Have you ever noticed ghost users in your Google Ads change history log? It just shows “AdWords Administrator” but doesn’t show which user, by name, made the change.

So if you want to know who made a specific change in your Google Ads account, sometimes you might not be able to track down who made the change.

Was it an automated tools? Was it an API? Was it a user who deleted their account? Who are these ghost Google Ads users named “AdWords Administrator”?

This was spotted by Samara Hart who posted about this on X – here is the screenshot shared:

Samara wrote, “Is anyone else who manages Google Ads seeing these ghost users in your change history? Some of which are budget changes and when you filter down to see what this “user” did, there is no history shown?”

Someone also asked about this on Reddit five months ago. The user wrote:

Today, when consulting Google Ads ‘change history’ a mysterious ‘Adwords Administrator’ popped up in the ‘change overview’. While all other users are listed by email address, this one appears only as ‘Adwords Administrator’ and makes ‘budget changes,’ according to the ‘Summary’ column.

Do you know where this is from?

Forum discussion at X.

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Google Ads seems to be testing an expandable row in the channel performance report that shows you an overview of your feed-based vs asset-based metrics. You can click on a carrot icon to expand the row and expose the data summary.

Mike Ryan spotted this and posted about it on X – he wrote, “New! A expandable summary row has been added to Google’s (beta) Channel Performance report, which is very helpful for getting an overview of your feed-based vs asset-based metrics.”

Here is his screenshot:

This does look pretty handy and a quick way to see this data.

Forum discussion at X.

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In February, we covered the new Google Ads “people also consider” ad format for sponsored search results. Then, on mobile, it was in a list format. Now, Google is testing a swipable carousel format for these people also consider ads.

Sachin Patel posted a new screenshot of the carousel format on X – here is a screenshot of it:

Here is his video:

New design for people also consider @rustybrick @gaganghotra_ pic.twitter.com/4EBdYMBmf9

— Sachin Patel (@SachuPatel53124) July 8, 2025

Here is the original list format:

This is a weird confirmed ad format, which I covered in more detail over here.

Forum discussion at X.

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Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, defended why so many search terms are hidden within the Google Ads advertiser console and reports. She said, “the threshold increase was solely privacy-driven.” She added this was a question she asked when she was joining Google, suggesting it was important for her to learn before joining the company.

The topic came up when Collin Slattery posted on his blog and on LinkedIn and X about how many hidden search terms there are within Google Ads. He wrote:

We all assume that hidden search terms waste money, but I wanted proof.

So I analyzed $20 million in spend, 14 million clicks, across 933 campaigns to see for myself.

Turns out they do and to a staggering degree!

For every $1 in ads you buy, Google siphons $0.85 in forced inefficiency through hidden search terms.

He also shared this graphic:

Ginny Marvin from Google replied on LinkedIn and X – here is her full response:

This was something I asked about when joining Google. What I learned: the threshold increase was solely privacy-driven. A search term is reported when it meets sufficient search volume across all Google searches. The threshold applies to all queries.

I get it’s frustrating. Our aim is to help you understand how your customers find you on Search, while respecting user privacy. We’ve worked to surface more insights in privacy-safe ways: aggregating misspelled terms with their correctly spelled queries, Search Terms Insights, etc.

There’s always a tradeoff between volume & marginal ROI. Our goal is to hit your bidding target. Queries are matched when predicted to help achieve your desired ROI, regardless if they meet reporting thresholds.

Performance isn’t homogeneous within a campaign or bidding portfolio. It’s helpful to see your analysis found little variance in non-brand campaigns when segmented by visible vs. “other”. The variance in brand is something we can look at more closely, but segmenting by other dimensions may provide more insight.

We’ll continue to seek ways to improve visibility in privacy-safe ways. And we’re looking to achieve more consistent ROI across traffic segments.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn and X.

Update from Collin and Ginny:

Hi Collin, The threshold applies to every query the same way. Any search term that is not surfaced in the report simply has not been searched enough times across all Google searches to meet the privacy threshold. It either meets the privacy threshold and gets reported or it…

— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) July 9, 2025

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This post was sponsored by Vehnta. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Why isn’t Google Ads working for my B2B marketing campaigns?

How do I improve lead quality in B2B Google Ads campaigns?

What’s the best way to scale Account-Based Marketing (ABM) using Google Ads?

The good news: Google Ads isn’t broken in B2B; it’s just being used wrong.

In This Article:

1. 1. Issue 1: AI Automation Optimizes For The Wrong B2B Objectives
2. 2. Issue 2: Generic Targeting Wastes Budget On Wrong Audiences
3. 3. Issue 3: Marketing/Sales Alignment Problems
4. 4. Issue 4: Scalability Of ABM Approaches
5. 5. The Strategic Transformation: From Volume to Value

The platform works brilliantly for consumer brands because their strategies align with consumer behavior, but B2B operates in an entirely different universe with complex buying journeys involving multiple stakeholders.

This guide will help you modify Google Ads to perform better for B2B paid marketing campaigns.

Issue 1: AI Automation Optimizes For The Wrong B2B Objectives

Google’s AI-powered automation creates the biggest challenge for you at this time.

Why? The actions that signal customer engagement for Google Ads do not align with how B2B shoppers behave, leading to incorrect AI analysis of and actions taken on B2B ad success.

For example:

• Performance Max campaigns optimize for volume conversions rather than quality opportunities, resulting in a doubling of lead volume while halving lead quality.
• Google Smart Bidding tends to attract users who are likely to take lightweight actions, such as downloads or sign-ups; these actions are unlikely to result in qualified B2B buyers, leading to low-value conversions and wasted spend.

How To Fix Google Ad AI’s Misalignment For B2B PPC

Phase 1: Implement Strategic AI Controls

1. Disable automatic audience expansion in Search campaigns to maintain targeting precision.
2. Use Target ROAS instead of Target CPA, setting values based on actual customer lifetime value.
3. Create separate campaigns for different buying stages with stage-appropriate conversion goals.
4. Start Performance Max with limited budgets (20-30% of total spend) until optimization stabilizes.

Phase 2: Configure B2B-Specific Signals

1. Upload customer lists with consistent firmographic data as audience signals.
2. Set up similar audiences based on highest-value customers, not highest-converting leads.
3. Monitor search terms weekly and add negatives aggressively.
4. Use custom conversion goals weighted toward pipeline contribution, not form submissions.

The Easy Way

Vehnta accelerates campaign optimization, enabling precise targeting and performance tracking across your entire B2B account list.

With its Similarity feature and AI-powered Keyword & Ad Generator, you can create high-performing, B2B-optimized campaigns in minutes, avoiding wasted spend on low-value conversions.

Insights are available from day one, and campaigns can be optimized manually or with AI. Plus, with seamless Google Ads integration and automated multilingual message diversification at scale, Vehnta lets you go to market faster and more effectively.

What You Get

• Faster launch cycles.
• More qualified leads.
• Better performance.
• Scalable impact. without the usual manual overhead.

Campaigns are built on intelligent targeting and high-quality inputs, so optimization starts smart and improves from there.

The Result

• Reduced wasted budget on low-value conversions like downloads or sign-ups.
• Focused paid ad spend on high-intent, high-fit prospects.

Issue 2: Generic Targeting Wastes Budget On Wrong Audiences

Most B2B campaigns tend to target broad demographics rather than specific firmographics, resulting in wasted spend on prospects that are a poor fit.

Traditional metrics create a “metrics mirage” where campaigns focused on clicks draw unqualified leads instead of high-intent decision-makers.

Additionally, broad messaging often fails to resonate across diverse markets, whereas precise targeting is effective at scale.

One multinational retailer with 500+ locations across four countries cut costs by 60% and tripled engagement by implementing hyper-local, multilingual campaigns tailored to specific regions.

How To Fix PPC Ad Targeting Waste

Phase 1: Implement Firmographic Precision

Phase 2: Configure Account-Level Monitoring

• Set up cross-domain tracking to monitor multiple touchpoints from the same organization.
• Use UTM parameters with company identifiers to track organizational buying patterns.
• Create audiences based on account-level engagement patterns.

The Easy Way

Vehnta’s Similarity engine leverages a 500M+ company database to identify prospects that match your best customers with surgical precision.

Simply:

1. Insert one or more existing customers or your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) into the Similarity Engine.
2. The Similarty Engine analyzes economic data, industry sectors, and semantic relevance to find similar companies.

This approach makes targeting 10x faster than manual audience research.

Additionally, it provides precision that extends far beyond basic lookalike audiences.

Then, the Search Terms feature provides full visibility into searches performed by your target audience, organized by company and location for actionable insights.

What You Get

• A radically faster, more precise way to build high-value target lists.
• Prospect lists that closely mirror your best customers, aligned to your ICP from day one.
• Full visibility into the actual search behavior of those companies.

The Result

• Smarter segmentation.
• Faster activation.
• Better-performing campaigns fueled by insight, not assumptions.

Issue 3: Marketing/Sales Alignment Problems

B2C metrics fail to capture the complexity of B2B interactions, resulting in a fundamental disconnect between marketing activities and sales outcomes.

Most B2B marketing teams operate under the myth that success requires high lead volumes, but this creates qualification bottlenecks since most B2B sales teams can effectively pursue only a few qualified opportunities simultaneously.

This quality-over-quantity approach delivers results: an enterprise SaaS provider targeting only $1B+ companies achieved 70% cost reduction and 3x engagement by focusing on ultra-precise targeting aligned with sales capacity.

Steps to Fix Marketing/Sales Misalignment

Align Campaigns with Sales Capacity

• Calculate your sales team’s true capacity for working on qualified opportunities.
• Set monthly lead generation goals that align with sales capacity, rather than arbitrary growth targets.
• Develop lead scoring systems that qualify prospects before they reach the sales team.
• Implement progressive profiling to gather firmographic information during conversion.

Optimize for Opportunity Quality

The Easy Way

Vehnta’s Insight Collection provides real-time business intelligence that automatically qualifies prospects, focusing on high-quality opportunities from pre-qualified target companies instead of generating hundreds of unqualified leads monthly.

The VisionSphere function provides a ranked list of companies most interested in your business, calculated by proprietary algorithms reflecting genuine buying interest.

What You Get

• Consistently higher-quality pipeline, driven by real-time insight into which companies actually show buying intent.
• Focused efforts on prospects that are already aligned with your offering.
• A ranked view of interested accounts.
• Clarity on where to prioritize and when to engage.
• More efficient sales motions.
• Stronger conversion rates.
• Faster deal velocity.

All the intelligence you need, without the noise.

Issue 4: Scalability Of ABM Approaches

The challenge of scaling Account-Based Marketing through Google Ads lies in managing hundreds of target accounts while maintaining surgical precision.

Traditional ABM approaches require significant manual effort and dedicated specialists, making it difficult to achieve scale without compromising quality.

However, this complexity can be overcome: a global manufacturer targeting 4,000+ plant locations reduced spend from $160K to $40K while generating 2.5x more qualified leads through automated ABM systems.

How To Fix Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Scalability

Phase 1: Implement Automated Account Intelligence

• Use advanced similarity algorithms to identify high-value prospects matching your best customers.
• Automate audience research and list-building processes that typically consume weeks of specialist time.
• Deploy AI-powered campaign creation that generates optimized targeting in minutes.
• Set up automated monitoring across hundreds of target accounts without additional team members.

Phase 2 Create Scalable Precision Systems

• Build campaigns that automatically diversify messaging across multiple languages.
• Implement systems providing full visibility into search behavior across target companies.
• Use proprietary algorithms to rank companies by genuine buying interest.
• Deploy real-time optimization eliminating manual analysis while maintaining quality.

The Easy Way

Vehnta accelerates campaign execution through a truly scalable ABM approach, enabling accurate targeting and real-time performance tracking across your entire B2B account list.

Integrated AI Campaign Generation allows marketers to generate highly relevant, B2B-tailored campaigns in minutes, not days, while minimizing budget waste on low-intent traffic. From day one, teams gain access to actionable insights and can fine-tune performance manually or through automated optimization.

Thanks to seamless Google Ads integration and automated multilingual message diversification at scale, Vehnta eliminates the operational friction that often stalls ABM at the execution phase.

What you get: ABM that finally matches the speed and scale of your growth ambitions, without the typical overhead. Campaigns go live faster, reach the right accounts with precision, and continuously improve through data-driven optimization. Marketing teams save time, reduce costs, and drive more qualified pipeline, while maintaining control and strategic clarity. The complexity is gone; the impact remains.

The Strategic Transformation: From Volume to Value

The transformation from failing to succeeding with B2B Google Ads requires fundamentally rethinking how paid search fits into complex, multi-stakeholder B2B sales processes. Companies achieving breakthrough results abandon volume-based B2C tactics for precision-focused, account-based strategies that create budget efficiency and market dominance within targeted segments.

The competitive opportunity is significant: while competitors chase high-volume keywords and vanity metrics, strategic B2B marketers focus on qualified accounts and pipeline impact using advanced targeting intelligence and automated optimization systems.

Ready to transform your B2B Google Ads approach?

Discover how Vehnta works and achieve precision at scale—cut costs, improve targeting, and align every campaign with how your customers actually buy.

Book a demo: boost leads, cut costs.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Vehnta. Used with permission.

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Google seems to be testing a new ad unit for hotel or nearby listings that have big blue buttons to book at the site being listed. The button takes them to a direct booking form. I am honestly not sure if this is new but I am told it is.

This was spotted by Brad Brewer who posted the following screenshot on X:

I think I was able to replicate this, so I made a GIF of it in action:

Brad wrote, “New Google Nearby Place Ad Unit – Direct Bookings for… Expedia and Booking Holdings.”

Are these new?

Forum discussion at X.

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Google AdSense announced a new feature to “Fill empty in-page ads” by showing “contextually-relevant suggestions related to your page and site inside unfilled ad spaces.” In short, if an ad is not filled by Google on your page, then Google will look for other ways to monetize that ad spot.

I should note at the top, that Google will turn this on by default for all AdSense publishers within 30 days. So if you want, you can opt out of it.

Google wrote, “An “unfilled ad space” occurs when AdSense is unable to find a suitable ad to show in a specific ad space on your page. You don’t make any revenue from an unfilled ad space.” So Google came up with a new “Fill empty in-page ads” setting.

When you select that setting, Google will try to fill it in other ways.

Google can show “contextually-relevant suggestions related to your page and site inside unfilled ad spaces.” Here is the example provided by Google:

Let’s say your page is about baking, in an unfilled ad space we might show suggestions that relate to baking such as ingredients or cooking utensils, etc. If a user clicks on any of these, we’ll try to show display ads relevant to the suggestion the user clicked on inside a dialog.

The other method? Well, Google didn’t say, they just wrote, “Other ways to improve the targeting of ads in the future and increase your long-term earnings.”

To turn this on, there is a new setting called Fill empty in-page ads to the “Ad serving” page in Blocking controls. You don’t need to take any action.

Google said it will turn on this new setting on for all publishers over the next 30 days.

If you don’t want AdSense to optimize your empty in-page ad spaces, you can opt out by taking these steps:

• Sign in to your AdSense account.
• Click Brand safety.
• Click Content, then Blocking controls.
• Click Manage Ad serving.
• In the “Display ads” section, turn off Fill empty in-page ads.

I spotted this first via Bruno Ramos Lara on X and then Mayank Parmar also sent me his:

@rustybrick AdSense link ads reborn pic.twitter.com/VEbME0WLpV

— Mayank Parmar (@mayank_jee) July 3, 2025

Forum discussion at X.

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This week, we finally had an official Google update, the June 2025 core update, which seemed to have kicked in on July 2nd. We also had an unconfirmed update on June 28th, days before the core update was announced. Google Search Console updated its Insights report. Google promoted AI Mode with an animated not Google Doodle. Google is testing AI Mode in Chrome. A study from Similarweb shows that clicks from Google dropped 13 percentage points since the launch of AI Overviews a year ago. I posted the monthly Google webmaster report. Bing placed the Copilot Search tab at the beginning of all tabs. Google Ads has a new broad match experiment testing. Google Ads AI Max is a search match type. Microsoft removed over one billion ads and 475,000 advertiser accounts. Microsoft Advertising will do away with TCPA and TROAS. Google AdSense will fill empty in page ads with contextual relevant suggestions, by default, in 30 days. Microsoft is laying off 9,000 jobs. And Cloudflare announced it will block AI crawlers by default and offer a Pay Per Crawl initiative. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Sponsor: BruceClay one of the founding fathers of the SEO space, doing search marketing optimization since 1996. Bruce Clay is big into SEO training, check out seotraining.com to learn more and check them out at bruceclay.com. Also, check out their new product, Prewriter.ai – this tool empowers writers to write better and more efficiently, so check it out.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favorite podcast player to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed. For the original iTunes version, click here.

Search Topics of Discussion:

Please do subscribe on YouTube or subscribe via iTunes or on your favorite RSS reader. Don’t forget to comment below with the right answer and good luck!

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Google is notifying some advertisers that their ads with message assets will stop serving on September 1st, and won’t be able to create new ones on August 1st, if the phone numbers remain unverified.

You will need to verify the phone numbers associated with those message assets in Google Ads. If you do not do that, Google won’t let you create new message assets starting on August 1st and then the ads will stop serving completely on September 1.

Arpan Banerjee received this email and posted a screenshot of it on X – it reads:

On August 1st, we will update the Unverified phone number section of the Destination requirements policy to make this requirement applicable to message assets, in addition to call-only ads, call assets, and location assets. We will begin enforcing the policy update for newly created message assets on August 1st. For existing message assets, we will begin enforcing the updated policy on September 1st.

Message assets will not serve if the associated phone number does not comply with this policy and cannot be properly verified. In case of disapprovals, you can learn more about how to fix a disapproved ad or asset.

Here is his screenshot:

Also via:

🚨 Google Ads Policy Update 🚨
Starting Aug 1, unverified phone numbers won’t be allowed in message assets.

📅 Enforcement for existing assets begins Sept 1.

Make sure your phone numbers are verified to avoid disapprovals!#GoogleAds #PPCchat pic.twitter.com/54k2w5j0ZA

— Govind Singh Panwar 🚀 (@mr_govindsingh) July 1, 2025

Forum discussion at X.

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Google has added AI Max to the search match types in the Google Ads interface. If you click on the Keywords tab in the Google Ads console, and then segment by “Search terms match type” you should see it.

Aleksejus Podpruginas first spotted this and posted about it on LinkedIn and then Thomas Eccel also covered it on LinkedIn.

Here is a screenshot from Aleksejus Podpruginas:

Here is Thomas Eccel’s GIF of this:

When you load up Google ads and then click on the Keywords tab, and then segment by “Search terms match type”, you’ll now see:

• Exact Match
• Phrase Match
• Broad Match
• AI Max

AI Max is new.

As a reminder, AI Max replaced Search Max as a name and it recently started creeping into the Google Ads interfaces.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

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