As many of you know Google is ratcheting down on advertisers that offer ads related to housing, employment and credit later this month. For us we see it as a Google Ads credit crackdown, since that is where it affects us the most. This change will disrupt those of us that work in the automotive, retail and even medical verticals. That’s right even medical, since the policy as written includes anyone that offers payment plans — even if you are targeting fairly.
I bet you are thinking, Guru didn’t we go through this a couple years ago? Nope, you would just be thinking of when Facebook implemented roughly these same polices. But from first glance it appears that Google”s rules maybe potentially even more stringent.
How do I know if I am affected by the Google Ads Credit Crackdown?
If you work in any industry that offers any sort of financing, employment or housing related services it is safe to say that you will be affected. Google has been alerting current advertisers through notifications in their Google Ads account. No matter what industry you work in, it would be worth checking out. Our agency even had one pop up for an accounting firm.
What does this mean?
Starting October, 19th 2020 if you are in an affected vertical you will no longer have access to:
– Gender
– Age
– Parental Status
– Marital Status
– Zip Code Targeting
The big loss for our agency is going to be in zip code targeting. Properly built campaigns in video and display can get buy by creating more diverse targeting sets, focusing on the cumulative power of smaller targets.
Even though its only been around since 2012, zip code is going to be hard to replace. This is going to be especially true for franchise clients that have restrictions on where they can advertise. When zip codes are define your PMA its going to take a lot of little pieces to make up these geos.
Unfortunately the best advice that I can give is we will have to look at each individual client and focus on significantly more smaller radius targets. In other cases you can build up using city or county targeting and fill in with radiuses. Going forward overlaps on the map will be the new norm. Another thing that we found very useful while making these changes was a combination of targeted and excluded areas.
Make sure to start working on these changes as soon as possible and take into account the additional setup time for new campaigns. As we all know there is no way to outsmart Google, they are always one leg up. As an agency we decided it was best to get ahead of the curve and stay above board instead of having campaigns go down for a couple days!
The positive I take out of it is, at least this might give us little guys that don’t rely totally on automation a leg up for once!
Good luck with your post Google Ads credit crackdown campaigns and please reach out if you have another idea.
