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As we move into 2021, the leading search engine in the world continues to evolve to provide a better service for consumers, marketers, and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals. In this article, we’ll explore the top Google Ads updates, looking at the significant changes on the platform over the past year.
The purpose of the campaign goal is important and of course having conversions through campaign is inevitable. But not all conversions are of equal values. Now based on certain characteristics like location, device and audience you can adjust conversion values. If your audience is related to sports products and you know you might have repeated customer who already bought some product like triathlon gear, you can multiply the conversion value by specific value for this specific group. These rules will be used by smart bidding (Maximize Conversion and Target ROAS) to optimize the bid.
Google Ads introduced new Google Ads Editor v1.7 that includes support for Hotel ads, easier downloads, YouTube audio ads, lead form extensions and more.
Now you can reach new customers and make bookings by managing your Hotel ads with new version of Google Ads Editor.
You can now select specific parts of your campaigns to download to work in your campaigns offline.
To help drive brand awareness, Google Ads now supporting YouTube audio ads in Google Ads Editor.
You can now search, discover, or watch relevant content with lead form extensions in Google Ads Editor.
People may interact with multiple ads from the same brand while making purchase decisions. Attribution models let you choose how much credit each ad interaction gets for your conversions so you can focus your investments on the media with the biggest impact. Now Google Ads upgraded non-last click models, including data-driven attribution, to support YouTube and Display ads. The data-driven attribution model now measures engaged views from YouTube. With these new updated, the data-driven attribution model learns even more from how users interact with your ads and convert. Google Ads now added YouTube and Display ads to attribution reports, alongside Search and Shopping ads.
For different attribution model, the “Model comparison” report helps you compare your cost per conversion and return on ad spend, such as last click, rules-based, and data-driven attribution. Now in once place you are able to see your Search, YouTube, and Display ads and understand their impact on conversions to help you select the attribution model that’s right for your business.
You choose an attribution model when you set your conversion action. After changing your attribution model, you can notice changes to the reporting in your “Campaigns” tab:
Now consumers looking for back-to-school gear and supplies plan to shop both online and in-store to get everything they need. To help you in this situations Google Ads gives three local ad solutions.
It is watched that more than 50% of North American back-to-school customers say they’ll check for in-store stock online some time recently going into a store and 48% will shop at stores that offer curbside pickup or contactless shipping. Offer assistance customers discover the things they require in adjacent stores utilizing nearby stock advertisements. You’ll presently appear items that are accessible for prompt store pickup nowadays, pickup later or curbside pickup. On the off chance that you’re not however on nearby stock advertisements, you’ll be able utilize your existing Shopping advertisements nourish to control pickup afterward that’s accessible within the beta however.
It is observed that 60% of back-to-school shoppers plan to do at least a portion of their shopping at a small business this year. For retailers of all sizes to promote their locations across Google Maps, Search, YouTube, Gmail and the Google Display Network, local campaigns are a simple yet powerful solution. You can drive foot traffic for store reopening, special in-store promotions, updated business hours and specific products that are available in nearby stores. Local campaigns measure and optimize specifically for store visits and/or local actions such as phone calls and clicks on driving directions to your store.
Customers interchange between online and in-store so on the off chance that you’ve got physical areas, don’t constrain the reach and viability of your online advertisements. Include store visits in Shrewd Offering to assist develop add up to deals, whether they happen online or in your stores. Keen offering naturally sets offers for each advertisement sell off – in real time – based on your particular execution objectives. You’ll be able optimize for omnichannel objectives in your search and Shopping campaigns.
You’ll now see the following choices when you create new bid strategies for Search campaigns:
Within the next few weeks, you’ll no longer have the option of using the old Target CPA or Target ROAS bid strategies for standard campaigns. Instead, use the updated bid strategies by setting optional targets. This update only applies to campaign-level strategies; portfolio bid strategies will be updated another year.
If a target CPA or target ROAS has been set, you can see it in “Bid strategy type” column.
During peak shopping moments, Google Ads now making it easier for you to showcase your promotions across more surfaces on Google, customize your seasonal promotions and make better merchandising decisions to help you drive more sales.
By uploading your promotions in Google Merchant Center, relevant products will automatically be eligible to be included in new deals experience when shoppers scroll through the results page on the Shopping tab, they will now see a new “Deals related to your search” prompt that highlights the most competitive deals based on discount.
To help you attract new customers with your best deals, you can now indicate if a promotion is only available to customers who haven’t previously bought from you. The title of the promotion could now say “10% off for new users”. While these promotions will still be shown to all, shoppers will only be able to access the promotional price if eligible. To help you reach more customers, you can now highlight your promotions on free listings on the Shopping tab. You can navigate to the promotions tab in Merchant Center to choose which promotions you want to be indexed through organic traffic and appear on free listings or, alternatively, supported with ad spend.
Google Ads now adding two new features to their best sellers report to give you more relevant and timely shopping insights to help you more effectively plan your product assortment: historical best seller data and relative demand.
By having access to historical best seller data, you can better predict sales trends for the upcoming season by first understanding popular products from previous shopping moments (like last year’s Black Friday or Christmas). This newly added field called relative demand that can help you gauge the relative demand between products in the same category and country as well as the potential opportunity when stocking new products.
Google Ads now introducing a new pilot program to test a three-strike system for repeat ad policy violations. Starting September 2021, warnings and strikes will be issued for violations of Google Enabling Dishonest Behavior, Unapproved Substances and Dangerous Products or Services policies—this includes ads promoting deceptive behavior or products such as the creation of false documents, hacking services, and spyware, as well as tobacco, drugs and weapons, among other types of content. These types of ads have long been prohibited, but now we are introducing increasing penalties with each strike applied. Here’s how the strikes system will work:
You can now create new sub-manager accounts from within your existing manager accounts as well create your new manager accounts directly from the Performance page and Sub-account settings page in Google Ads. Now you no longer need to have a user assigned to a sub-manager account also you can now remove users from your existing sub-manager accounts. This makes it easier for you to stay under the limit of 20 Google Ads accounts per Google account.
TV in Reach Planner helps media planners understand the optimal mix of television and YouTube to maximize their reach with this tool you can forecast the total unduplicated reach, average frequency, and TRPs of a holistic media plan and it also help you compare your original plan with a recommended plan to make better informed decisions. Google Ads now announced that TV in Reach Planner is now available in the United States, Japan, France, Vietnam, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Germany, India, Spain and Russia. To apply for access to TV in Reach Planner please reach out to your Google team.
Google Ads introduced ad pods and with ad pods two ads served back-to-back. Ad pods are typically served to viewers who watch longer form content to reduce interruptions to their viewing experience. Now soon ad pods will be eligible to serve non-skippable in-stream ads in addition to skippable in-stream ads and bumpers. With this update, you will continue to minimize viewer interruptions while helping advertisers connect with their most important audiences.
Now you’ll no longer be able to create new BMM keywords with the +keyword notation. However, existing BMM keywords will continue to serve using the updated phrase matching behavior. However you’ll be able to edit attributes of your BMM keywords like bid or status, but if you want to edit the keyword text you’ll be prompted to change it to phrase match.
Within Google Ads:
TrueView for action helps brands engage with prospective customers on the watch page. As customer journeys become more complex, it’s important to reach customers in moments of exploration and evaluation. That’s why Google Ads evolving TrueView for action and scaling its best features to more places on and off YouTube with Video action campaigns.
Video Actions campaigns give you a lot of benefits:
Optimizing your campaigns is critical to improving performance for your Video campaigns and driving the business results you need. That’s why Google Ads bringing optimization score to Video action campaigns. Optimization score surfaces personalized recommendations to aid take full advantage of your campaign performance across Search, Display, Shopping, and now Video. You can easily tap into your Video action campaigns’ maximum potential by checking the optimization score and following the listed recommendations that meet your business goals.
Related video extensions extend your message beyond your primary video ad, keeping viewers engaged with your creative and now these are globally available to all advertisers who use Google Ads. With related video extensions, you can show a list of 2 to 5 related videos below your video ad on the YouTube mobile app.
Here’s a quick recap of all the product announcements:
Image extensions are now available globally to help the customers.
Now you can showcase your brand using different types of images such as lifestyle visuals or product shots. By tapping these images, people will be taken directly to your site.
Google Ads now add images from your landing pages to their corresponding ad groups in your Search campaigns. You can then review these images and remove any you don’t want to show with your ads. Dynamic image extensions are currently available in English and will roll out in additional languages over the next few months.
Image extensions now gives you an easy way to inspire potential customers while you expand the reach of your Search campaigns. By connecting with people as they search for videos related to your products and services, you can engage even more qualified customers.
Google Ads shared their focus areas as they anticipate travel reopening in parts of the world, highlighting three new products to help their partners capture pent up demand: vacation rentals in Hotel results, hotel booking extensions in text ads, and enhancements to commissions bidding.
As users decide on their choice of accommodations, Google Ads will begin showing vacation rental listings within the Hotel results page for a given destination.
Google Ads recently introduced hotel booking extensions, which automatically surfaces Hotel Ads feed data within Search text ads extensions.
Google Ads introducing new ways to make commission (per stay) easier than ever to use
Here are some new ways to reach people nearby that Google Ads has announced at Google Marketing Livestream.
To help more people find your business, Google Ads added three new ways for Local campaigns to show up on Google Maps.
Now in your local inventory ads you can show products that are available for immediate store pickup today, pickup later or curbside pickup. If you are not yet on local inventory ads, you can utilize your existing Shopping ads feed to power pickup later that is available in beta yet.
To make smart bidding even easier for you to manage these bid strategies and drive performance, Google Ads now rolling out several new features.
Top signals in the bid strategy report give you more transparency into the factors that drive your campaign performance and can help inform your broader marketing strategy now these signals are available for Search campaigns using Target ROAS and Maximize conversion value as well.
Smart Bidding uses machine learning to automatically set bids at auction time to improve the performance of your campaigns. Google Ads now seasonality adjustments to give you more control while using smart bidding. To make these adjustments even easier to use, you can now set them at the manager account level instead of creating them for each individual account.
Google Ads making it easier to opt into Maximize conversion value bidding by surfacing new opportunities on the Recommendations page. These recommendations will show for eligible Search campaigns and can help you get more conversion value within your budget.
Target Impression Share simulators to predict performance:
Simulators is now available for search campaigns using Target Impression Share. With this change, you can now understand how adjustments to your target impression share can impact metrics like cost, impression share, and clicks.
To make easier for you to use Customer Match, Google Ads has launched the following updates to help you reach more of your customers and improve performance.
You can now see your match rate instantly and also Google Ads helps show you the match rates of previous uploads so you can see your historical trends.
When you should update your lists, Google Ads will now surface a suggestion on the Recommendations page automatically.
Following few points to be taken care based on the Apple’s new ATT policies:
Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) bidding within app campaigns is available for such android apps which have used Firebase SDK conversion reporting. By putting your budget and desired target ROAS, Google will use these parameter to find new users that fit with your app goals.
Now Target CPA and Target ROAS will be bundled with the Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value bid strategies, respectively. This means that:
You can see the updates in the table:
Google Ads advertiser controls allow advertising partners to choose where their ads appear, the format in which their ads run, and the audience they want to reach. But just as importantly, these controls also allow advertisers to avoid running ads alongside content that they wish to avoid. These controls already allow advertisers to block specific websites, content, or entire topics from their advertising campaigns, including entire lists of sites that they want to exclude all at once.
Google Ads introduces a new feature that will help simplify this process giving advertisers the ability to use dynamic exclusion lists that can be updated seamlessly and continuously over time. These lists can be created by advertisers themselves or by a third party they trust, such as brand safety organizations and industry groups. Once advertisers upload a dynamic exclusion list to their Google Ads account, they can schedule automatic updates as new web pages or domains are added, ensuring that their exclusion lists remain effective and up-to-date. This feature will be available to all users within the coming weeks.
Google Ads have robust policies and enforcement technologies in place that protect all advertisers from harmful content and bad actors. These investments are the bedrock of Google Ads works to create a safe advertising ecosystem. Google Ads now strengthened their enforcement capabilities, investing heavily in technology as well as enforcement teams around the world that enable us to block or demonetize violating content.
Google Ads now updating the global site tag (gtag.js) and Google Tag Manager (gtm.js) to set a new same-site cookie on advertisers’ web domains to help improve how Google Ads attribute conversions back to ads. Consistent with how existing first-party cookies work, the new cookie will be unique and limited to users on your site only. Starting in May 2021, this first-party cookie will enable more accurate attribution of conversions, including instances where a user might engage with more than one of your ads before converting.
Google Ads rolled out the Insights page (beta) last year in select countries to help businesses stay on top of emerging trends. Now, the Insights page is available to all advertisers globally. The Insights page surfaces trends tailored to your business, so you can see if you’re keeping up with demand for trending products or services.
To help you optimize your campaigns more efficiently, you now have the option to apply recommendations automatically. By opting in, Google Ads will apply recommendations of your choice as new opportunities come up. You can choose from over 17 recommendations to apply automatically. You can change these selections or opt out of them at any time.
You’ll be able to see both when and how many times these recommendations have been applied in the “History” tab.
You can now enable continuous audience sharing from your sub-accounts as well. When you opt in to continuous audience sharing, any existing and future remarketing lists you create from sub-accounts will be automatically shared with your manager account. This update means that you don’t have to create new audience lists or manually select audiences from each account.
Google Ads announced the global availability of property promotion ads, an ad format that helps advertisers reach users who have not yet identified the exact hotel they would like to book. Now, advertisers will be able to set specific bids for property promotion ads through the Google Ads interface, API and bulk upload system.
With this update, property promotion ads will be made available via an ad group type within the Hotel Campaign in Google Ads. All active hotel campaign advertisers will be eligible to show.
To make it easier for you to manage your campaigns, Google Ads rolling out a new summary view. This simplified layout can help you do the following:
View performance at a glance:
Improve performance with custom recommendations:
Create and edit campaigns in just a few clicks:
Manage keywords in one place:
Google Ads is rolling out two new features to help you monitor and improve performance in real time with mobile app.
You can now set up custom notifications. This makes it easy for you to get real time notifications about the performance and status changes you care about.
To make it easier to understand performance changes, you can now review performance insights in the Google Ads mobile app. With this feature, you’ll receive a real-time notification if there’s a significant performance change, and an explanation describing why the change occurred. You may also see a recommendation to help you resolve the issue.
Google Ads announced some important changes to the Google Partners program’s structure and badge criteria to help partner and your clients continue to thrive.
Responsive search ads can help you reach more of your customers and grow your business in real time, even as consumer behavior changes. Now responsive search ads will be the default ad type for Search campaigns in Google Ads. Expanded text ads can still be created if needed. To get the most from your responsive search ads, consider these best practices:
To give you an even more holistic view of your Google media, Google Ads now added Display ads to attribution reports, alongside Search including Shopping and YouTube ads.
YouTube and Display ads in attribution reports are now in beta. Eligible advertisers will be able to opt-in within the Measurement > Attribution section of Google Ads.
The Top Paths report shows how your Search including Shopping, YouTube, and Display ads work together to drive conversions. This makes it easy to view the most common paths your customers take to complete a conversion based on the ads they interact with along the way. This includes clicks and video engagements.
Now, you’ll be able to see your Search, YouTube, and Display ads in one place and understand their impact on conversions to help you select the attribution model that’s right for your business.
Google Ads confirmed that the deadline to adopt parallel tracking for Video campaigns is April 30, 2021. If you work with a click measurement provider, reach out to them as soon as possible to ensure that there’s no disruption to your click measurement system. Use this parallel tracking partner guide to help with the transition.
To help you generate more leads, you can now show a lead form when people tap the headline of your Search ad rather than guiding them to a landing page.
Google Ads is rolling out changes to phrase match and broad match modifier that make it easier for you to reach your customers, no matter how they’re searching. Simplifying match types .Now, you’re able to reach people with the following keyword match types:
With these improvements, you can reach the searches you want just by using phrase match—without worrying about the searches you don’t want.
This change also helps you to streamline keyword management and save time.
Google Ads understand that these changes can mean different things to different businesses, and they want to help minimize any disruption. That’s why Google Ads rolling these changes out slowly over several months. Starting mid-February, both phrase match and broad match modifier keywords will begin to transition to this new matching behavior. Once the new behavior has been rolled out globally, you’ll no longer be able to create new broad match modifier keywords. However, existing broad match modifier keywords will continue to serve under the new behavior. That’s why starting now, you are recommended to create new keywords in phrase match going forward.
To help you make the most out of these upcoming changes, we suggest the following best practices:
To help you more accurately compare the impact of your video ad campaigns across formats, Google Ads standardizing the conversion attribution across all skippable in-stream and feed video formats measured through Google Ads Conversion Tracking. This is in line with the current conversion attribution for our Action focused video formats, with Clicks and Engaged-views (10s) as the default attribution events that allow you to compare conversion performance between two different campaign types more accurately. An advertiser running a Video action (tCPA) campaign and a Video consideration (CPV) campaign can now compare the conversion attribution performance in the same way.
All advertisers will be able to create and manage cross-account bid strategies for both Search and standard shopping campaigns. It is easier to drive more performance by combining campaigns from different accounts into a single portfolio.
Google is helping their community prepare, as they know that developers and advertisers in the iOS ecosystem are still figuring out how to adapt upcoming App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy.
Review Apple’s documentation and applicable laws and regulations to determine whether implementing the ATT framework is right for your app or not.
After Apple’s ATT policy goes into effect, your iOS App campaigns are likely to see fluctuations in campaign volume. For App campaigns for engagement, you will see a significant decrease in reach that’s why you have to closely monitor the performance and delivery of all your iOS App campaigns and, if necessary, adjust budgets and bids to achieve your goals.
SKAdnetwork is Apple’s new framework to verify installs from various ad networks where you promote your app. You can easily implement SKAdnetwork solution by upgrading to the latest version of Google Analytics for Firebase. This will automatically register your apps for SKAdnetwork attribution and help you measure “first open” conversions for consented users. Alternatively, you can use another SDK that supports SKAdnetwork or implement Apple’s SKAdnetwork API yourself.
If you’re participating in our beta for tROAS campaigns on iOS, you should pause these campaigns and revert to tCPA campaigns by enforcement.
You’ll also see a change in the way we report on conversions. In reporting, we will be expanding modeled conversions from just on Search to other channels as well. This means your conversion column as well as your install, in-app action, and conversion value columns may contain modeled conversions.
To make it easy for you to prevent technical from impacting Smart Bidding, Google Ads is introducing data exclusions for Search, Shopping and Display campaigns. This new tool can help you ensure that Smart Bidding uses accurate data to set the right bids. For example, let’s say that your website conversion tracking breaks and underreports conversions for 5 days. With data exclusions, you can now exclude that date range from being used by Smart Bidding.
If you already have remarketing list available, you might be interested to have new customers which should match with this similar search behavior audience you already have in remarketing list.
Image source: Google Support
As every business got affected during COVID-19. Digital advertisement also needed some changes during this pandemic. In this regard Google itself helped the advertiser by providing enhance knowledge guidelines which they need to take care for managing campaigns through COVID-19. The guideline includes new resources for evaluating your media strategy and adjusting your campaigns based on shifting consumer behavior that can help you to evaluating your campaign and industry trend.
All business owners want to have more quality-oriented customers and Google push them in this path too. Google have provided few updates which can help in customer acquisition like:
Security is important in Google ads account. Why everyone should have access to everything if it is of no concern to them. That is why with billing-only role only you can give access to the finance department team. They will be able to view and manage billing but won’t be able to change anything in the campaign.
Moreover, there is now a ownership role. Previously there could be many owners of the account. Now with ownership role there could be only one owner of the Google ads account.
To see your expected reach with new customers, now you will be able to see the results in Audience Manager in Google Ads.
Estimates will be available for Search audience list having more than 20000 users, and for YouTube Audience list having more than 5000 users. Google is already working on it to expand it in future.
You always have to look shift in campaign performance whenever optimization is done. If some shifts happen in campaigns it will be very difficult and time consuming to diagnose. But with single click you can see the reason of performance change with Explanation in Google Ads. This helps you to spend less time in exploring the reason and more time to do optimization. Google has expanded explanations to search campaigns that use Target CPA.
Now you will be able to see the reason for important changes in cost and conversions for those search campaigns which use Target CPA, for example, you can find with explanation that if your campaign and ad group performance was impacted by changes to bid limits, Target CPA, Budget and more.
While exploring things with explanations. Keep in mind that explanations can only compare two time periods of equal length within 90 days moreover you will only be able to see those campaigns which have significant changes in performance.
If you have different spending and return on investment levels then Performance Planner helps you in predict the performance. The new features are introduced in it.
ii. Shared budget Campaigns:
Shared budget can be created, modified and downloaded forecasts are now supported in search campaigns.
ii. Plan Sharing:
You can now share your plan. Anyone in the account can view and edit the plan. In the top right corner of your plan you will find “Share”. Upon clicking this new screen will open and from there you can allow it to share.
iii. Conversion Lag Report:
In your campaign when you got some conversion sometimes there happened a delay in updating the number. They can sometimes cause CPA to look high and ROAS to look down. So accurate numbers are not available which may result in wrong forecasting. But now with the conversion delay/lag report you can have better account performance forecast. This report is only available for App Campaigns for install, App Campaign for engagement and Search Campaigns.
Google Ads Editor version 1.5 is rolled out now. In this new release you will have improve ad strength, support for additional recommendations and image extensions.
Remember ad strength gives you idea about to provide the right message to your customers. It varies from “Incomplete” to “Excellent”, this measure the relevancy, quantity and diversity of your ad copy. In Google Ads Editor new version you will be able to see ad strength in new column.
You can now build and grow your audience much faster with maximize conversion bidding in App campaigns. You only have to provide your budget rest with Google machine learning intelligent algorithm you will get maximum install in no time. Either you have come with new game, planning for seasonal campaigns or promoting new content in your app, you should use this option to grow your audience faster. You will not see the results immediately wait for few weeks of running this bid strategy, you will definitely show an effective CPI based on the budget you set and the installs you were able to generate. You may later choose to transition from Maximize conversions to CPI bidding.
You can set maximize conversion bidding as:
Currently, App campaigns accept more than 30 different sizes and dimensions for image assets. Starting later this year, Google will begin shifting from size-based to ratio-based image specifications. You will only need to upload images in three aspect ratios:
Increasing the image file size limit from 150KB to 5MB so you can upload higher-quality assets.
GIFs will no longer be accepted. The only accepted formats will be .jpg and .png.
Google will send alerts in your Google Ads account to notify you of ad groups that contain unsupported images and remind you to take action when get closer to launch this update.
To help you make this transition, Google will soon introduce a tool that enables you to crop your images into one or more of the supported dimensions.
Six additional recommendation types have been added. These will help you improve your responsive search ads, adopt Target ROAS bidding and more.
This update helps you to expand your ad with additional information like location information, call buttons, website links and more
Other than above mentioned, more features in Google Ads editor include:
Optimization score gives you idea about personalized recommendation based on your campaign goals. Now you will be able to see your campaign goal next to your optimization score.
Campaign goals are derived from your bidding strategy and can be focus on conversions, conversion value, clicks or impression share. Let’s suppose you have set bidding strategy is set to maximize conversions then optimization score will help you to optimize with respect to conversion. In the same way your recommendations will be changed based on that.
You will now be able to see the top recommendation for your campaigns next to campaign goals.
Customer Match lets you use you’re online and offline data to reach and re-engage with your customers across Search, Shopping, Gmail, YouTube, and Display. The information shared by the customer used by customer matches to target the ads accordingly. As a relationship with customer keeps on increasing so keeping the aligned and updated manually is a time-consuming task. That is why Google as collaborated with Zapier to make it easier to work with the Customer Match List. You don’t need to manually upload, remove or sort the list. It will automatically pull from information from your customer relationship management system, marketing automation or ecommerce tool to Google Ads. Your offline conversion data can also automatically updated with Zapier now.
You mobile app can engage your honest customers and keep them coming back to you. With app campaigns you can provide your customer fresh and relevant content.
You can capture users’ attention and provoke them to come back to your app by prominence of new content or offers in your ad text, image and video assets.
Optimization and recommendations are important. If your account is set up to capture full potential, you can easily manage multiple accounts and identify opportunities for better growth.
You can also click into your optimization score for individual accounts to apply recommendations that help you meet your marketing objectives.
Recommendations and Local campaigns are now in Google Ads Editor V.14.
Recommendations provide customized suggestions to help improve your campaigns’ performance. To make it easier for you to implement these suggestions at scale, you can now review and apply recommendations across accounts in Google Ads Editor V1.4.
You can use Google Merchant Center and Business Data feed to your app campaign for engagement. With feeds your ads may be available all the time with updated products and services.
Remember to have an app campaign for engagement, advertisers must have:
There is another deep link validation feature in Google Ads now, this will help to send user to the right app landing page linked with your ads. When you create your campaign just add your URL.
You can check the type of recommendation to know where and how many recommendations can be applied in your account.
With Local campaigns feature, you can easily search and replace text, move items, and undo or redo changes to your local campaigns in bulk.
There is an update now in lead form extensions: an improved way to drive high-quality leads across Search, YouTube, Discovery, and Display ads. It is easier to manage and effective.
Machine learning has made responsive search efficient enough to deliver relevant messages to potential customers. It is observed responsive search ads increase 10% more clicks and conversions. Following are the updated in features now:
i. Location Insertion:
You can now use location insertion in responsive search ads. It will show your location dynamically where your ads are being shown. Once set up, your ad will automatically include city, state, or country names based on the locations of potential customers or their areas of interest.
You can find Lead Form Extension for YouTube and Discovery campaigns in the ”Extensions” page of Google Ads. Moreover you can now choose from over fifty available questions to customized lead forms according to your business. For example, let’s say you want to drive qualified leads for your car dealership. You can now ask questions like “Which type of vehicle are you interested in?” or “When do you plan on purchasing a vehicle?”
You can use Webhook by yourself or Zapier to automatically link your leads to your CRM.
There are two layouts available in discovery ads, optimize the mobile canvas on Google’s feeds, which help you to drive actions with consumers. As the user scrolls, he will be able to see 4:5 portrait aspect ratio layout to showcase your products and services. You can use lead form extension with discovery ads to directly capture the leads data.
Advertisers which use discovery ads along with audience expansion have seen 52% more conversions at comparable cost per acquisition to their default selected audience. More informed decisions with detail forecasting will also be available to scale your campaign performance. You can now also set up audience exclusion during campaign creation which really helps you if you are planning to have new customers rather than engaging existing customers as they shop for holidays. Below is the image of audience inclusion and exclusion in discovery ads.
Everybody is waiting for new normal and that is why consumer behavior is changed so much. Search queries trends are changing e.g. “Online gift” is increasing year over year 80%. That is why Google has introduced Insight Page to help you stay on top by following these emerging trends. These trends are based on your business. Let’s suppose you are online pet store and you are looking for more customers. If you look at the insight page you will see the rising demand of “Dog subscription boxes” and “dog toys”. Based on these trends you can create optimized campaign to target the relevant audience.
You can check with report how many times your ad was shown using location insertion.
ii. Countdown Customizer:
if you want to promote sales or even and want to show count down in your responsive search ads, now it is possible so that you won’t miss out your potential customer.
iii. Suggestion in Ad Writing:
You will find commonly used phrases while writing headlines and descriptions for your responsive search ads, they will help to highlight online availability, shipping and return options for your business. Even you add your final URL, it will make some suggestions from your existing website content and existing ad.
Performance of your assets used in your responsive search ads can be measured now. You can find the prominent insights at the campaign level. Once you’ve determined which assets are performing well, you can apply those learnings to other ads. If assets are performing poorly, you can take action to replace those assets.
You can further go down to see the rising searches and also know the locations where the demand is increasing fast. E.g. you can find the trend for “Vitamins & Supplements” with growing searches for “vitamin C” in Florida and California.
This reporting data is not real time but it is updated on daily basis. You can find this report on the left menu under Ads and Extensions and then click “Assets”.
Recommendation:
Google Ads introduced a new recommendation to “improve your responsive search ads” when their Ad strength is below ‘Good’. This is an easy way for you to optimize your ads in a more efficient way. When checking your account’s optimization score, look for this recommendation to help you identify opportunities that can improve your responsive search ads at scale.
You can also take advantages of the suggested trends which are currently growing but you are not considering. For example, a grocery store may discover a related trend like “whipped coffee” which may give them prospect upgrade or product development ideas.
The insight page will also have recommendations you can evaluate and apply keyword, budget, and bidding recommendations in just a few clicks.
As time passing by, online shopping is becoming more in demand. That is why smart shopping campaigns are becoming better by offering more visuals and more goals.
Now you can add your conversion value to your new customer.
Showing your images can be more visually attractive Just as Smart Shopping campaigns can optimize your bids and placements, the format in which your products are displayed will also respond to your customers’ needs. Google is adding more visual features to help customers easily discover more retailers, explore options and narrow down who they want to make a purchase with.
Google has released new features in smart bidding for you that can help you in managing campaign using Smart Bidding with much improvements.
When it comes to Target CPA, Target ROAS and budget, it is very important to keep an eye on them. Because if not handled with caution, it can have serious impact on your campaign. Simulator will help you understanding how Target CPA and Target ROAS and budget change can affect your performance. Following report is based on 7 days of campaign data. Simulators helps you to see what has happened in the past, but it does mean it is future. Simulators will provide you capability to predict future in Search campaign. You can even date range up to 90 days (3 months) in the future, simulators will help you so you can forecast better, how changing budget or target changes can impact your performance.
When the customer is ready to buy, they may see annotations that can help them make an informed purchase decision. For example, you can highlight free and fast shipping on Google Search (U.S. only).
You can continue to highlight promotions on your products to further convince customers to make the purchase with your business. (U.S., U.K., DE, AU, IN, FR only)
Getting better understanding with reporting improvements:
In bid strategy, Google have introduced new recommendations. Google has introduced new keywords or budget opportunities, it can help you get more results in your campaigns while completing your goals. More recommendations are in pipeline.
Four features from bid strategy report now available to provide more transparency into smart bidding performance:
Consumers search queries are constantly changing. This is making more difficult for advertisers to guess every possible search query which is related to your business. For example, more and more global users are searching for “support local businesses”. It is growing over 20,000% year over year. Now, it is getting more and more vital to understand the intent of user search.
Performance objects can achieved by using broad match and Smart Bidding together can help you reach more relevant queries that meet your performance objectives. For example, a board match keyword like women’s jeans could match to relevant queries you may not have thought of like winter jeans for women or women’s accessories. By combining this keyword with Smart Bidding, it can use auction-time signals to set the right bid for every queries. So, you don’t need to guess and manage every possible search.
You can take advantages from Smart Bidding in your own accounts. Broad match can identify existing keywords that are likely to improve performance if you switch them to Broad match. It popup automatically on the Recommendations page in your account. Advertisers which switched from phrase match and broad match modified keyword to board match can observe that there conversions are increasing and they also having conversion value. Few companies have use this strategy to generate long term growth.
You can easily compare your performance with other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions by using auction insights report. Single view was making difficult for advertisers to evaluate his cross-account performance, because it was only available on account level. Now it is easier for advertiser, because auction insights are available in Report Editor at account and manager level.
By using Report Editor, you can compare cross-account auction insights with ease. You can track following things by this update:
i. New Layout:
Create layouts and automatically generated video introduced in responsive display ads to drive more online sales. Three different layouts have been rolled out which that uses automated image enhancements including smart image cropping and text overlays.
ii. Add videos quickly and easily:
To make things simpler and faster, Google can automatically create video ads for you by using your existing image and text assets.
Search and Shopping campaigns both have this report. You can access auction insights by following method: click on the Reports icon in the top right corner of Google Ads, navigate to Predefined reports, and select the Auction Insights tab.
You can have actionable insights across multiple Google platforms like Google Ads, Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 with the help of Ads Data Hub. For you to unlock these insights in your advertising campaigns even more easily, you can now link your Google Ads account to Ads Data Hub directly in the interface. You can now easily analyze your data with custom reporting and better understanding of impact of your marketing, by just linking your accounts your accounts. You will be able to access detailed, event level data from your Google Ads campaign.
If you want to build and collaborate on a custom report with others, creating Google Ads reports in Google Sheets can be useful. Earlier, it requires a lot of manual work to import your Google Ads data into Google Sheets. A new Google Ads add-on is now available for Google Sheets to make this process easier and save you time. For custom reports using Google Ads data, you can use this tool.
Google has announced that the target spend setting for Maximize Clicks bid strategies would no longer be available for new campaigns. From January 2021, target spend with the Maximize Clicks bid strategy will use daily campaign budgets for all campaigns and portfolios. For helping you in minimizing this impact of this change, the maximum cost click bid limit may be lowered for strategies that are still using target spend. It will not impact that strategies which are not using target spend.
Creating reports and identify insights to grow your business can be easily done by Report Editor. Several updates to the Report Editor have introduced to make it easier for you to build reports and analyze your data.
In addition to seeing these alerts in real-time, you will get a summary of all alerts in the review step:
Properly setting up your campaign is very important. But this is not always easy to define if your campaign set up is right. That’s why, Google has introduced few improvements. These improvements will help in creating new campaigns more effectively.
iii. Top Products:
With new single-image layout to highlight individual products. You can use different text with your product or logos. Special text e.g “Promotion” or “Best Seller” can be used for better user engagement.
You must avoid your account to be suspended due to misrepresentation in adverting. When a user clicks on an ad, users should not be deceived.
Get in front of new shoppers:
Smart shopping campaigns will optimize for new customers as an additional goal to maximize the conversion value through online sales.
Smart shopping campaigns always remain profitable to customers, Markley a marketing agency has experienced that through smart shopping their sales as increased in dress categories to 13 times.
Rich Creatives To Highlight Brand:
85% of Regular online shoppers say that product information and pictures are important in decision making process to buy a product. Now you can engage holiday shoppers by having more persuasive creatives for smart shopping campaigns. As it was rolled out for dynamic display ads to show top products.
Company name is more prominent along with logo for more brand awareness. Short headlines are also prominent in different ad sizes.
Moreover, layout was also introduced that dynamically create carousal of your products.
With manager accounts in the app you can now:
You can’t ignore the Overview Page as it is an easy way for you to view a summary of your account performance and actionable insights. you can now,
More Insights for full pictures:
You might have already used feeds in Display, Shopping and Local campaigns to quickly upload and showcase products in your ads. Feeds in App campaigns offer three main benefits:
i. Richer Formats:
Soon, by using Google Merchant Center, retail advertisers can also begin showing image ads in the canvas below YouTube TrueView “in-stream” app promotion ads.
ii. Expanded Query:
How and where your app will be more discoverable can be managed through feeds. If you’re a furniture selling brand with couches in stock, feeds may bring your app ads more frequently when users search for “loveseats for two.” This is a result of feeds giving ads algorithms more signals on which products are available in your app. Rich and more data increases the possibility of your app ad matching with a user query and becoming suitable to serve.
iii. Smoother Onboarding for New Users:
new app user will have a smoother onboarding experience by having different deep linking. -From app install straight to the item they saw in the ad.
There is change in the merchant center as well, now there will be available new report editor. Across your free listing ads, additional metrics like impressions and clicks through rate will be available.
Moreover eligibility criteria for smart shopping campaigns is reducing. Conversion and remarketing tags will still be required.
Deal seeking is not new, this year customers are more price conscious. Until gift items are not sale, 58% of US holiday customer will hold their buying gift items. 40% of global customers say they use Google to find the best deal, when they are trying to find for competitively-priced products. You can boost your sale by just simply applying if you are selling your product on Google.
Google is helping advertisers in getting discovered by these deal seekers in holiday season. You can easily upload and edit promotions in the Google Merchant Center and also Google is working on increasing visibility of products that have a promotion or are on-sale.
What is frequency distribution?
Frequency distribution will tell how many people saw your campaign ad a certain number of times over a selected date range.
What is weekly and monthly average frequency?
Average frequency (weekly and monthly) will help you see how frequently your ads are shown to people over a specific period of time, you just have to choose average impression frequency per user (7days or 30 days). By using this metrics you can get better understanding how your weekly and monthly average frequency performance changes over time.
Tune into Ads on air, it is basically a video channel where you can get all the details about Google Ads latest product innovations and also people who created it are representing it. They will also give you insider advice, best practices and stories from advertisers.
For advertisers and developers Google Ads API is usually available. For supporting your business you can build tools with new capabilities and efficiency updates with these API.
With Google Ads API, you will see fast results of new features and compatibility updates for tools like recommendations, local campaigns and more. Google is also making current features like Keyword Planner, change history and billing.
Discover the right mix of TV, YouTube, and Google video partners and identify opportunities to maximize the reach and improve the frequency of your video campaigns with the help of TV in Reach Planner.
Google has provided ability to user for planning TV and YouTube together with the help of third party measurement provides and combine it with YouTube forecasts.
US TV data is already available, powered by Nielsen, and Japan, powered by Intage, Google is going launch that TV data in Reach Planner for Vietnam and more countries will be added soon. Now, advertiser will be able to plan TV and YouTube alongside one another to make sure the enhance ads reach and a balanced frequency across video advertising channels. This update will be available for all Google Ads users.
Specific context that matter for your brand can be enhance your reach by YouTube’s ability to drive mass. It will make easier for you to get discovered to the content that’s a great fit for your brand. YouTube dynamic lineups has advanced contextual targeting.
Contextual targeting on YouTube is using next generation advanced contextual. Through Google’s machine learning will help YouTube for understanding each channel better, including analysis of video imagery, sound, speech and text.
This will allow advertiser to create lineups that can scalable across content based on specific topics, cultural moments or popularity. For example, you will find broad lineups like beauty, and more nuanced choices like “Face, Hair, Nails” and “Luxury Beauty”. That means you can have better access to the unique interest and needs of your audiences.
Google Ads and Display & Video 360 are using YouTube dynamic lineups and more countries will soon have this feature.
It is very hard to discover individuals who have interest in items or brands like yours. If you have utilized Google audiences, at that point you might be comfortable with custom affinity and custom intent audience, which help you connect with individuals based on their interests or topics they are effectively exploring. By building audiences dependent on pertinent keywords and websites, you can convey more significant ads to all the more relevant ads accomplish your objectives.
Google announced that they will provide simple solution in the form of custom audience, which will bring custom affinity and custom intent audience into one simplified solution. All advertisers across Display, YouTube and Discovery campaigns will have this update.
Personalized advertising will more transparency:
Google knows advertisers expect ads to be transparent and offer more control. Advertisers also prefer ads that are fulfilling their needs and interest. With the help of tools like Ad Settings allows advertisers to easily update how their ads are personalize. Google is working on finding new methods to improve their transparency, choice and control, providing even greater visibility for the data it used for ads personalization.
Brief intro of custom audiences:
In custom audience, a single audience can be used for achieving any business goal like brand awareness, consideration or conversions.
Anyone who has created custom intent or custom affinity audiences, these will be automatically be merged into custom audiences with no extra set-up needed.
When you create your custom audience you will see estimated reach and after that you can use it across your Display, Discovery and YouTube campaigns.
Google has provided learning path to master in App Campaigns by these updated courses you can understand key trends in app behavior, refine campaigns based on your or your client’s goals, use machine learning to your advantage, and take the next step beyond app advertising. There is also one hour session to learn more strategies to apply new principles to adapt new app strategies, knowing best practices to grow beyond an install.
It was started a year back few strategies would no longer be available for new campaigns like Target Search Page Location and Target Outranking Share bid strategies, these will be gone. So now these strategies now automatically be moved to Target impression Share strategy. It is a smart bidding strategy which automatically sets bids with the target to show ad on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on Google SERP.
Reaching at right time is best to target Google Ads introducing features to help you sign up from any device, stand out on Google Maps, see your results right on Google Search, and control when your ads show.
i. Sign up directly through the mobile app:
Google has made the process easier and quicker, so you can start advertising right away. Now, you can sign up for Smart campaigns and run ads directly from the Google Ads mobile app. This is currently available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, UK, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Japan, with more countries to follow.
ii. Stand out on Google Maps, for free:
Google Maps are used by 1 billion people every month so why not use this as option to show your business. Promoted pins on Google Maps support your business be noticeable during these moments by displaying a prominent, square-shaped Google Maps pin. This pin can help you highlight specific services such as pickup, delivery, and other unique offerings.
iii. See how your ads perform directly on Google.com:
How your smart campaign going you can instantly see the status with a quick search, how they’re performing, and how your ads look to potential customers. First, sign into the Google account you use for Google Ads. Then search for “My Ads” or “Google Ads” on Google.com.
iv. Control when your ads show:
Keywords are the important thing which helps to show your ads on search results. With keyword themes (formerly “products and services”), you tell Google what your business offers and Google show your ad to potential customers searching for related phrases. With this keyword theme feature your ad will appear to the related searches.
Keyword Planner makes it easy for you to find keywords that are relevant to your product, service, website, or landing page. If you want to group together ideas based on the attributes of your products and services. For example, let’s say that you’re looking for keywords related to “dry skin.” In the past, you would’ve had to sort through thousands of keyword ideas. Now, you can filter attributes to include or remove keyword ideas related to dry skin, such as ‘face cream for dry skin’, ‘face lotion for dry skin’ and ‘best winter face cream’.
Personalized feeds like news and videos now play a significant role in helping people find inspiration throughout their consumer journey. Initially, discovery campaigns were not available to everyone but now it is available globally.
You can show authentic and relevant ad with discovery campaigns. Customer can take action from either single image or image carousal.
With a discovery campaign, you can analyze your ads reporting based on assets as well.
You can learn more about the discovery campaign and how to set up them by clicking here.
Both search and shopping campaigns report can be found in one place for your product and services. Some of the metrics available for each retail category include:
For your search and shopping, you can review different factors like brand vs non branded campaigns, best product, location targeting, ad scheduling, audience targeting, and different bid strategies.
As Covid-19 has affected almost every industry digital advertisement also faced challenges for businesses. Below are some considerations you can adopt for your ads while navigating your campaign through COVID-19.
i. Assess your ads:
ii. Find your feet to dynamic market conditions:
Moreover due to impact of COVID-19, Google has also announced free shopping listing for the advertisers.
Customer always needs ease. To give your customers more comfort in how they connect with your business and services, you can now introduce an optional “Visit website” link with your call-only ads. With this update Google ads Change the name to call only ads to call ads.
Your ad on search results by introducing “Visit website” will have greater visibility. This will help the user to tap on the “Visit website” link in your ad, then he will be taken directly to your website. If your business requires phone calls for new sales, you may be getting fewer accidental calls and more qualified leads. If you already having call ads, add a Final URL in it and become part of those advertiser who are taking advantage of the website link
User when see ad he must have idea it is from authentic source. User trust should not be betrayed. That’s why Google is more concerned about. In the past it has happened many misinformation was spread through Google Ads. Now Google Ads launching advertiser identity verification, a policy that requires advertisers to verify their identities for ads served through Google Ads.
Being an advertiser you will get an email from Google for your verification. You will have to provide some documents based on your business type to prove your identity. If you are honest and true you should not be in worry at all it is only to filter out those who are doing fraud through Google ads.
Google knows making an audience strategy is not easy task and but Google will make sure that work pays off for you by showing your ads to more people.
As there are many ways of conversions, it getting more complex to customer journey. Sometime current report don’t capture this complexity. Measuring and optimizing performance (especially if you have an app and a website) can be difficult with this complexity. For making it easier to how your customer convert, Google has introduced new ad destination report to Google Ads.
You will be able to see which conversions came from clicks to your app versus clicks to your website with this ad destination report. It will make easy for advertiser to understand where consumers engage the most and how to enhance engagement. Moreover, advertiser will be able to observe if consumers landed on his business profile or got directions to your store for a conversion.
You can plan your budget more effectively with the help of Performance Planner. For providing you help so you can plan and predict future of your campaign even better. Performance Planner currently supporting Shopping campaigns and Smart Shopping campaigns.
With the use of Performance Planner you can plan your Shopping campaign with ease for:
Find the impact on performance with adjust budget and campaign settings.
You could manage multiple accounts and campaigns budgets can be manage.
Seasonal periods can be planned more effectively.
It is might be possible Google is cutting up to 50% of its marketing budget for the second half of 2020. The cuts to the marketing budget might be to contain reduced advertising earning due to the COVID-19. According to an email Google is instituting cuts the marketing budget across a range of Google divisions. The email stated:
“There are budget cuts and hiring freezes happening across marketing and across Google… We, along with the rest of marketing, have been asked to cut our budget by about half for H2.”
Videos are becoming part of many businesses to make and maintain connections with customers. Those business who don’t have resources to create videos, Video Builder can help them. It is a free beta tool by using images and text you can create small animations. You can also create animation with music from library. You can choose from a variety of layouts based on your message and goals, customize colors and font and quickly generate a short YouTube video (6 seconds or 15 seconds). It will be a very good experience for first time users, it can provide an efficient, low-resource way to create videos. If you’re interested in trying the Video Builder beta, you can check here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/videobuilderbeta/
Google ads introduce new Google Ads Editor v1.3. The new Feature includes support for shared budgets, optimization score and an improved edit pane.
Within an editor now you can now create and use shared budget from your shared library.
Combined, weighted-average optimization score will be available for your selection in account tree section. Optimization score helps you prioritize recommendations for your campaigns so you can quickly improve performance.
Based on feedback to Google, several improvements were made in to this to reduce the time were spend scrolling within the edit pane. You can hide the empty fields now and also resize and position the edit pane by popping it out to separate window.
Now you can see the market changes with Google trends that allows you to see the topics people are or aren’t searching, almost in real time. For example, in March 2020, the search term “virtual birthday party ideas” were high trending in just a few days in the US? Same goes with your business related terms. If you want to make changes in your campaign finding a new keywords by following a trend Google Trend should not be ignored.
Having Google Ads performance data to visualize and analyze, Report Editor was always an option. You can access Report Editor by navigating to your “Report” tab in your manager account. It can now let you access 200 accounts directly from browser.
There is an update of asset reporting feature to provide you more helpful and actionable insights.
Performance rating provides clear guidance:
“low”, “good”, and “best” asset ratings will appear in the tooltip
Two new columns introduced, Asset source and Orientation. So that you can determine which asset was uploaded and what was its orientation
Performance changes for your assets are important to observe that is why this update is introduced. You can select different date range and various metrics observe the performances.
When final user will see your ad how it will appear you can check this through Ad Preview. By clicking on “View ad previews” in the asset column of your report, this ad previews tool will show you sample ads assembled from your assets as they might appear in all eligible App campaign placements. Currently you might not find it yet. This feature along with performance charts, will be available in the next few months.
Google ads want to empower every business to get their ads up as soon as possible. So Google ads are launching a new feature that enables you to appeal policy decisions directly in Google Ads.
With this new feature, you can swiftly resubmit an ad after solving the policy issue. If you’ve checked the policy affecting your ad and believe Google ads made an error, you can also appeal the policy decision directly in Google Ads.
Parallel tracking sends customers directly from your ad to your final URL while click measurement happens in the background. Previously it was not available for video campaigns but when it was introduced, the deadline was given March 31, 2020 to every advertiser to use in video campaigns. Then the deadline to adopt parallel tracking for video campaigns extended to June 15, 2020. Google Ads give everyone extra time to indefinitely to make this transition. If you’ve already done with most of the work needed to embrace parallel tracking, you are have time to finish the process.
If you are having multiple campaigns its performance can be optimized by using Portfolio bid strategies. Previously target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize clicks, and Target impression share was available in Portfolio bid strategies but now smart bidding with search campaigns, Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value ready to use with portfolios.
Purchase cycle of the customer is important and this new look will help you in understanding the cycle. Few reports have been removed and few have been combined to bring better insights. Available reports are:
Moreover you can also check different customers who converted after multiple clicks. Model comparison helps you compare your cost per conversion and return on ad spend for different attribution models, such as last click, rules-based, and data-driven attribution.
Google ads introducing new optimization score features and Dark mode in the app. With Google Ads you can analysis real time data for apps, review high-impact recommendations and take quick action to improve performance.
You can improve the performance from within an app by having an optimization score to prioritize recommendations for your campaigns.
Whenever your optimization score changes you’ll be notified in real-time. You can tap the notification to open your Recommendations page, where you can take action to raise your score and improve performance. On the settings page of the app. you can set to receive these notification.
Visual comfort for all the users that is why dark mode is designed it. You can turn on the dark mode on the setting page of the app.
People who already engaged with your products and services are your loyal customers. Whether your goal is to increase sales or having brand awareness, remarketing to people who have already engaged with your website can always help you grow your business. Now with a manager account, you can share audience lists across accounts. Different steps to sharing remarking list you can follow to do this.
Campaign changes are continuous process so you cannot deny it so understanding the impact of your campaign changes is important, Performance charts can show your campaign changes. For example, there comes drop in conversions for one of your active campaigns. So you can check from change history report now hover over the markers in the performance chart to get more details about the changes you’ve made over a specific period.
Previously Standard and Accelerated Delivery methods were available. But now Standard delivery will be the only ad delivery method for any new Display, Video, App and Hotel campaigns. Accelerated delivery will no longer be available. Starting in May 2020, all existing Display, Video, App and Hotel campaigns which are using Accelerated delivery will be automatically switched to Standard delivery.
Integrating third party is sometimes difficult if you are not too much technical. But now Google provides you ease on it. It collaborated with Zapier. To help Google Ads integration to pull the data and put into CRM. Conversion events, formatting the data and upload directly to Google Ads will be possible.
Simulators help you understand your performance and potential you could have in achieving the goal at different bid levels. Previously, these simulations have only been available for campaigns using manual bidding or Target CPA. Now for detail insights from a wider variety of campaigns, Google ads adding simulator support for budgets and for the Target ROAS bid strategy.
Find the right target ROAS to achieve your goals:
The Target ROAS simulator shows the relationship between a ROAS target and your key metrics.
Find your ideal budget to maximize performance:
You may need to update your budgets for campaigns that use Maximize clicks or Maximize conversions. By using budget simulator you can check how these changes could have impacted your performance. This makes it easy for you to find your ideal budget allocation across campaigns.
Understanding why your performance changes is critical when optimizing a campaign. To help you understand some performance changes in your campaigns and ad groups faster, you can now request explanations. With explanations, you can view the most likely reasons for impression, click, and cost changes with the click of a button.
For example, let’s say you notice a big week-over-week drop in impressions for one of your campaigns. Rather than diving into multiple reports to find out what happened, you can just click on the “See Explanations” button on your campaign and ad group tables while in time comparison mode.
Before you get started with explanations, keep the following in mind:
Just like for Search and Shopping, optimization score for Display campaigns ranges from 0% to 100%, with 100% meaning that your campaigns are set to perform at their full potential. You’ll see separate scores for Search, Shopping, and Display at the campaign level, and one combined score at the account level. Google have also added unique recommendations just for Display, like creating Smart Display campaigns, using targeting expansion, and adding responsive display ads.
It hasn’t always been easy to share your new keyword plans with everyone who needs to see them. That’s why you can now create, save, and share plans from directly within Keyword Planner.
For Example: Let’s take an example as mentioned by Google, if you are a sports retailer planning to launch three new product lines: running shoes, fitness apparel, and gym accessories. In order to share your keyword plans in the past, you would need to create, download, and email them individually. Now you can create separate plans for each product line and share them directly with others for feedback, all without leaving Keyword Planner.
Smart Bidding helps you drive performance while saving you time. To give you more transparency into which factors are driving your performance and provide insights that may inform your broader marketing strategy, you can now view some of your top bidding signals in the bid strategy report. The report might also include combinations of different signals.
For example, the report may show that people are more likely to convert when searching for the keyword “business” in Los Angeles on a Saturday.
How effectively your ad clicks lead to valuable customer can be identified by Conversion measurement. This is done by creating conversion actions like “online purchase” or “phone calls”. Earlier, you could form these conversions actions into 6 categories. Now on, you can group your conversion actions in 19 different categories such that “add to cart”, “submit lead form”, “book appointment”, and more. Now, it will easier for you to understand conversion funnel metrics based on your marketing objectives with these additional categories.
Since last year, searches for “available near me” have grown globally by more than 100%, before engaging with nearby stores consumers increasingly turn online. Marketers should make it easier for consumers to find business locations and it is very important to understand how your online campaigns are driving offline results. You can add details about your physical locations by using location extensions, you can add details about your physical locations like your address, hours and directions to online across Search, Display and YouTube.
After successful test campaigns in select markets, the YouTube Masthead is now globally available on TV screens for all advertisers to buy on a CPM (Cost-per-mile) basis. It can be purchased as part of a seamless cross-screen buy that runs on mobile, desktop and TV screens or as part of a single-screen only buy that runs just on TV Screens.
Google have introduced Google Ads Editor v1.2. This latest release includes support for new campaign types and updates to multi-account management. Editor now supports
You can expand your global footprint more than ever in shopping campaigns. Start showing your products globally with multi-country feeds, which allow you to target multiple countries that share the same language by using a single feed in that language.
For example, if you upload product information in German for Germany, those products may be automatically available to show in other German-speaking countries, such as Austria and Switzerland.
To help you hit your business goals, Google are improving interactivity on YouTube with new extensions that make it easy for your customers to take action. Building off of our popular extensions on Search, extensions on YouTube give viewer useful and actionable information like store location, interest forms and additional calls-to-action.
Lead Form Extension capture interest when potential customers are searching for your company, products, or services on Google. A fast, mobile-optimized experience makes form submission easy and eliminates the extra step of navigating to your mobile site lead form.
Placements are the locations on the Display Network where your ad appears. Examples include relevant websites and apps that partner with Google to show ads. These metrics will only include manually targeted placements. Previously, the “Placement” column in Report Editor included data for automatically targeted placements. So keep in mind that these new placement numbers won’t reflect all the placements where your ads have shown. To view all placements where an ad has shown use the placement (group) filter in the Report Editor. On your campaigns and ad groups pages, you can use the “Where ads showed” section.
App campaigns use your text, image, video and HTML5 assets to deliver relevant ads to app-happy users across Google. This will help you make more informed design decisions, particularly as new App ad inventory goes live on Discover and YouTube Search. Advertisers with active App campaigns will automatically adopt these updates, so no action is required from you. While we do not anticipate adverse impact to your App campaigns’ performance, you might see some shifts in your asset reporting metrics.
Responsive search ads are available to all advertisers in all languages, as well as in Google Ads Editor, the API, and the mobile app. Get started by adding at least one responsive search ad and two expanded text ads per ad group. This has proven to help advertisers reach new customers while delivering great results.
Conversion reporting makes it easy for you to understand the value ads generate for your business. To date, Google Ads has always reported conversions by the date your ad was clicked. So it will help in better understanding of conversions in your campaigns
For example, let’s say your ad was clicked on last week and that traffic converted this week. In this case, both the click and the conversion are attributed to the date of the click. This helps you accurately measure metrics like cost per conversion or return on ad spend–because ad spend is reported based on the time of the click.
Seeing your product in action helps convert customers eager to try before they buy. This is especially true for beauty brands. Now with the help of augmented reality, trying on lipstick, once only possible in-store, can be done virtually on YouTube.
People turn to Google Search for inspiration, to explore interests, and find the things they care about. The improvements are in the audience targeting such as Affinity, in-market audience and etc.
A conversion action is a specific customer action that you’ve defined as valuable to your business, such as a newsletter signup or a purchase. These actions can be included in the “Conversions” column, which is used to evaluate performance and optimize bids. For Search and Display campaigns that have specific budgets for different marketing goals, you can override the default, account-level setting by selecting which conversion actions you want to optimize for at the campaign level. Starting today, this campaign-level setting is now available for Video campaigns.
Smart Bidding uses machine learning to set bids at auction-time, factoring in a wide range of signals that help predict performance. Now, the same technology that’s helped advertisers achieve better results is available in Search Ads 360. In fact, during the beta, hundreds of Search Ads 360 advertisers enabled Google Ads auction-time bidding and saw an average conversion increase of 15% to 30% at the same or better ROI.
To help shoppers feel more confident in their purchases, Google have introduced user-generated images in product reviews on Google Shopping. You can now include review images in your product review feeds, allowing customers to visually connect with what you sell through pictures of previous customers wearing or using your products.
To make it faster and easier for you to analyze this valuable cross-account data, the Manager account’s Report Editor can now slice and dice your data in real time. With this update, you can now analyze and identify cross-account patterns in your data without leaving Google Ads.
Cross-account reporting is currently available for Manager Accounts managing up to ten Google Ads accounts
With Updates in Call-Only Ads now your business name and headline will show directly below your phone number, along with a larger phone icon, to make it more clearly to users what you offer and make the call-to-action more prominent.
Recommendations help you prioritize your most impactful opportunities to improve account performance. Google ads introduce improved keyword recommendations, a new workflow, and bulk actions in the recommendations to improve your account performance:
Improved keyword recommendations:
New update improve the relevancy and quality of your keyword recommendations. Keyword recommendations can now contain broad match modifiers
Recommendations table view:
To make it easier for you to view your recommendations and their expected impact, Google ads added a new table view format:
This new table format helps you prioritize your recommendations at scale with the following features:
Bulk apply and dismiss for manager accounts:
You can now bulk apply or dismiss recommendations at the manager account level2 with a single click with new update.
Conversion tracking helps you measure the valuable actions that advertisers take on your website after they click an ad, such as a purchase or brochure download. Setting it up is critical to the success of your campaign.
To make it easier to measure progress towards your defined goals, you can now set up conversion tracking as you create a new campaign.
To maximize Omni channel ROI, store visits in Smart Bidding is now available to all advertisers for Search and Shopping campaigns.
Turn insights into action:
Store visits in your Smart Bidding allows you to optimize for total performance more holistically, helping you drive better results while saving you time.
Flexible testing at the campaign level:
Trying a new bidding strategy at the account level can be challenging, so it’s now possible to test incorporating store visits into your Smart Bidding strategy for select Search and Shopping campaigns. By enabling the campaign-level conversion setting, you can include store visits as an optimizable conversion on a subset of Search campaigns before expanding your omnichannel bidding strategy to your entire account
Optimization score helps you prioritize recommendations for your campaigns so you can achieve your business goals faster and more efficiently. Previously, this score was only available on desktop. Now, you can see and act on your optimization score in the Google Ads mobile app.
Now, you can review and apply recommendations wherever you are, so you won’t miss out on taking critical action just because you’re away from the computer.
Google ads announce a new Healthcare and medicines policy to prohibit advertising for unproven or experimental medical techniques such as most stem cell therapy, cellular (non-stem) therapy, and gene therapy. This new policy will prohibit ads selling treatments that have no established biomedical or scientific basis. The new policy also includes treatments that are rooted in basic scientific findings and preliminary clinical experience, but currently have insufficient formal clinical testing to justify widespread clinical use.
Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS use machine learning to automatically set bids at auction time to help improve the performance of your Google Ads campaigns. To provide more control in these rare situations, you can now apply seasonality adjustments for Search and Display campaigns.
Standard delivery will be the only ad delivery method for Search campaigns, shopping campaigns, and shared budgets. Accelerated delivery will no longer be available in Google ads because Accelerated delivery attempts to spend your budget faster than Standard delivery. Standard delivery takes into account expected ad performance throughout the day and is better at maximizing performance within your daily budget. Accelerated delivery method only available for Display campaigns and Video campaigns.
Gallery ads are a swipe able, image-based ad format that gives customers the information they need about your products and services right at the top of the search results page. Most of smartphone users expect to get immediate information while using their smartphone. Therefore, Google ads announced the beta for gallery ads at Google Marketing Live. This can help you connect with advertiser before they visit your site.
Gallery ads are now available in 11 languages, including: English, German, Japanese, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, and Polish.
Google ads editor with it new updates, it promises will be easier to use and include a host of new features.
According to Google, some of these new features include in Google ads editor.
You can quickly promote your chain by creating location extension. Google will also review to make sure the chain is a good match for your business using like its website domain and country. After that you can use location groups to filter for specific locations within that chain.
Due to COVID-19, worldwide communities are responding in various stages and according to local ordinances business are reopening or restricting operations. For navigating the changing market and turn the Google for local information like what’s open near them, store safety measures and in-stock inventory. Since last year Google searches for “clothing store open” by 900% and 1000% year-over-year search grew for “restaurants open for”. “Local restaurants open for delivery” and “Restaurants open for carry out near me”.
In these dynamic conditions adjusting your business can be difficult, especially with lower capacity. Google is providing automated support you in open locations and meet customers where they feel comfortable shopping, even as the market changes.
Helping consumers plan their next visit to your business:
Using Google local campaigns, can help you communicate with consumers who are near your locations. As your stores reopen, create ads that share your open status, provide health and safety updates, or highlight in-store shopping options like product inventory, curbside pickup and takeout options, or special promotions all on a store-by-store basis.
Local campaigns can be optimize for store visit indicators like clicks on “directions” and “calls”. This will add more businesses to access Local campaigns. You just have to give your store locations, campaign budget and creative assets and Google’s machine learning technology automatically optimize your campaign to meet business goals. Even you can easily update your goals as local conditions change.
Promote your local inventory and store pickup options:
In COVID, Getting them nearby is often the best option, because consumers are still looking ways to get items they need fast. With shipping delays, you can assure your consumers that they can find what they need locally and collect their purchases safely by showing consumers what fulfillment options you offer. You can promote items that are available in store to pick up.
After successful beta tests in select markets, the YouTube Masthead is now globally available for all advertisers to buy on a CPM basis. Google ads introduced the option to purchase the YouTube Masthead on a cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) basis and use advanced audience solutions to customize who sees it. This is in addition to the option to purchase the Masthead on a cost-per-day basis reaching all visitors to the YouTube Home page.
Google ads bringing True View for action to Google video partners to help you drive leads and conversions on high-quality mobile applications and publisher websites beyond YouTube. All of our partners must comply with Google’s Video publisher policy and Ad Mob & AdSense policies, and abide by our Video Ad Safety Promise.
Faster mobile sites mean better user experiences and more conversions. Parallel tracking allows for much faster load times than traditional click tracking. Parallel tracking will become mandatory for all Display campaigns. If you work with a click measurement provider, reach out to them and ensure that they’re ready for this change. This will help ensure that there’s no disruption to your click measurement system.
Google ads recently announced new tools that provide more visibility into the data used to personalize ads and the companies involved in the process. These are in addition to existing tools like Ad Settings where users can easily update their ads preferences or opt out of ads personalization all together at any time.
Your App ads are now to show for more searches on iOS mobile web browsers. This means app installs and in-app conversion events from iOS browsers will be included in your campaign reporting. This can help you reach more people who are looking for what your app has to offer and can help you improve campaign performance.
So, there you have the ultimate list of Google Ads updates. Every year is sure to be full of changes, too, so everyone in PPC advertising should do their best to get familiar with these updates and embrace the new tricks and tools.
Taking a proactive attitude to experimentation is a key ingredient for success with PPC advertising. You can learn more about that in our blog about How to Create An Optimized Search Ad Campaign.
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