Google Ads Brand Recommendations: What to Know

Google Ads has introduced Brand Recommendations powered by AI. These tailored suggestions cover awareness and consideration campaigns with CPM and CPV bidding. They complement existing performance recommendations, providing a full optimization funnel. 

The recommendations are customized for each advertiser and are regularly updated. They typically include adjusting bids, audience expansions, and video creative recommendations. 

So how much attention should advertisers give to these recommendations? Let’s break it down.

Why should you take these recommendations instead of using Meta, TikTok, etc. to generate awareness?

Google’s not telling you to build campaigns from scratch here; the recommendations are focused on improving existing brand awareness and consideration campaigns.

It can’t hurt to analyze the recommendations if you’re already willing to allocate time and budget to those campaigns.

The category of recommendations I’m most interested in

I’m particularly interested in checking out recommendations for measurement, keywords and targeting, and bidding and budgets.

Google would do itself a big favor by helping advertisers measure engagement along the funnel to position itself as a source of demand generation as well as demand capture.

It also has a ton of data in its walled garden to track users in a privacy-safe way.

The category of recommendations I’m least interested in

I’m not paying much attention to Google recommendations for ads and assets; they usually involve more best practice-type recommendations, like adding different video aspect ratios.

If you’re looking for advice on what types of ads or creatives to test or themes that might resonate with your audience, you won’t find them. 

If you have a good checklist of best practices for building a full set of sizes and dimensions for your ads and assets, you can probably skip this section altogether.

In general, like most new features – whether from Google or another platform – you should cast a critical eye on these recommendations before accepting them at face value.

Explore them and test some of the ones that make sense to you to see how well they work. We’ll be doing the same in our accounts and will keep you posted on the results!