After weeks of promoting and teasing updates, Google held a live stream keynote today dubbed “Step Inside AdWords.” The presentation was used to announce a slew of new AdWords products and tools that will help advertisers enhance their campaigns both online and off. No matter what your industry or AdWords budget, today’s announcements are worthy of a few minutes of your time.
The announcements fell into three main categories, each of which we’ve outlined below. While the AdWords updates aren’t quite ready to be rolled out to everyone, Google did say to expect them in the coming months.
Innovative Ads
Google introduced a holistic solution to advertising mobile apps, which stretches across the company’s vast network, including search, YouTube, Google+, etc. This new cross-platform feature will be integrated into AdWords for a simple and familiar user experience.
Google noted as many as 60 percent of apps are never installed, and 80 percent of apps downloaded are only opened once. Alarming information, especially if you’re advertising an app as part of your marketing efforts. With these new innovative ads, Google will suggest keywords for your app’s ads based on insights from Google Play. Google will also offer more relevant targeting based on users’ app download history. For example, if you’re advertising a calorie counting app, your ad might be served to a person who recently downloaded a running app.
Google also introduced App Deep Linking, which will allow advertisers to link to a specific spot within an application. This means marketers can finally link ads to the most relevant page within apps, such as a news topic a user is searching for.
All of this activity will be measured through conversions, engagements and in-app purchases.
Insightful Reporting
We were particularly excited to hear that Google is building a platform to track offline conversions that originate from online ads. Google is implementing the pilot program with clothing retailer, Express, however few details were provided about the actual implementation.
While working on offline conversion tracking, Google noted three key principles they must adhere to: delivering great consumer value, protecting user privacy and delivering actionable insights for marketers. By measuring and including in-store transactions, Express’ return on ad spend increased 102 percent. The offline impact of online advertising was actually higher than their existing measured online impact. This improved online and offline reporting will allow advertisers to bid based on full value and deliver better, more relevant and better targeted ads.
Offline conversion tracking is a feature that all businesses can benefit from, not just those who sell physical goods. As details around exactly how this will work emerge, this will be an innovation worth following closely.
Tools for Efficiency & Scale
Major improvements are coming for those who manage large-scale AdWords accounts. Soon, users will be able to change bulk campaign settings, automate bids to maximize conversions, and create spreadsheets and graphs with live data right inside of AdWords. This will help reduce errors and increase efficiency for any account that has a large number of campaigns or ad groups.
A new tool called Drafts & Experiments will allow users to stage ideas in a lab before implementing. Once you’re happy with your creation, you can publish the draft into your original campaign, or run it as an experiment. The latter option can then be compared to the actual campaign, making it easy to decide if you should update your overall campaign.
Many of these changes will be powerful assets for your digital advertising campaigns. While these changes aren’t quite ready to be rolled out to everyone, our team of Google experts are already getting prepared. Contact us if you want to learn how today’s AdWords updates can help improve your online advertising.