‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through cyberspace,
Not a search was occurring, not even a trace.
The Google Ads were hung by the SERP with care,
In hopes that great sales would soon be there.
The Google Ads Experts were nestled, all snug in their beds.
While visions of quality traffic danced in their heads.
We had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.
While automation rules rolled out new bidding caps.
When out on the ‘net there arose such a clatter
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
With coffee in hand and my keyboard at the ready,
I gazed afar and held myself steady.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear
But, St.Google and eight Google Ad Engineers.
The Engineers sprang to their desk and opened their code,
Exposing the luster of embedded objects below.
The code flew with such fury that smoke arose from the editor.
As new features flowed from alpha to beta and they were so much better.
I watched in wonder as my browser reloaded.
Improved performance, in my diary, I noted.
St. Google sprang to the sleigh and to his team gave a whistle.
And Engineers flew towards the sleigh like heat-seeking missiles.
Taking their seats with masks on and excitement anew.
They logged in and flew back to Mountain View.
I heard them exclaim, ere they drove out of sight—
“Merry Googling to all, and to all a Google night!”
Our Wish List
Since 2008, our Google Ads experts have written an open letter to Saint Google. We believe that at least one of Saint Google’s Elves or maybe even the big SG himself reads our blog because we have gotten lots of things that have been in our letters. Regardless, we find this to be a fun tradition for a company that eats, lives, and breathes Google Ads. So here are our 2022 Christmas wishes for Saint Google.
1. Tab for Negative Keywords in Search Query
We have been advocating this since our first Dear Saint Google letter in 2008, and if you’re in this industry, we’re sure you have been too. The idea is simple – report to the advertisers the search queries they lost because of a negative keyword. Negative keywords are one of the most powerful Google Ads features, but great power comes with great risk. The risk is that you remove traffic you want, and once you do this, the system is silent. Inside the logic of Google Ads, there is a piece of code that jumps out when it matches a negative keyword. All we want is to know is that it happened. This request has been around for so long that we no longer need a “report”, we need an entire “tab”.
2. SEO Wizard
We service many clients and consult many small businesses who come to us with questions about SEO. They know that Google reins king when it comes to bringing them organic traffic but these small businesses have no idea what they can do to improve pagerank. We would love to see an SEO wizard that would give SEO tips as verbose and helpful as Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
3. Google Asset Health Check
One of our company’s biggest strengths is being able to provide our clients with the information to see how well Google views their website, and therefore their Google Business Profile. However, this takes lots of different tools and can be time consuming. One of our wishes from old St. Google would be a Google Asset Health Check– an easy-to-read report that enables business owners to see how Google perceives the usage and inclusion of its different assets (Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, etc.). This report would help tell them what they’re doing right and what needs to change in the eyes of Google. Sometimes Google wants us to be mind readers, but this is an area we would prefer not to be.
4. Easier Access to Social Media Profiles on GBP
Your Google Business Profile should be the one-stop-shop for all things contact information about your business: your website, phone number, hours of operation, etc. At the bottom of some GBPs there are links to that business’s social media profiles, however these are much harder to obtain thank you’d think. Ultimately, it is up to Google to make the connection between your business (your GBP) and your social media profiles. There is no field in the GBP dashboard to input these yourselves. With all of the mighty power that Google holds, we wish there was an easier and quicker way that Google can verify a business’s social media profiles and add them to their GBP.
5. Grade the GDN
The GDN (Google Display Network) is massive and poorly documented. There are millions of sites on the GDN however no indication of how good a site is. Does it have a lot of traffic? Is it easy to navigate? Is it frequented by real people or just internet crawling robots? Creating grades of A, B, C can help those who use Google Display Network know what type of sites their ads are being displayed on. A is the top 5%, B is the next 15%, and C is the unwashed masses. Sites should be allowed to file for an A or B ranking, and if they get it, they are rewarded with more revenue. This review should cost money to apply for and include a review of performance.
6. Daily Budget Controls
Budgets have rules that not everyone understands, and sometimes it makes it difficult to control the account properly. If you get behind on the daily budget, Google Ads will attempt to catch you up by increasing the budget by up to 20%. It does this by multiplying the daily budget by the number of days in the month. This new budget is compared to the current monthly spend. The new budget is always in Google’s best interest but not always in yours. We want the budget to be the budget and only sometimes we want the catch-up. This needs to have a control for the catch-up percent allowed.