The State of Google Ads in 2026 (Episode 511)

[Music] Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer. And today I'm going to deliver a speech, a topic, a discussion, a little different than what I usually do. I'm going to share a bit of a dialogue of what I think is the state of Google ads in 2026. These are things that are on top of my mind that I've been seeing on a pretty regular basis that shock me, frustrate me, make me happy, upset, sad, a variety of feelings because this is, Google ads is my entire career. That's all I have learned. It's all I've ever done for over 20 years now. And there's some things that are really different than they used to be. And some of these things are good. Some of the things might surprise you. Some things, all of these surprise me. And I want to discuss what this means and how I see it. And I'm going to give examples of accounts that I work on, clients that I work with. Of course, I won't be sharing names or who they are or anything. But I'm going to be telling you some stories. It's story hour here on the paid search podcast. I'm going to be talking about how things are in 2026 as a Google ads editor, manager. And I'm going to be sharing that with you now. So the very first topic that I have, and I really have, I sat down with a pen and paper and literally started writing out what was on my mind because I just didn't know what to talk about today. And this is just really what flowed out. So here's the first one. One thing about the state of Google ads in 2026 is that I have found conversion tracking is the defining line between long term success and quick failure in Google ads. I find that there are, and I have four different examples of where I've seen this recently with clients and people that I'm working with. They're conversion tracking. They're tracking of their phone calls, leads and sales has made the defining point between frustration and long term success. So I recently started working with a company that had over five years of just astounding steady flow of conversions. I was looking through the account and they consistently have had a steady flow conversion, steady flow of traffic, despite absolute broad match keywords, no real control of traffic quality, kind of sloppy work being done in the account. But regardless, it has always performed well. And this client has always had conversion tracking. In fact, they took conversion tracking very seriously from the beginning and had improved conversion tracking in the past year to a higher level type of conversion tracking. And despite the sloppy work in the account, they've had success, which is astounding. So think about this, the conversion tracking that they had transcended the poor management that was being done in the account. So despite some really bad decisions about using broad match keywords, right? And it's not that broad match keywords are bad. That's not what I'm preaching here. What I'm saying is that the client had word XYZ and the actual searches they were getting, actual search terms, the conversions they were getting was word ABC. Right. They had it set up where they were trying to get this traffic. And when I dug into it, it turns out they're actually getting this traffic, which actually was working great for them. And if, and, and, you know, maybe if they had tried to engineer it that way, maybe if they had tried to target it specifically, maybe it wouldn't have worked. But who cares? It's working this way. And it's phenomenal. It's wonderful. So let's contrast that with another company. That's another company that I work with that continually struggles with Chris. Should we keep running the Google ads? You know, it costs a lot of money. I don't know if it's doing us any good. And, you know, it money is, is very important because in, in, in Google ads, that's the only thing that makes a Google ads campaign work. You have to pay your bill. You have to pay for traffic. So this client has no idea how much value, how many conversions they're actually getting from their campaigns. So what happens is they turn it off and on, uh, posit, drop the budget. Things go bad. They increase the budget again. You know, and then they start to feel like, I'm not sure if this is really working and then then they'll, then they'll change it again. And this is, uh, I mean, obviously quite frustrating for them. Because they're always second guessing the spent in Google ads. And, uh, you know, that, um, that is a direct result of not tracking conversions, not having phone call tracking, not having web form tracking, not knowing how much of their campaign is actually delivering value to them. And so the campaign is always kind of up and down. And, you know, there's, there's probably the worst story that I have is a client that I've worked with for a while. And they have never had conversion tracking despite day one when I started working with them, immediately made it clear that we should have conversion tracking. We need to have it in place because someday you're going to want it. Maybe not now things are going, you know, things are going fine, but maybe someday. Well, they declined. They didn't want to do it. They were uncomfortable with a tracking phone number on their website that was not their actual phone number. Um, they were not comfortable. They didn't have anyone that could place codes on their site for them. They didn't really want to find anyone. So let's just skip that. Let's just get the campaign going. Okay. So fast forward a couple of years. I got an email from this client saying, Chris, we are having the slowest spring we've ever had. Things are not going well. And I, you know, of course, I'm very concerned. I want them to do well. That's, you know, that's my job is to make sure that Google ads campaign is going well. This Google ads campaign is the only advertising they're doing. So I had to break it to him. I said, you know, hey, I looked at everything. The campaign's still getting the same traffic, the same ranking, the same CTRs, the same search terms, the same, mostly the same CPCs. I mean, everything's pretty much the same. You know, we're still about this kind of positioning and all that. But you know what I couldn't tell him? I couldn't tell him if they actually were getting less leads from Google ads. Maybe, maybe there was an organic traffic that they never measured that they were getting and suddenly that's dropped off. But we have no idea. So it's an entirely different experience for, you know, this, this client because they're having problems and they don't know what's broken. And because they did not set up conversion tracking in the first place, they were unable to really measure where the problem is. Right? I mean, if you, if you only go to the doctor whenever you're not feeling well and you've never gone to get any kind of baseline of, you know, where, where things are before you're feeling bad. I mean, you'll never know like, well, you know, the only measurements you'll have are when things are bad, establishing a baseline, a standard by which that you can measure and compare things is universally important, whether we're talking about health or Google ads. So I mean, this is, this is important stuff. And then, you know, the, the last one is, you know, not, I don't want to be overly negative. So I have a, I have a great story, a perfect way of using conversion tracking. And again, it defines the success and keeps this company from direct failure. And it's a company that tracks all of their conversions. And they go a step further is they track conversions that are worth more and conversions that are worth less. measure those with a conversion value in their account. Until we hit a certain number of conversion value sales that brings us up to and above a certain capacity on those, budget cannot increase. Even though there's tons and tons that could be spent on this campaign, more money could be spent. Thousands could be spent. But until that goal acquisition is made, this company has made the right decision to keep itself from failing by doubling, tripling, quadrupling the spend. Because that, I mean, that's the easy answer, right? Just spend more. If things aren't going well, you can just spend more. What keeps you from doing that? Well, in this case, the company knows, well, we can't spend more until we at least hit a certain profitability level. And then that constitutes spending more. Spending more when we're below standard of success is only going to cause failure to approach faster. And it's, oh, that I wish every client had the wherewithal to make that kind of decision. And as I discussed with other satire situations, many of them don't. Many of them do not. So I have more of this kind of candid discussion coming up. I'm going to talk in a second about another topic that is on top of my mind as far as the state of Google ads and where I find myself struggling and seeing things that are, you know, so seem to be universally true. And I do want to tell you about my sponsor, the only sponsor that I have that makes this podcast possible, which is Optio. I, I have been talking to Optio for a very long time. They are very gracious to offer my listeners exclusively a 28 day free trial of their software. The software is designed to help you bring up the performance of your Google ads, as well as other networks on the online advertising environment. So it's not just Google ads anymore. You can now work in Bing and TikTok and LinkedIn other other networks. But the point is, what does it do? Well, it helps you to make critical decisions to improve your Google ads. You know, we're talking about tracking conversions in this first one, you know, conversion tracking, being the measure of the true measure of success. To go from quick failure to long term success, that's the defining difference. Well, Optio uses information like that to help bring you to long term success, making decisions on how to accomplish that. It is a powerful analyzing tool you can try for free for 28 days at opto.com/psp. So that's optio.com/psp for a 28 day free trial. So let's move on to number two. Number two is this I have found accounts on Google are extremely diverse. And what I mean by that is it has become very difficult for me to make a prediction about whether an account will be successful or it will fail. I do not find that I can make these guesses. I mean, I'm pretty well educated in Google ads. So I don't even know if I'd call it a guess. But, you know, using my experience, you know, multiple decades of experience with countless number of industries and clients that I've worked with, I can't make a clear guess about whether this is going to go well or not. And that doesn't mean that I haven't tried. I have talked to people and said, Oh, this is going to be good. You know, I really think this is going to succeed. I'm excited. I'm excited to try this. Let's do it. Let's go. And we have we have a very short relationship because it does not work to my shock and embarrassment. And then I hear and you know, looking into account and think, you know, by all, by all measures and all metrics that I see in this account, this doesn't seem like it should work. This should have failed. And yet the person says, Oh, no, no, this is the backbone of my business. This is the backbone of my industry. This or not my industry, but this is the backbone of, you know, everything that my business does. And it's incredibly successful. Despite me, if I had a guess, would say it's not. So it's it's kind of surprising nowadays. You know, so, so, you know, the point of this little discussion here on this about accounts being very diverse and unpredictable on Google ads is, you know, well, why is that? What is that? You know, how does that make itself known? What are some examples? Well, I have an account and despite me being very clear on this podcast that I don't like maximize conversions, I have an account that absolutely does not like target CPA. Okay. So this account is running max conversions, maximize conversion bidding. And despite my experiments and testing and trying to bring it under a target CPA management style so that I can have some control over things and manage things better. It actually thrives and does much better with maximize conversions, which is, which is quite shocking at times. I don't really like it. But I mean, that's really different from my experience. And I see things like that again. I mean, there's another example. And most of this has to do with bidding, automated bidding, you know, different things like that. But let's say you have a campaign running and it's running a target CPA or maximize conversions. And you see some opportunity with very specific search terms. You say, you know, these search terms are really critical. And if I can pull these search terms out and get a high search impression share on these search terms, you know, make sure that I show up on these search terms 80, 90% of the time at a high rank. I think this account will really explode and be successful. So I can take this winning traffic from one campaign and put it into a manual bidding campaign. And essentially just bid really aggressively, put a good strong budget behind it and make sure the client shows up 80, 90% of the time for these searches. How could that possibly not work? Because it is, it's the only traffic fix that's converting for them. And I think if I do that, if we just really invest into that specific traffic, then it'll be successful, right? Well, there's a lot of unpredictability. It's quite shocking that multiple times, things don't work like that. Campaigns do not translate from, oh, you see this one binary, very specific thing, very clear thing. Okay, take that and multiply it. Okay, you've multiplied it. Okay, that fails. You see this really specific search that says, you know, dog, dog washing near me or dog washing. So it's some really specific kind of moderate tail, long tail kind of search that you're like, yeah, this is exactly what they do. This should work. I'm going to target that specifically in this area this time of day. These devices, boom, I can set that up with manual bidding. And nothing. It does not work. So, and this is something you'll hear more about in my third point about the state of Google ads, but there's, there's something going on more than, than what we can see. There's something mysterious, magical algorithmic, if you want to call it that, that's more than just what we see in the metrics. So before I get to that, I'll tell you the last one is something that makes things very difficult, very frustrating, and frustrates people, you know, to great, to great degrees is quality score. I can't tell you how many coaching sessions I've had where I just have to coach people to stop thinking about it. about quality score. Stop managing for quality score. Stop obsessing about quality score because the landing page experience, the expected CTR, the ad relevance, these are the only measurements by which we can see how our quality score is determined. And I got bad news for you. Any page experience, unpredictable, totally unpredictable. Good luck trying to understand why Google thinks your landing page experience is below average. It's very difficult to predict whether that's going to be successful. I look at a page and I'm like, this is a great page. Google hates it. Google hates that it has a very universally below, below average landing page experience. Don't ask me why. I don't know why. Expected CTR. That's another metric when it comes to quality score. That's a measurable metric that Google gives us. Totally illogical. Totally illogical. It's not that it's unpredictable. It's just that it'll be good over here and be bad over here. I'll do this and it'll go up. I'll do this. It'll go down. Sometimes it's this match type will do well. Other times this match type will do well. It's illogical. It does not make any kind of predictive sense. I can't assume I understand it. So that's way frustrating. And then ad relevance. Okay. That's probably the one we have the most control of because we can really actually take direct action to make sure that our ad relevance is actually attaining ad relevance and it's actually getting the traffic that we want. Okay. Good. I'm really glad for that. But the other two out of three. Oh my gosh. It's anyone's guess. So that's my second point here is that these accounts on Google extremely diverse, very difficult understand failure and success. And sometimes it seems like a very thin line. And you don't even know when you're crossing it. You don't even know when you've jumped from success to failure. Failure looks like success. Success looks like failure. Up is down, down is up. It's not a good. It's a very frustrating situation to be in whenever your business relies on Google ads and you can't analyze and predict some of the basic concepts on the platform. Google ads is by far the most complicated advertising platform. I think that's firmly established. But that was before 2026. Now 2026 is the most complicated, I think, because it's the least predictable, the least logical. I don't know. I can't say that for sure. I don't work in other networks. But from what I understand, Google ads is by far the most complicated complex and I think unfortunately the most volatile. Okay, so last one. And again, if you would please check out optio.com/psp28dayfree trial of their amazing tool optio.com/psp. All right, number three. And this is something I have from personal experience. I think in 2026 people have a more poor, a poorer understanding of Google ads than ever before. I think there are specific reasons for that, which I'll get into. But I think I think people have a less of an idea about how to manage, how to, you know, how Google ads works more than ever before. For example, I think what adds to this complexity adds to me making this statement is that number one, the UI, the interface, the user interface on Google ads, where you log in, add ads.google.com, you log in. The interface is really pretty awful. I feel like we've regressed from where it used to be, especially in the past couple of years, the amount of pop ups, distractions, things that try and pull our attention are everywhere. The number of trap doors and little hidden things are everywhere. The UI is difficult, complex to manage and very frustrating. I think that has contributed to people understanding Google ads less and less. Google tries to push in front of us these overview pages that try and simplify the information. When in reality, the more solid, complex, information is hidden. We actually see less information than we have ever seen. Search terms. You know, we no longer have average position. We now have percentages by absolute top. But absolute top doesn't necessarily mean above organic. Sometimes that means your top, your ad was shown at the top of the sponsored ads, which technically could be at the bottom of the page. So we don't have first position ranking. We now have absolute top position ranking. And, you know, probably the most frustrating thing of all that makes people pull their hair out is the traffic runs like it's a simulation. You set up a keyword and you expect to get a search that looks like the keyword and get a click on that keyword. No, no, that's not the way it works. No, sometimes you set up a keyword and it didn't work. Not enough volume. No one searching that. You don't get any volume on that. It does not exist. I mean, you know it exists. You know, people search for stuff like that. You know, but for some reason the system just won't get you any impressions on it. Maybe it's because the bidding, you know, the bidding is set a certain way or the bidding strategy just won't get you any impressions. Yeah, quite frustrating. So we go from just a very black and white kind of put the keyword in bid on it and you get clicks and impressions. No, it doesn't work like that. No, you kind of have to do do a do a backflip and then stand on your head and then if it's Tuesday at 3 p.m. you'll get a click. And hopefully that's the click that you wanted because maybe it isn't. And, you know, this this adds to a lot of frustration. You know, people I think have been blinded and kind of led astray because what Google based itself on, you know, decades ago when it started was it is the only platform where you can pay for something specifically that you want and actually see your metrics, actually see how many impressions, how many clicks actually see the searches, you know, see the results of what you're paying for. Unlike TV commercials, you know, that's what it was up against the beginning TV commercials billboards, radio, things like that. Those offered no metrics, no impression metrics, no actual real tangible numbers to show you the results of your dollar for dollar spend. And now we've almost seem to have moved away from that. And now in a situation where automation and AI try and just say, oh, no, no, you put the words in, we'll take care of it and then we'll kind of decide where your stuff goes. It's added a lot of mystery to what was very simple. So yeah, that's that's how I see the state of Google ads today. I think there's some defining points. I think conversions, lack of conversions makes a very distinct difference. I think the diversity of success can make it very hard to even predict when success will will be guaranteed or not guaranteed. And then the knowledge gap, the learning curve in Google ads seems to have lengthened quite a bit, even though it's presented as though it's quite simple, even though it's presented as though it's a simple, just put this keyword here, just put your money in this slot and oh, it'll work. It presents itself as simple, but in reality, I feel like the distance between what you can know and what you don't know and can never know has broadened, has widened that gap has gone more and more. So despite all of that, I still think Google ads is a phenomenal system, but and that's the things that I was thinking on this week. That's the things that I has really occupied my thinking for the past couple weeks and that's how I see the state of Google ads in 2026. And yeah, I hope this episode's been useful to you. Again, I'm Chris Schaefer. You can find me Chris Schaefer.com if you'd like help with Google ads otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.