Since Google Ads phased out Expanded Text Ads in favour of Responsive Search Ads, we’ve had less and less control over what ad copy we serve, as unless you pin ad copy (which often reduces your ad strength rating), you’re at the mercy of Google to decide which headlines and descriptions it’s going to show most frequently.
I’ve always found this to be frustrating, as you spend the time and effort creating unique headlines and descriptions, only for users to never see them. Plus, the reporting is rubbish, especially if your ads don’t generate a lot of impressions.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Google Ads has started introducing ‘Automatically Created Assets’. And it’s not obvious how to find how to turn this feature off.
I stumbled across it by chance while trying to get my head around the new interface (which I also hate BTW) when changing a bid strategy on a campaign.
Campaign Settings are now on a tab above the table, as shown below.
Once you’ve selected the campaign you want to edit, if you scroll down far enough, you’ll see an option called ‘Change automatically created assets’. What’s this, I thought.
After clicking the menu item, you’ll see this box:
Now, automatically generating assets for sitelinks, callouts, and images is one thing, but this new feature will create headline and description assets. And I’ve seen how poor some of the sitelink and image assets it creates are, and I’ve seen how poor the ideas for headlines and descriptions it comes up with are, so I most certainly would not trust Google Ads with this. Plus, if you click the ‘Learn more about automatically created assets’ link, it states ‘In some cases, automatically created assets can use generative AI to help you generate assets that are more relevant to people’s search queries.’ No thanks, pal.
So obviously, I turned it off. And then spent the next hour turning it off on all my other accounts.
I’d recommend you do the same.
But that’s not all.
I had previously turned off most of the Account-level automated assets. Because they are mostly garbage, too.
And look what I found:
What they mean by ‘Dynamic business names’ and ‘Dynamic business logo’ is this:
To help get you started, Google Ads will crawl your website and dynamically create a business name and business logo for you. These assets are viewable in the ‘Assets’ tab in your Google Ads account and can be removed. Alternatively, you can choose to provide your own assets (business logo and business name) as described below. If Google Ads was unable to crawl and find eligible assets on your website OR if you currently do not meet the eligibility criteria, your ads will show your display URL and a placeholder logo.
So yeah, disable that too, and make sure you add your business name and a few logo variations to your Assets.
In my opinion, Google Ads is doing everything in its power to make advertisers spend as much as possible, while becoming less and less transparent. And sneaking in features like this, which could seriously impact advertisers, most certainly doesn’t help.