Insider strategies to navigate changes like a pro

When the rules change, smart players adjust their strategy.

Google Ads has changed a lot since it first launched. But shifting PPC strategies isn’t always easy.

What happens if the rules change and you don’t know about it? Or you’re too confused by the new rules to take decisive action?

Here’s how to adapt to changes in Google Ads while keeping your competitive edge and sanity.

Google Ads stacks the deck in its own favor

Google Ads constantly makes changes to increase its revenue. If there were a Serenity principle for advertisers, it might be:

“Grant me the clarity to accept the Google Ads changes I can’t control,
the knowledge to push back on the ones I can,
and the insight to recognize when I’m being manipulated.”

Here are the three main types of changes you’ll see with Google Ads and how to outsmart the platform at each step.

1. Forced adoption: You don’t have a choice

With forced adoption, there’s no workaround or way to opt out. Google makes changes, and advertisers are forced to adapt.

Take search term visibility. Advertisers once had access to 100% of their search term data. 

Now? In the campaign below, 90% of clicks are hidden under Other search terms. 

There’s no setting to change this. You’re paying for the clicks, but you don’t get to see where they came from.

The recently announced “asset flexibility” change would also fall in this category. 

Don’t want your unpinned headlines to be used as sitelinks or your description lines to vanish entirely? Too bad! 

What can you do?

When you can’t fight the change, you must change how you play. 

For example, CTR isn’t what it used to be. 

When Google Ads were limited to three on the right rail, competing for clicks was a different game. 

Today, an ad can dominate the entire above-the-fold space. 

If you’re still using CTR as a primary KPI, you may be optimizing for a world that no longer exists.

Dig deeper: Google Ads optimization: What to stop, start, and continue in 2025

2. Persuasion tactics: Opting out feels like a mistake

With persuasion tactics, you control how you respond to platform changes, but Google makes saying no feel like a mistake. 

The platform is designed to nudge, pressure, and gamify decisions in Google’s favor.

You’ve seen it before:

• Interface nudges pushing you toward automation and expanded targeting.
• Warning alerts implying your campaign is failing without Google’s recommended action.
• Language framing that sells changes as “upgrades” or “best practices” to make them seem like the only smart choice.

Then there’s gamification. 

Ad Strength and Optimization Scores tap into your instinct to “fix” low numbers, even when it doesn’t help performance. 

Google Ads reps are often incentivized to push automation adoption over actual results.

What can you do?

Persuasion tactics work because they shift responsibility onto you. 

If you choose to make a change, you’re less likely to push back when it doesn’t work. But that choice was never as independent as it seemed.

Outsmart these tactics by:

• Ignoring false urgency: Just because an alert appears doesn’t mean something is wrong.
• Slowing down your decisions: Is this good for my account or just for Google?
• Second-guessing Google reps: Many are incentivized to push automation, not to improve your performance.

The more aware you are, the more confident you can be in making decisions that serve your business, not Google’s.

Dig deeper: Google Ads best practices: The good, the bad and the balancing act

3. Deceptive patterns: The real choices are hidden

Deceptive patterns in Google Ads rely on unexpected defaults, buried settings, and misleading options that quietly steer you into decisions you wouldn’t make if the choice were obvious. 

With these changes, you never notice the choice in the first place, and your budget gets wasted without you ever realizing it.

The challenge with deceptive patterns is that you don’t know what you don’t know. 

However, the more familiar you are with Google’s interface and the ways it quietly reshapes your choices, the better equipped you are to take back control.

What can you do?

• Check the defaults: Many settings automatically enroll you in things you wouldn’t knowingly choose, like broad match expansion or automated asset placements.
• Explore the interface: Google regularly moves or renames settings, making it harder to find what you can control. Take time to see what’s changed.
• Ask questions: Your coworkers, industry forums, and fellow marketers have likely already spotted things you weren’t aware of.
• Grab the PDF: Your 22-page companion guide to this SMX session – covering the most common deceptive defaults and where to find them.

Dig deeper: Top Google Ads recommendations you should always ignore, use, or evaluate

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Make sense of complex updates and announcements

If you’re anything like me, your day is a constant stream of Google alerts, updates, and notifications.

Someone’s breaking news on LinkedIn. An email from Google insists on immediate action. A story in your feed begs to be unpacked and interpreted

Even if you went on a news diet, you’d still have to deal with the fact that what worked for your Google Ads account last year might not work for you this year.

What’s frustrating about updates isn’t just the pace and frequency; it can also be hard to even know what they’re talking about. 

Say there’s a new campaign type called “Enhanced Max Select for Conversions” that claims to reach new customers at the right moment with the right message.

You read the email and follow the links to the press release and blog post, but you’re still left wondering:

• What action, if any, do I need to take?
• What happens if I don’t take action?
• How will this affect my results?
• What hidden agendas might be driving this change?
• What do clients and leadership teams care about?

You can’t find answers to your basic questions, and you’re stuck wondering how to move forward.

To help you combat this analysis paralysis, I created a custom GPT.

Meet Nora, the Paid Search Decoder. Nora helps you break down announcements, so you actually know what action to take.

Let’s see Nora in action with this Google Ads announcement, “New features and controls for your AI-powered campaigns.” 

In it, you’ll find the vaguest of headlines like “Media management, your way.”

If you ask regular ChatGPT, “What actions can I take from this update?” you’ll get a pile of non-actionable babble. 

Things like “leverage AI” and “enhance brand control.”

Now, let’s ask Nora the same question, “What actions can I take from this update?”

Nora gives you a clear breakdown of what’s immediately available and what’s rolling out later. 

The usual cautions apply. Always verify sources and be on the lookout for AI hallucinations. 

But with Nora, along with other trusted sources, you can make sense of new rollouts faster and actually know what to do next.

Dig deeper: How to tank your Google Ads account in 10 days

Stay focused: Let your account goals drive your decisions

In any paid search discussion, the same questions always come up: 

• “What’s the best bidding strategy?” 
• “How many keywords should be in an ad group?”

These aren’t bad questions, but they’re starting in the wrong place. 

Great marketing doesn’t come from chasing tactics. And it definitely doesn’t come from chasing every new Google Ads feature.

If you want to outsmart Google Ads, get strategic. 

Instead of starting with which tactics to use, start with your goals. 

Ask:

• “What does my account need?” 
• “How do I get it?” 

Then, choose the tactics that support your strategy.

I’ll show you what I mean.

Here’s a campaign where CPCs were creeping up, CPA was at an all-time high, and the agency had made 51 budget changes in just eight months.

When we took over, we defined clear goals and then built a strategy to match. 

Objectives

• Keep CPL low.
• Increase conversions and conversion rate.
• Reduce budget changes.
• Target demand-side interest (not supply-side).

Strategy

• Edit and pin ad copy to clarify demand-side targeting.
• tCPA with a portfolio bid strategy to limit max bids.

The result

• 50% more conversions.
• 25% lower CPA.
• No more budget-whiplash.

Will this exact approach work for you?

Probably not. And that’s the point.

A personalized decision tree can help you focus on what actually drives results for your account without getting distracted by shiny objects. (Download the PDF for access.)

[Watch] Outsmarting Google Ads: Insider strategies to navigate changes like a pro

Find more insights and strategies for outsmarting Google Ads in my SMX Next session: