Oct 9: Your brand name in AI Max, the new-ad premium, and a Google goals trick

1. 01

   Google tidied up how your brand name works in AI Max

   If your Google Search campaign uses AI Max, look for a new Branded searches section in your campaign settings. It replaces the old standalone brand exclusions, and it decides whether your ads show when people search for brand names, including your own and your competitors'.

   

   Negative keywords at the campaign and ad group level still work alongside it. It's still rolling out, so some campaigns have it and others don't yet.

   What to do: next time you're in your campaign settings, check which option is selected and make sure it matches what you want. If you already run a separate campaign for your own business name, "only unbranded searches" stops the two from overlapping.

2. 02

   New ads cost more for the first few days. That's normal.

   When you launch a new ad set on Meta, or make a big change to one, Meta needs a few days to figure out who to show it to. That's the learning period, and you pay a premium during it.

   We tracked it on a brand-new ad set in our own Optimize My Ads campaigns. The cost to reach 1,000 people sat around $49 to $55 for the first three days, peaking on day 3. Once results started coming in, it dropped to about $37, then $28 by day 6. That's roughly 40% cheaper than day 1. We see the same early premium on new ad sets every time.

   

   What to do:

   • Don't judge a new campaign on its first two or three days.
   • Avoid stacking big changes. Each one can restart the expensive learning stretch.
   • If you have a boss, a partner or a team watching the numbers, tell them before you launch. Launch on Monday, costs jump on Tuesday, and now nobody panics.
3. 03

   A Google Ads setup trick that saves you a headache later

   Google uses your conversion goal (a purchase, a lead, a booked call) to decide who to show your ads to. Changing a campaign's goal often sends it back into learning, and results can swing around for a while.

   Here's what we do on every account: instead of pointing a campaign at individual conversion actions, we create a custom goal, something like "Purchases", put the conversion actions inside it, and set the campaign to use that goal. If tracking breaks later and an action needs to be swapped or fixed, we change it inside the custom goal. In our experience, that causes far less disruption than changing the campaign's goal directly.

   

   What to do:

   • In Google Ads, go to Goals and create a custom goal with the conversion actions you care about.
   • In each campaign's settings, under "Conversion goals", choose that custom goal.
   • It takes about five minutes, and you'll be glad you did it the first time your tracking needs a fix.