Hello there!
If you are a digital marketing enthusiast, we request you to buckle up as we have some really interesting keynote updates for you.
Like always, this year too, Google brought some oomph at the Google Marketing Live. The keynotes and Google Ads updates 2019 presented were much anticipated by digital marketers.
What is Google Marketing Live?
Google conducts this event every year to let digital marketers and business owners the roll-out of any new updates, products and features in the near future. These keynotes are important as they let marketers stay ahead of the competition and tweak the way they interact with their audiences.
This year’s keynote focused on machine learning and the crux of it was for it to be useful, present and responsible. Privacy also was given importance and ads delivery to the right people at the right times. Let’s look at the year’s Google ads updates 2019.
1. Smart bidding gets big improvements.
If you’re in digital marketing, you know how important machine learning is today. It is a work thou can’t escape hearing in this part of the world. Google is implementing machine learning in a big way across all its advertising platforms and one notable way is through smart bidding.
Smart bidding is where Google Ads make use of machine learning to optimise bids for conversions. One can already be familiar with this concept if they’ve automated their bidding with CPC, Target RAOS or Target CPA.
This year’s keynote announced some big enhancements in smart bidding.
Creating conversion action sets:
You can now create a set of conversion actions to optimise bids across various campaigns.
Conversion goals at campaign level:
Optimise all your bids within a particular campaign that is dedicated to a single goal.
Adjust according to an upcoming event:
This is interesting and useful as Google Ads will now optimise your bids for the time period of an upcoming event or sale and return back to before afterwards.
2. Audience expansion tool to help reach more prospect audience
Once you’ve found your perfect custom audience, you can use the new audience expansion tool to target new people who look and behave like your custom audience. It is very similar to Facebook’s lookalike audience.
3. YouTube bumper ads for all businesses.
Research shows that a continuous stream of 3 bumper ads makes more impressions on viewers than a regular 30-second ad. Google introduced the bumper machine, a new tool that can help brands turn any 90-second video into sleek bumper ads for YouTube. This is a free tool which is soon to be released this year. Editors have control over how the ads look like in the end.
4. Feed-based ads get a makeover with Discovery Ads.
Google unveiled Google Discover last September. The Search Engine Giant is now allowing marketers to advertise on it using Discovery Ads. This will help advertisers engage with consumers using swipeable image carousel.
These ads can be used across the home feed, YouTube and Gmail promotions tab, giving you a huge reach. It also uses machine learning to give you the best results.
5. Google now introduces images in paid search ads.
This is a major announcement to come out of Google Marketing Live this year. The introduction of Gallery Ads on the search network is soon to be rolled out globally to advertisers.
What is a gallery ad and how does it look?
A gallery ad is a set of big swipeable images for a search from a user. The consumer can just swipe through the pictures to know what it is and click to expand to view too. For uploading a gallery ad, the marketer has to put up to 4-8 images, 3 headlines to test and up to a 70 character-description.
This is a new, much-anticipated ad type that can be run with the other types of ads on the search network. Galery ads are charged either as a normal text ad or when a user clicks on it as a cost-to-click basis.
Images drive a huge part of the online engagement across all platforms and this is one of the top google ads updates 2019.
6. Reach your local audience better.
We all know that consumers today do in-depth research on their smartphones before purchasing from a physical store. With the help of Google Ads, you can influence your audience group to decide even before they get into the store.
You can do this with the help of local campaigns. This is a semi-automated campaign type that can promote a store across Maps, Display, YouTube and Search to all marketers. Once you’re set, Google Ads optimizes the ad delivery to automatically maximize footfall to the stores.
7. Google Shopping experience becomes much better.
Google had recently announced a shoppable image search after Instagram’s Checkout on Instagram. The new update has made this process even more frictionless, giving the user the ultimate shopping experience on the search engine. This is a better way to turn prospects into customers.
8. Click Share is soon to come to Google Search Campaigns.
What is Click Share?
Click Share is the estimated number of clicks one receives out of the total click the ad was supposed to receive. This was already for Google Shopping Campaigns since 2015, but it will be soon rolled out for Google Search Campaigns too.
9. Google Ads bids goodbye to Average Positioning Reporting.
The search engine giant is saying bye to average position reporting as of September 30th. It has been around for over 15 years and now its use has declined. The introduction was first made in shopping campaigns to give users an insight into the average position in search campaigns. Marketers can now transition to other updates introduced last year like search top impression rate and search absolute top impression rate for better analysis.
Now add filters to the Overview Page.
The overview page is what a user sees first and is one that gets maximum engagement. One can now set filters to the overview page that adds a personal touch to the whole experience and a new level of customization.
The filter options include:
- Campaign
- Ad Group
- Campaign Status
- Device
- Campaign Type
- Ad Group Stats
10. New App+Web to be released for combined reporting in Google Ads.
A new analytics reporting is to be released in which website management and interaction between different applications becomes easier. It is just to simplify the process of measuring audience engagement with the help of this new property type. App + Web property type allows users to combine all of the app and web data in one report.
11. New recommendations to be introduced to the Optimization Score.
Optimization Score helps marketers save time by using recommended actions for different campaigns to run ads effectively. New recommendations are to be added for increased performance.
12. Google Ads to get a new Performance Planner.
This is being introduced to help marketers run campaigns for increased conversions. Now dive deeper into what works and what does not work for the campaigns and what would increase the overall performance.
13. Now export Google Ads data directly to Google Sheets.
Advertisers can now export Google Ads data directly to Sheets and share the Sheet.
14. Improved Standard delivery for search and shop campaigns.
Soon, Standard delivery will be the only option available of ad delivery method for Search campaigns, Shopping campaigns, and also shared budgets.
15. New CPM buying features for YouTube Masthead.
YouTube Masthead is now available for all marketers globally on CPM basis after several successful beta tests. Brands can drive engagement, visibility and reach by making use of this placement. by making use of this fixed placement.
Check out this space for more Google Ads Updates 2019, Google Ads News and Digital Marketing News.
