Recent Google Ads Updates-Quick Review

As we move into 2020, 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.

1. Performance changes with Explanations:

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:

• Explanations is currently available for manual CPC or eCPC Search campaigns.
• Explanations can compare two time periods of equal length within the last 90 days.
• Explanations may only show for campaigns with significant performance changes.

 

 

2. Optimization Score is now included in Display Campaigns:

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.

3. Multiple Plans and Plan Sharing in Keyword Planner:

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.

 

4. Top Signals – To gain more insights into your bid strategy:

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.

 

5. YouTube Masthead is now available on Smart TV:

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.

6. Google Ads Editor updates include New campaign types and cross-account features:

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

• App Campaigns for Engagement
• Discovery Campaigns
• Shared Negative Keywords list
• Searchable Errors
• Condensed Edit Pane.

 

 

7. Get your products in front of more shoppers through Merchant Center:

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.

8. Elevate your video campaigns with new extensions for YouTube ads:

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.

 

9. Lead Form Extensions:

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.

 

10. Placements reporting updates

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.

11. App campaign asset updates:

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.

12. Advertiser can now use Responsive Search Ads:

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.

13. Understand conversions by time with new columns:

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.

14. Virtual Make-up comes to the YouTube Masthead

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.

15. Reach your ideal customer on Google Search

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.

16. Set conversion actions at the campaign level for video ads

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.

17. Google Ads auction-time bidding comes to Search Ads 360

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.

18. Turn browsers into buyers with user-generated images in product reviews

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.

19. Easier cross-account analysis with Report Editor:

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

20. Improving call quality with a new look for call-only ads:

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.

 

21. Get more from Recommendations:

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:

• View and sort your recommendations by largest optimization opportunity
• See how much your optimization score will change if you adopt a recommendation
• See a breakdown of scoring and recommendations by campaign
• Download the table view into Excel

 
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.

22. Set up conversion measurement as you create a new campaign:

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.

 

23. Add store visits to Smart Bidding to drive better omnichannel results:

To maximize omnichannel 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

24. Optimization score is now available in the Google Ads mobile app:

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.

25. A new policy on advertising for speculative and experimental medical treatments:

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.

26. Introducing seasonality adjustments for Smart Bidding:

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.

 

27. Search and Shopping campaigns will now be using improved Standard delivery:

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.

28. Gallery ads available in 11 languages globally:

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.

29. Easier to use and loaded with new features Google ads Editor new Updates:

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.

• IP exclusions can now be copied, added and updated across all campaigns
• Accounts Manager makes managing multiple accounts simple and efficient
• Dark Mode for added viewing comfort
• The image picker will make browsing and choosing ad images from your desktop a breeze

 

30. YouTube Masthead now available with CPM buying:

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.

31. Drive more conversions with TrueView for action on Google video partners:

Google ads bringing TrueView 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 AdMob & AdSense policies, and abide by our Video Ad Safety Promise.

32. Parallel Tracking will be mandatory for Display ads:

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.

33. New audiences search with Increasing transparency for personalized advertising:

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.

34. New updates for App campaigns help unlock more search inventory on iOS mobile web browsers:

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.

Wrap Up

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.