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Feeling bewildered by Google Ads?
The world’s biggest online advertising platform is a fickle beast, which can take years of practice to truly master. What’s more is that Google Ads changes come thick and fast, especially in the digital age where evolution is the name of the game.
In May 2019, the search giant announced a host of new updates at its annual event, Google Marketing Live. As we move towards the final quarter of 2019, it’s time to take a good look at the impact those changes have had.
Read on to discover 14 significant Google Ads changes, and how they can help your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns.
Optimization is a cornerstone of successful PPC advertising. Google knows this, and so, this year saw the introduction of a vital new barometer in the Google Ads dashboard — optimization score.
You’ll find this score on the recommendations page. Suggested actions will be provided to help you improve your Ads account performance in several ways. For example, these suggestions may include:
You can apply or dismiss each suggestion as you see fit. These recommendations can boost your conversion rates, which, in turn, will earn you more money and a better return on investment (ROI).
The optimization score ranges from 0% to 100% and is available to use at the account level, manager level, and campaign level.
In the image above, the account has an optimization score of 76.7%. You’ll see some suggested recommendations that will help bring the score to 100%.
As if the Optimization Score wasn’t a big enough win in Search campaigns, Google has since released it for use on Shopping Campaigns. The beauty of this is that you can get real-time recommendations, which is excellent news for anyone running an e-commerce store.
By taking cues from the recommendations page, you can make adjustments to ensure your Shopping Campaigns are fully-optimized for maximum impact. Being able to make essential changes during major promotions will help many e-commerce site owners earn a much better return on their advertising spend (ROAS).
At the Campaign level, there is a separate Optimization Score for Search and Shopping, whereas the scores are combined at the Account level.
Click Share is the estimated share of clicks you received out of all clicks your ad was eligible to receive. For example, your ad may have received ten clicks, but Google estimated it could have received 100 clicks if you had a higher budget, higher bids, or some extensions. In this case, your click share would be 10%, which leaves a lot of room for improvement.
This metric has been available for Google Shopping Campaigns since 2015, but the decision to release it for Search Campaigns was one of the big Google Ads changes this year.
Here’s a harsh truth:
53% of visitors to a mobile site will abandon the site if it takes any longer than three seconds to load.
Nowadays, people expect websites to be fast, and when the site loads, they want a smooth and straightforward user experience. If your site is mobile-responsive and built for speed, your traffic will plummet.
This year, Google released its Mobile Speed Score metric.
You’ll find this score in the Landing Pages tab and can use it to determine which pages need attention. You may deem it necessary to embrace Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), as these pages load up to 85% quicker than standard mobile pages. It’s no coincidence that 90% of AMP sites have the maximum mobile speed score of 10.
It’s important to know how your ads fare in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). At the turn of the year, Google rolled out two special new metrics that focus on this:
These give advertisers a clear view of how prominent their ads are in search results, and are far more accurate than the often misunderstood Average Position metric.
A lot of people fall into the habit of adding columns to their reports without really thinking of the value they add. The addition of the “recommended columns” option means that advertisers can tap into the real potential of Ads reporting.
For instance, if you’re using bid automation, you may be advised to add the ‘Bid Strategy Type’ column in your campaign table. In doing so, your reports provide quick insights so people can understand the bidding strategy with a glance. Furthermore, the Bid Strategy Type will no longer be a required column in your campaign reports. This frees up space so you can view more columns statistics.
Studies indicate that advertisers can increase conversion rates by 43% when they use the new Performance Planner, which was released on May 2019.
This tool works by analyzing your advertising spend, helping you determine how best to distribute your budget across your campaigns to generate optimal results.
By using the Performance Planner, you can assess critical metrics like spend levels, cost per acquisition (CPA), and cost per conversion. Users can click on spend points to see the potential impact of any changes. For example, you can assess the difference in conversion rates between $12 CPA and $20 CPA.
All things considered, this is one of the most exciting Google Ads changes in the past year, as it offers advertisers a smart, efficient way of using their budget.
When you’re choosing keywords for your PPC campaign, relevance is a major consideration. The Google Keyword Planner tool has gone through an array of changes in recent times, and now it is finely-tuned to generate the most relevant keywords for your campaigns.
Let’s say you start with the seed keyword, headphones. The tool will serve up closely related terms, like wireless headphones, Bluetooth headphones, and noise-canceling headphones. You can add words to the seed term to broaden your search.
Also, advancements in Keyword Planner mean that you can use the tool to get bid estimates, and even plan out your Search campaigns.
With literally trillions of searches happening on Google each year, the prospect of narrowing your focus as an advertiser can be a little overwhelming. How do you filter out the traffic to make sure you only pay for clicks from relevant, qualified users?
Keyword match types are the answer, and recent updates to Phrase Match keywords and Broad Match Modifier keywords are making it increasingly easy to attract qualified leads.
Industry experts project that advertisers will start using these match types more often, as they tend to attract more clicks, and better yet, more conversions. Also, 82% of these clicks are projected to be from new visitors, so your existing keywords won’t already cover them.
In PPC advertising, staying organized is paramount. As a manager, you’ll struggle to run a successful Google Ads account (and various sub-accounts!) if you haven’t got your ducks in a row. The more the business scales, the larger the Ads account may grow, so staying organized is crucial if you are to have any hope of generating a positive ROI and hitting targets.
Enter the Account Map.
This user-friendly tool helps you visualize your account structure, so you can quickly view each account, one at a time, gauging performance, and gleaning quick insights to determine what changes are needed.
Before this update, we needed to manually flip through multiple pages and countless tables, which proved to be a frustrating, counter-productive process. Now, with the Account Map, you have a central hub where you can manage all your Ads accounts in one place.
Anything that increases your conversion rates is sure to be a hit with PPC advertisers. So, when Google announced a new smart bidding strategy called Maximize Conversion Value, it’s no surprise that people got excited.
This option is now available in all Google Search campaigns, allowing you to set the optimal conversion value that is within your current PPC budget.
When a campaign is spending below its daily budget regularly, Google Ads offers an option that will reduce your daily budget in line with your actual daily spending. The Maximize Conversion Value option uses historical campaign data, and the user’s contextual signals to discover the optimal cost-per-click (CPC) bid at auction time.
The rules you set for conversion value in your campaign can be set according to the user’s device, location, or custom audience characteristics.
Accelerated Ad Delivery has long been an option in Google Ads, where advertisers could choose to use their daily budget in the earlier part of the day. This may be advantageous for those with an audience that is more active in the morning.
However, this option is no longer available for new search or shopping campaigns. Now, you only have the choice of Standard Delivery. This means your ad will be withheld from some auctions that it is eligible for, thus preserving your budget, so it lasts for longer each day.
For existing campaigns currently configured with Accelerated Delivery, they will be automatically migrated to Standard Delivery on 1st October 2019.
So, is this the death knell for Accelerated Ad Delivery in Google Ads?
No — not yet, anyway. Accelerated Delivery is still an option on Display and Video campaigns, and is expected to remain available for the foreseeable future.
Understandably, some advertisers have not greeted this update with the same warm reception that other Google Ads changes may have received. In response, Google has claimed that Accelerated Delivery is not practical for campaigns that have no budget limitations.
Moreover, campaigns that are restricted by budget limitations should not use this option either, as it can trigger increases in CPC rates due to the flurry of competition early in the day. Also, it may lead to unintentional budget spend in earlier time zones that you anticipated.
In a direct response to the demand from users, Google Ads has decided to launch a filter on the Overview page. This is the first page users see after they login to Google Ads, and so, it tends to get a high level of engagement.
Now, users can set filters on the Overview page, which permits a new level of customization and personalized functionality. Some of the filter options include:
Mobile has been the most focused device this year for the end-users as well for the technology solution providers. Mobile usage has been increasing day by day and Google especially has taken this seriously early this year and shifted their algorithms on Mobile-first indexing. Recently Google has introduced a metric that would help marketers to measure the mobile conversion rate with respect to desktop, it is referred to as “Relative Mobile conversion rate”.
Relative Mobile Conversion Rate is a ratio of the mobile conversion rates versus desktop. This metric, first discussed in the last year 2018, has now contained an official existence. It shows gaps in mobile performance and provides an accurate reflection of conversion rates over time.
It is a vital metric to monitor because they may indicate the mobile performance improvements if the mobile version is experiencing significantly fewer conversions than the desktop version.
You don’t have to be in PPC advertising for too long to understand that it involves a lot of metrics, and requires a dedicated approach to testing and optimization. With so many data points to consider, and such rapid changes in markets, consumer interests, and technology, standing still is not an option — for advertisers or Google Ads.
This platform will continue evolving, so advertisers have more features, more tools, and more specialized means of collecting, analyzing, and leveraging data insights from their PPC ads.
You should keep your ear close to the ground, so you understand the significant changes in Google Ads as they happen. That way, you’ll have a better chance of optimizing your campaigns for success.
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