Big changes are afoot at Google as their Google Marketing Division recently had its yearly Livestream webinar to outline everything new and improved within Google Ads. Many of the changes and updates that have been made were in response to the consumer and marketing turnaround that happened due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The changes reflect how consumers are moving in different directions when it comes to searching, interacting with e-commerce sites, in-store shopping, and other online purchasing. Businesses are looking for new ways to understand the consumer because the better the relationship that they can foster, the more likely they are to earn repeat customers and expand through word of mouth.
Google Marketing is rolling out new features and updates in areas including the future of marketing and commerce, showing authenticity as a brand, understanding the age of automation, and transforming your business to ensure future success. More importantly, making businesses understand their intention and what type of company they want to be moving forward.
Insight’s Page Updates:
Jerry Dischler, Google Ads GM, shared that the insights page would be an extremely useful new addition to the Google Ads portfolio. Businesses can create custom insights to understand specific elements of data concerning their audience and how well certain campaigns are doing. There is also a new element to the insights page which has taken the form of Performance Max which is a new way to buy Google Ads from a single campaign. Performance Max campaigns bring together all of Google’s Ad inventory in one location to make audience analysis a seamless process.
In another effort to emphasize a new phase of privacy for the user, Google will not build alternative identifiers to track individuals as they browse across different websites. Google is focusing on a new chapter of privacy-focused changes including no cookies or trackers in the hopes of building trust with users. As businesses also use the software, users will put more trust in specific organizations as they are not
Future of Measurement:
Another of many updates includes many changes within the ability for companies to measure and track data more effectively. Organizations can now build measurement strategies on first-party data. In addition, in line with the many changes to improve data privacy the updates will provide conversion modeling through consent mode that helps to fill in the data gaps with modeled data. The consented and modeled data will improve the advertiser experience by deepening insight capabilities. These changes will help improve cross-channel advertising decisions about media budgets based on insight and app performance.
Added with the data modeling, the Google Ads update now creates in-app conversions for touchpoints. This allows advertisers to properly value the impact of all ads including search, shopping, display, and YoutTube. In addition to adding conversions, organizations can now add image extensions to run with text advertisements. This can increase the effectiveness of advertisements because the user can visually understand the product while reading the accompanying text.
Throughout the event, Google emphasized three main aspects of the future of data. The future is first-party, consented, and modeled data.
Keyword Updates:
New and exciting things are happening with keyword searches. There are now three different ways that Google Ads users can search through their audience and campaigns. The first way is Phrase Match which is used to reach the specific phrase but also more of the right searches related to the campaign. Broad Match has been changed to deliver more relevant searches by incorporating signals by landing pages and more. Exact Match finds searches that are identical to the query as long as it is eligible to match. The exact match is often preferred by users.
Google Merchant Growth:
Google’s main goal with helping businesses grow is by updating merchant ad ability to be more effective to help reel in more consumers. Google Ads uses what customers are searching for to understand how to best grow businesses and make decisions. Product feed within advertisements allows businesses to highlight specific products to pull the consumer in. New local inventory ads show nearby products available for pickup now or later. As we have recently seen due to the pandemic, expanding in-store and curbside pickup is important and it can now be added to YouTube and Maps. Providing all information in different locations can create a much more positive consumer experience.
A soon-to-be-launched addition is a Google Loyalty Program which is currently in pilot testing. Loyalty programs can often create returning consumers as they are rewarding each time they return to the webpage or store.
Measuring Against Competitors:
When running an advertising campaign, a business can control nearly every aspect of how information is released and ordered. They can use insights to understand how their specific advertising is performing but what they haven’t been able to do in the past is compare how their overall efforts compare head to head with their competitors. Now, with Google’s new Competitive Visibility Report, businesses can gather insights beyond just their performance and are able to see how they are performing in relation to their competitors.
In addition, Price Competitiveness Report, a new update, allows organizations to see how other businesses are pricing similar products. This shows which prices are getting clicks and attention in comparison to competitors. It also allows for organizations to see how non-competitors are pricing their products and how their general campaigns are running. Understanding what else is going on in other sectors and fields can help make a company more aware and well-rounded by incorporating other ideas.
Looking ahead:
As businesses continue to evolve they are looking for new innovative ways to gather information on their audiences to best reach and stay in touch with what the consumer is looking for. Using insight pages and data tracking, Google Ads analytics can help organizations gather comprehensive information surrounding the success and failure of product, ad and information campaigns.
Data tracking in the future will be more effective while also being less invasive and emphasizing privacy for the web user. By creating a trustworthy relationship between organization and user, data information will be more likely to be consented to by users and there will be more data for the businesses to analyze to better understand their consumer.