Google Ads Updates in January (Everything You Need To Know): Add Negative Keywords by Account-level, Remove Redundant Keywords and GA4 Updates

In January, Google Ads announced upgraded settings for account keywords. These upgrades include new features for adding negative keywords and upgrading the setting of removing redundant keywords. Additionally, Google has made some updates to GA4. Let’s go through these Google Ads updates together.

Google Ads Update 1:
Add Negative Keywords by Account-level

Usually, we add negative keywords by ad group or campaign, but what if you want to add negative keywords to multiple campaigns, Google has introduced a better option.

Starting in January, Google offered to add negative keywords by account level. You can now add negative keywords in your account’s settings. By doing it this way, This list will automatically apply to all relevant campaign types in your account.

This is especially useful when you have several unwanted search terms that you wish to add in multiple campaigns. By adding at account level, you can save time by avoiding the need to add the same negative keywords to each campaign manually.

How To Add Negative Keywords by Account level?

Step 1: Find the “Account Settings” tab and expand the “Negative keywords” section. 
Step 2: Click on the + button, and list down all the negative keywords you wish to add.
Step 3: Make sure you click “Save” after you follow all the steps

By successfully adding account-level negative keywords, your ads can reach your target audience more accurately, get better impressions, and even gain more conversions.

In addition, Google will help to minimize your ads from showing up to irrelevant search audiences for your brand and services. So in other words, you can say that it also brings you a better brand experience with quality traffic as it helps exclude irrelevant traffic from the search interests. As a result, we gain better control over our campaigns.

Google Ads Update 2:
Remove Redundant Keywords

Google has announced an upgrade to one of their auto-applied recommendations, “remove redundant keywords”. If you noticed, this is one of the features from the google recommendations tab that offers for advertisers to have better control over their advertising.

In the past, Google only removed the redundant keywords that are found within the same match types and ad groups. However, as of January 19th, Google has announced that these auto-applied recommendations can now be applied across different match types in the ad group, including all keywords matched in your account.

This new feature enhances campaign optimization scores and reduces negative impacts on advertisements. This also means that it brought a broader impact to the redundant keywords, as any ad groups with redundant keywords can be removed across match types at the same time.

However, this update may not be good news for most of the advertisers as we used to rely more on using phrase match type and exact match type when we set our keywords, and Google is trying to promote broad match type which may cause an increase in the campaign costs.

How to turn off auto-applied recommendations?

From Google Ads you may use these two ways to turn off automatically applied recommendations.

Turn off from Manage tab
Step 1: Find the “Recommendation” tab and click on “Auto-apply”.
Step 2: Under “Manage” tab, uncheck “Remove redundant keywords”. Then, save.

In another way, turn off using the History tab.
Step 1: Find the auto-applied “Remove redundant keywords” recommendation.
Step 2:
Click on the dot on the left, select “Disable” and you will see a red dot .

Google Ads Update 3:
GA4 Updates

Search Bar Updates

Google recently announced three new updates on their search bar, which provide a better dashboard for advertisers looking for information in their account.

Find Data Stream Details

Google provides more accurate information and quick access to any data stream details in real-time. If you wish to get a detailed web or app data stream on your property, you may use search terms from the keyword “tracking’, an app stream ID or a web stream measurement ID to access.

Find current property and account settings

If you want to have a look at your current properties or account settings, you can use the search terms from the keyword “Property”, you can search the current property ID or account name to view it in detail.

Go to other GA4 properties

If you want to switch between different properties in GA4, you can use the search terms below:

  • Property ID or property name of the property
  • Webstream measurement ID of the property
  • An app stream ID of the property

By searching these terms, Google will navigate you to the property you search for from another property you are in. GA4 allows up to 7 properties in a search query.

Metrics renamed in GA4

After the sunset of Universal Analytics occurs on 1st July 2023, Google will be renaming several conventions metrics for a better understanding of those metrics.

12 New Dimensions added in to GA4

GA4 has also released 12 new dimensions and items were added to the DATA API as shown in the photo.

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