Google this morning announced it is adding new options for advertisers who use their own brand names as keywords. It's all a little complicated, so our Google Ads correspondent JSG joined me with the details. 

Jyll — high level, what did they announce today?

Google had previously announced that we are going to be able to put some brand restrictions around Performance Max campaigns. So if you didn't want your Performance Max to target mostly brand searches, you could exclude your brand. 

But what Jenny Marvin announced today is something called “brand restrictions for broad match”:

This allows you to restrict or limit your ads to searches that include the brands and products related to those brands you want to search for.

So rather than trying to exclude brand from the broad match campaign, it's the opposite. You can limit your ads only to searches that include certain brands. It's the opposite of what people are trying to do when you're trying to make your broad go out and be broad, And not be on your brand. 

But what's interesting is she's saying this enables you to use broad match to reach more relevant brand traffic. 

So now she's saying you can use broad match keywords for a branded search campaign. 

Let's say your brand is, I don't know, Nike. Rather than having to put, you know, “Nike,” “Nike shoes,” whatever, I'd be an exact match and then start to put negative keywords in because Adidas now matches you exact match on all these things. Instead, you can put this new brand restriction for broad match around the brand of Nike. 

And because of the way Google's knowledge graph works, Google understands what's related to Nike and what's not. And that would be enough to use a broad match keyword for Nike to run a brand campaign. 

At least that's what the promise is. If it turns out it works as suggested, this is truly revolutionary for the way keywords works because it's moving us more towards this like search theme idea we saw in Performance MAX rather than nitty gritty individual exact match phrase, match keywords with negatives, etc.

These brand restrictions for broad match keywords actually remind me of an audience signal in Performance Max. As we know, Performance Max is fully automated. You can't choose your targeting, but you can provide an audience signal to guide the automation in the right direction. Ultimately, of course, it will try to find conversions to hit your CPA or ROAS goal. And so similarly, these brand restrictions for broad match, it's not guaranteeing you will or won't serve on certain keywords, but it allows you to guide the automation to say, “Here are the kind of brand searches I'm looking for, find more stuff like this.” 

So giving you some — I wouldn't call it “control” — but at least, you know, guiding the missile rather than just launching it and spray and pray. 

What's your gut feel on how this would affect the auction and the pricing of ads? 

It's going to get more advertisers advertising on more queries, so it's going to drive prices up. That's what Performance Max does, right? It gets more people advertising in more places they wouldn't previously advertised. More competition means an increase in pricing.

But an increase in price isn't necessarily a bad thing because the flip side is for those advertisers with sufficient budget, insufficient data, it's also opening up a lot more opportunity that you probably wouldn't have found on your own without the AI's help. 

So it's kind of dual sides. Costs could go up, but performance can go up as well, at least for larger advertisers. I think smaller advertisers, again, are still going to struggle with this because Google does not have a concept of Joe Schmo shop around the corner and what constitutes a brand search for that or not the way it does for a large brand like Nike or Lululemon or Shopify or whatever it might be. 

Is this on the platform right now or is this something that's coming? 

Jenny says brand restrictions will roll out globally next week. 

This is important. Now there's something called brand exclusions where you want to exclude your brand. This is now called brand restrictions. You are restricting to just your brand. I think the naming is confusing, and in typical Google fashion the naming is always confusing, but brand restrictions will roll out globally next week. 

Overall, do you see this as a net positive, net negative for advertisers and marketers? 

I think that a lot of people are going to see this as a negative because the more we lose control, the more people see it as a negative. But if you are like me and you accept the fact that keywords are going away, then I see this definitely as a net positive because it's allowing you to still have your good old fashioned brand campaign like you've always had before, but have it be more targeted and more focused than just putting in a bunch of random, broad match keywords and hoping and pray. 

Jyll Saskin-Gales is our Google Ads correspondent. She's also a Google Ads trainer and consultant — you can learn more about her at our affiliate link at b.link/gatraining.