09 The History of PPC
The Machines Take the Wheel: Automation and the Black Box
Six years of advertiser controls removed one at a time, each with a reasonable justification, until managing an account looked nothing like it had in 2015.
On September 30, 2019, Google removed average position from its reporting.
If you weren’t managing accounts then, that sentence lands flat. If you were, it was the end of something. Average position was the metric. It was in every client report, every dashboard, every conversation about whether a campaign was working. Advertisers had spent seventeen years optimizing toward a number that told them where their ads showed up.
Google replaced it with impression share metrics, which are arguably more useful and definitely more abstract. But the removal wasn’t really about a metric. It was one entry in a six-year list of controls removed one at a time, each with a reasonable justification, until the job of managing a paid search account looked almost nothing like it had in 2015.
This is the era where PPC stopped being about pulling levers and started being about feeding a machine.
The keyword stops meaning what it said
The slow part came first. Between 2014 and 2021, Google steadily loosened what a keyword actually matches.
- 2014 — advertisers lose the option to turn off close variants. Plurals and misspellings now match automatically.
- March 2017 — exact match starts ignoring word order and function words. “Flights to New York” and “New York flights” become the same keyword.
- September 2018 — exact match expands to same-meaning variants. Implied words and paraphrases now qualify.
- July 2019 — same-meaning matching extends to phrase match and broad match modifier.
- February 2021 — phrase match absorbs broad match modifier entirely. BMM is retired.
Google’s stated benefit was consistent throughout: advertisers would see roughly 3 to 4% more clicks and conversions with each expansion.
Notice what “exact match” now means. It no longer means the query matched your keyword — only that Google judged the query to mean approximately the same thing. That judgment is not visible to you, and after September 2020, when Google restricted the search terms report to queries with “significant” volume, a portion of it stopped being auditable at all. The backlash was loud enough that Google partially reversed in February 2021, but full visibility never came back.
The keyword — the unit paid search was built on in 1998 — became a suggestion.
Smart Bidding
The bidding side moved in parallel. Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value, Enhanced CPC — launched and progressively pushed from 2016 onward, with manual controls quietly deprecated behind them. Enhanced CPC was finally retired in March 2025.
A lot of contractors treat Smart Bidding as a black box, but the mechanism isn’t mysterious in principle. Google evaluates each auction against a large set of signals — device, time of day, location, browser, audience membership, query, and a great deal more — predicts the probability that this specific person converts, and sets a bid for that one auction to hit your target.
No human can bid per-auction on signals they can’t see. That’s the honest case for automation, and it’s a strong one.
The honest case against is narrower: the machine optimizes for whatever you told it a conversion is. If your conversion action counts every form fill including spam, Smart Bidding will efficiently buy spam. Automation moved the skill in this job upstream rather than eliminating it — from bid management to defining what counts as success. That’s a harder problem, and it’s easier to get wrong quietly.
The ads write themselves
Responsive Search Ads launched in 2018. You supply up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions; Google assembles combinations and tests them. In February 2021, Google announced RSAs would become the default. On June 30, 2022, Expanded Text Ads — where you wrote the whole ad and it ran exactly as written — were sunset.
Between those two moves, on July 24, 2018 (announced June 27), AdWords became Google Ads. The word “words” came out of the name eighteen years after launch. That’s not subtle.
Performance Max
Then the whole structure collapsed into one campaign type.
Performance Max entered beta in 2021 and became globally available on November 2, 2021. It runs across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps from a single campaign. You provide assets, audience signals, a budget, and a goal. Google decides everything else — which channel, which placement, which creative combination, which bid.
In 2022, Google forced the migration: Smart Shopping campaigns auto-upgraded in July, Local campaigns in August, everything complete by September.
The complaint was immediate and it was about visibility. There was no channel-level reporting, no meaningful search term data, no placement control. Search Engine Land described the core objection simply: advertisers poured money in and got results out, with minimal visibility into what happened between.
Reporting has improved since. Channel-level data, asset group performance, and search category insights all arrived later. But the fundamental posture didn’t change: PMax is a campaign type where the platform allocates your budget and shows you a summary afterward.
What the era actually took
Line them up and the pattern is unmistakable.
| What went away | When |
|---|---|
| Ability to disable close variants | 2014 |
| Separate device campaigns | 2013, partially returned 2016 |
| Average position | September 2019 |
| Full search terms visibility | September 2020 |
| Broad match modifier | February 2021 |
| Expanded Text Ads | June 2022 |
| Channel and placement control in Shopping and Local | 2022 |
| Rule-based attribution models | 2021–2023 |
| Enhanced CPC | March 2025 |
Every one had a defensible rationale. Machine learning genuinely performs better with more data and fewer constraints. Privacy regulation genuinely limited what could be reported. Simplification genuinely helped small advertisers who were never going to build a well-structured account.
All of that can be true while the cumulative effect is also true: the advertiser’s ability to independently verify what they’re buying declined substantially, and the party doing the allocating is the party being paid.
Brin and Page named that conflict in 1998. Nothing about automation resolved it.
What this means for your account
Your conversion tracking is now the steering wheel. This is the whole game. If you’re a plumber and your conversion action counts every call over 15 seconds, you’re teaching the algorithm that wrong numbers are wins. Set call length thresholds that reflect real conversations. Import booked jobs from your CRM if you can. Assign values that reflect actual job margin — a $400 drain clear and a $12,000 repipe should not be worth the same to the bidding algorithm.
Negative keyword lists do the work exact match used to do. With close variants and broad match feeding queries you can’t fully see, negatives are your primary control surface. Build them from the search terms you can see, and maintain them monthly rather than at setup.
Don’t let Performance Max eat your brand terms. PMax will happily spend your budget on people searching your company name — cheap conversions that would have come to you anyway. Use brand exclusions and run a separate branded Search campaign so you can see that spend honestly.
Test with holdouts, not dashboards. When the platform reports on its own performance, the only independent evidence is what happens to your total booked jobs when you change something. Turn a campaign off for two weeks. Look at the calendar, not the interface.
Judge your agency on inputs now. Ask what conversion actions are configured, what values are assigned, what’s excluded, and what the last four experiments were. If the answer is about bid adjustments and ad copy tweaks, they’re doing 2012’s job.