Step Inside AdWords Innovations Recap

On Tuesday April 22^nd, Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management for Google AdWords unveiled a slew of new features and innovative tools that will help advertisers succeed in the constantly connected world we live in. In the past few years, PPC managers have all seen the increase of mobile’s presence in our campaigns, but now we’re coming to a point as a society where it doesn’t matter what type of device you’re on; it’s about connecting people to the content that they care about, whether it’s online, on mobile sites or in apps.

As Jerry put it:

“It’s not really about mobile. It’s about consumers. And as consumers, what you really want to do is connect with the people and the things that matter the most, wherever we are, whenever, on any device.”

If you weren’t able to tune in to the livestream, we’ve embedded the video below and followed up with a recap of all the new features and enhancements advertisers should expect to see in the next couple of months.

Innovative Ad Formats

For those of you who use AdWords to market your mobile applications, this is your lucky day! The first big announcement of the livestream was a solution for advertisers to drive discovery and installation of their mobile apps. This includes providing suggested keywords that will help drive more application downloads and having the ability to target Display Ads to relevant users, which Google has acquired data for from the Google Play store.

However, one of the big challenges with applications is user re-engagement since 80% of all applications downloaded are only used once. To help drive more app re-engagement, Google will now allow advertisers to deep-link their ads to specific pages within the application. As with landing pages, great user experience drives conversions, and by directing users to the most relevant page in an app will help drive that great user experience.

Insightful Reporting

With the roll-out of Enhanced Campaigns, Google introduced “Estimated Total Conversions” to help advertisers measure the full benefit of their campaigns, which includes phone calls and conversions that happen across all mediums. With the overwhelming positive feedback received from the addition of Estimated Total Conversions, the AdWords team decided to expand on this product.

The newest addition to the Estimated Total Conversions metric is going to be in-store sales. This is a feature that is being tested in order to measures effectiveness of search ads at driving in-store sales, while maintaining user privacy and most importantly, providing actionable insights for advertisers to make smart decisions while optimizing their campaigns.

Tools for Efficiency and Scale

This is the section that brought me and my Vertical Measures team the most excitement. We all know that measuring performance and maintaining efficiency are some of the most important aspects of a PPC manager’s job. And frankly, Google knows that as well.

So to make our lives easier and our account management significantly more efficient, they will be rolling out the ability to complete bulk actions right in the AdWords interface. Advertisers will be able to update thousands of campaigns as once, bulk edit ad extensions, campaign settings, and essentially eliminate the need to use any third party software to make these changes (R.I.P. AdWords Editor).

To expand on account efficiency and the success Google has seen with the addition of automated bidding, two new bidding options will be released:

1. Automate bids to maximize the number of conversions


2. Automate bids to maximize value

Insight into what the Enhanced Reporting will look like now that we’ll have the ability to create pivot tables and graphs directly in the AdWords interface.

Along with these tools that allow for more efficiency when optimizing your AdWords campaigns, Google also released two new tools that help you analyze that data. Typically, when advertisers are creating reports to look at the performance data for their campaigns, they would have to export that data into excel and format it in a way that allows you to review the data in a way that allows you to make actionable decisions.

However, Google realizes this takes too much time and created tools that allow advertisers to be able to quickly review, edit, and make make decisions off of your data. The addition of Enhanced Reporting will definitely be a game changer in advertisers day to day. Enhanced reporting allows you to create pivot tables directly within the AdWords interface with live, real-time data. The Enhanced Reporting tool allows you to complete multi-dimensional analysis in order to seamlessly explore your data.

Along with having the ability to quickly review your data in AdWords, Google is releasing a tool called Drafts and Experiments that allows you to create a test (draft) directly within the AdWords interface and then allocate your desired amount of traffic to that test in order to have the ability to test different bidding strategies, messaging, etc. and see how it performs before fully implementing any changes across your campaigns. The buzz around this product announcement is that it will be a game changer, because now advertisers have the ability to make smart decisions, supported by real-life data.

These new product announcements seem to really have the intention of making advertisers’ experience within the AdWords interface efficient and seamless. Unlike some of the other recent updates within the AdWords interface (i.e. Enhanced Campaigns), these product releases are all completely optional and will allow advertisers to have more options when making decisions about their campaigns. These new features will be rolled out over the course of several months, so keep an eye out for new options in your AdWords dashboard. For a more comprehensive breakdown of these new innovations, visit the AdWords blog at adwords.blogspot.com.

 

Step Inside AdWords Innovations Recap