Google Ads Automatically Updating Eligible Campaigns to Enhanced CPC Bidding

We received an interesting email from Google Ads yesterday regarding automatically opting-in campaigns into Enhanced Cost-Per-Click bidding.

The text of this email is below:

A smarter way to bid.

To help show your ads at the right time to more people, we’re upgrading you to our intelligent bidding strategy.

Your eligible campaigns are getting updated to Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) to help show your ads when they’re most likely to get you sales, calls, leads, and more. We’ll automatically make the change for you so you don’t need to take any action.
Here’s how it works

  • Our intelligent bidding feature (ECPC) looks for searches where your ad is more likely to get a conversion
  • ECPC adjusts bids to drive more conversions at the same cost-per-acquisition as Manual CPC
  • Your bids are lowered when your ad is less likely to result in a conversion

You’ll receive an email once we’ve made the update. If you don’t want this feature, click below by Aug 29, 2018.
No, I don’t want this feature

At the bottom, in the tiniest font, there was this text:

You can review or edit this change anytime by visiting your Google Ads account. Google doesn’t guarantee or promise any particular results from implementing these changes, including impact on your campaign performance or spend. Make sure you monitor your account regularly so you understand what’s happening and can make campaign adjustments.

You’ve received this transactional email to update you about important changes to your Google Ads account.

When you click “No, I don’t want this feature,” it forwards you to a basic page that says your campaigns were opted out.

The email didn’t indicate what campaigns were impacted by this automatic update, but some further investigation revealed that the Google Ads interface had an alert for this.

We did not receive this email for all of our accounts yesterday – so make sure to keep an eye on emails, because our team was not able to find an automatic opt-out option in our accounts.

This feature might be right for the right kind of advertisers, but as skilled account managers, we’re not always fans of automatic changes that impact what is added to our campaigns and changes to the settings.

Folks on #PPCChat on Twitter were also getting emails about automatically being opted into Targeted CPA as well.

We’re not super happy about this change. We will be keeping an eye on our email, and we recommend you do too, fellow PPC pros.

Have you gotten this eCPC or Targeted CPA email from Google Ads? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!