AdWords ad rotation to be preserved

Posted by Josh on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012.

In a victory for sophisticated clients everywhere, AdWords has announced that they will re-enable the ability to indefinitely opt-out of ad rotation optimization.

Several months ago AdWords started to force advertisers’ ads to rotate if they were not edited within 30 days. At that time I (and presumably many others) expressed concern about how this impacts campaign management and testing capabilities, and soon they offered a way to request an opt-out of that requirement, but it was not part of the AdWords interface. As of October 2, the interface now allows opting-out.

Why is opting out important? There are several reasons optimization might be undesirable:

Optimization favors higher CTR ads, but these might be the best performing all the way through to conversions.
Identical ads going to different landing pages may have slightly different CTRs that interfere with A/B testing of landing pages.
A/B testing of ads can take a long time for low-volume keywords.
Optimization for an ad group’s keyword set can favor one ad, but subsequent changes to the ad group might favor a different ad that has already been optimized away-from.
Optimization takes away control and reporting clarity. (When did it begin? How much optimization occurred? On which keyword variations?)

I’m glad that Google has added this option back to the interface. You’ll find it under Campaign Settings, “Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping”.