AdWords ad rotation settings to get trimmed: Optimize or don’t

Google announced Tuesday a slight change to the ad rotation settings in AdWords. There will soon be just two options: “Optimize: Prefer best performing ads” and the not-so-subtly named “Do not optimize: Rotate ads indefinitely.” Five years ago is ancient history in digital marketing, but anyone who worked in paid search in 2012 will remember the backlash that came when Google announced the “rotate evenly” setting would last just 30 days before reverting to “optimize for clicks.” That was in April. In October of that year, Google reinstated “rotate indefinitely.” Since then, advertisers have been able to set their ad tests to “rotate indefinitely,” “rotate evenly” for at least 90 days, or rely on Google’s machine learning to optimize for clicks or conversions.