdimukadam

I wish Google would allow for 3rd party measurement to filter in. We (have to) allow Google to grade its own homework… And yet, external products, e.g. Northbeam, are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their own measurement, especially cross-channel. Allow that data to flow back in, and therefore, campaigns can optimize against it. @teabeeshell

Come on Store Visits!!! cracks knuckles, here we go: incremental store lift measurement for pDOOH. See if screens nearby get my customers. Let’s improve those polygons too so locations on various floors can be tracked more easily. and Store Visit Reporting at the creative level. Do my virtual try ons do what they need to do? Always on incrementality could be good, basically: take all the dollars and brains dumped into ecom, and make brick and mortar super addressable. …why yes, I do have restaurant brands through my office, no, ecom is not the same for burgers. @JuliaVyse

More diy on conversions, tracking and measurement. As in diy that a normal person could reasonably do. Too many things need developers now. @revaminkoff

putting 3 emojis on @revaminkoff comment because it’s SO TRUE. We get stymied by this all the time because clients don’t have dev resources and our dev resources are very limited and not always scoped (which is partly our problem but still) @beyondthepaid

@beyondthepaid 100%. And honest, SMBs/local businesses should be able to get set up to run effectively on Google without needing to hire a developer to do it, leaving aside the bigger fish etc. @revaminkoff

Q6: What features or changes would you like to see around agentic AI?

So rude: Chat with your data in datastudio is ONLY a cloud product. reps can’t help. ugh.@JuliaVyse

Gather context before recommending. That’s the baseline for anything AI + agentic @alimehdimukadam

hey, maybe look at campaign settings before suggesting words and images from the US to Canada, or literally any other market. @JuliaVyse

I guess..for one thing…work… For now, it’s ignored by me as I constantly get messages like this within Google Ads, in the right-hand panel, when editing ads. This screen shot is from within a beach chair company’s account. There is 100% zero issue with the URL.@teabeeshell

It really has a lot of potential if done right – you get context from the landing pages, you have trends and search in it, can recommend ideas, compare with benchmarks, do all of the things it has the potential to which is not increase budget by 5x @alimehdimukadam

@alimehdimukadam Where do you interact with it most? How is this not omni-present at this point? @teabeeshell

You know what? Agentic in the PLANNING area would be amazeballs. Way more helpful than in the build area. @JuliaVyse

@teabeeshell I don’t interact with it but I do interact with Gemini. So easier to extrapolate knowing what Gemini can do and compare it with ads advisor – ads advisor feels like bard. Yup – Planning, Reporting, even some automations and help with scripts or scheduled tasks – something like that @alimehdimukadam

Like use my conversions, saved audiences, past campaigns, keywords, landing page, and reach plans and propose something very cool! @JuliaVyse

Someday soon but that day all agency owners and ppc professionals will be the first to feel roles collapsing – assuming that’s why there is a slow rollout of these features….coz the ecosystem will disrupt faster ultimately impacting Google itself @alimehdimukadam

AI troubleshooting help in accounts would be great. Otherwise, in general I’m not a fan @beyondthepaid

I hadn’t seen the google support chat as an option in months, but the other day using the AI agent, when it so clearly couldnt help me, it offered to connect me with live chat support. took that as a win! @Janinemonico

A big improvement would be if they gave us an official MCP that had deep roots into all aspects of the campaigns so they could both read and write to campaigns. I had an absurd conversation with Ads Advisor just yesterday where it showed how inept it is. I hope they know it needs improvement…and I wouldn’t mind if it could also write to campaigns with permission. @EronCohen

PPCChat Participants