Google Ads Automation: When It Helps, When It Hurts

In this session, we’ll explore the dual nature of automation within Google Ads, one of the most powerful tools in digital advertising today. While automation offers impressive efficiency gains through smart bidding, responsive ads and AI-driven optimization, it’s not a “set-and-forget” silver bullet. Left unchecked, automation can quietly drift off course and begin undermining campaign performance.

We’ll break down:

• The key warning signs that automation is helping your campaigns (e.g., improved efficiency, stronger alignment between signals and goals).
• The red flags that signal automation may be hurting your performance (e.g., brand cannibalization in Performance Max, auto-applied recommendations that add broad match keywords and inflate CPA, modelled conversions diverging from real business outcomes).
• The practical guardrails and diagnostics you can put in place to stay in control (e.g., segmenting campaigns, auditing auto-applied changes, closely monitoring impression share & bid-strategy signals).
• How to shift the mindset from “automation vs manual” to “automation under supervision”:  feeding the right data, structuring correctly, and treating the machine as a tool you guide rather than hands-off.

Whether you manage small-budget search campaigns or large-scale automated portfolios, this session will equip you with a framework to evaluate whether your automation is working for you or against you, and to reclaim the strategic controls that matter most in 2026’s evolving ad-platform landscape.