Google recently presented their latest product offerings and announcements at Google Marketing Next, their annual keynote filled with exciting announcements in Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and DoubleClick.
There were many new products and features discussed at the keynote. We wanted to share some of the most exciting ones with you and talk about what they mean for our agency and brands like yours. If you’re a marketing nerd – we know you are – then get ready for some heart thumpin’ announcements!
Google Attribution Tool
As an advertiser, it is extremely difficult to properly attribute a sale or lead. There are so many different touch points throughout the buyer’s journey. Some products and services have hundreds. Some have dozens. Regardless of length, it is almost never as simple as conducting one search, clicking one ad, and then buying immediately. How did display advertising, social media content, Twitter Ads, offline influences, email marketing, and more come into play? How do you distribute credit to those channels once a purchase is made? Is your head spinning yet?
Google announced Google Attribution, and its purpose is to give advertisers a single view of the path to purchase, bringing online and offline media together using data driven attribution for deeper insights that essentially lead to better program performance, more sales, and a higher return on investment.
Using its incredible location tracking features, Google is able to tell when a Google user searched for a product or service and then later visited a location related to that service. Google has recently provided in-store visit data to select advertisers. Combining this offline data with online data provides us the full picture from the first step of the buying process through the end.
Accelerated Mobile Pages in Search and Display Ads
Within the keynote address, Google reported that if a webpage takes longer than 3 seconds to load, people will leave. Chances are you’ve done this yourself, unless you’re pretty patient! Most people are not. Last year, Google launch the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project. This initiative helps improve page load times for those who use AMP pages. Advertisers can now sign up for a beta that lets you use AMP’s fast-loading pages as landing pages. Additionally, Google Display Network ads are now being served with the same lightning speed technology of AMP pages.
Are you utilizing AMP pages on your website? The benefits go far beyond using these as landing pages. They have some pretty nice SEO benefits as well. While AMP pages are not an independent ranking factor, site speed and mobile friendliness are. AMP pages also appear with an AMP stamp, indicating that your page is going to load quickly. The image on the right shows how prominent these types of articles are in the search results page.
New AdWords Integrations with Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360
Our landing page and content testing functionality is now in one place alongside our advertising programs. With the new Google Optimize integration with AdWords, we’re able to test different landing pages and quickly see which pages are performing better. While there is still a lot of data analysis to do, the integration takes on step out of the process by giving us the data right within AdWords.
Google Surveys 360 now lets you target surveys to your remarketing audiences to help you understand why users act the way they do with your brand and ads. The integration with AdWords lets you do it right within the interface.
While these types of integrations make our lives easier, there is still a lot of analysis and strategic planning that goes into each of these initiatives. If you plan on tackling, or if you’re already tackling landing page tests, what is your strategy?
DoubleClick Bid Manager Updates and Unique Reach Data
Machine learning is a hot topic in the tech industry as it provides an incredible amount of data to those who use it. DoubleClick’s Bid Manager now uses machine learning to make bidding smarter and to improve performance. Using your previous campaigns’ performance, it understands what has worked in the past and recommends the right inventory and targeting for your brand.
In addition to an optimized bidding strategy, DoubleClick now offers unique reach data, letting advertisers know just how often people are seeing their ads. This feature is also available on the Google Display Network and YouTube advertising.
The New Google AdWords Experience
During last year’s keynote presentation, Google gave us a peek at the new Google AdWords interface. The new interface lets advertisers like us work smarter and faster, giving us more time to work on bigger picture strategies. The new interface isn’t open to everybody just yet, but E-Power’s clients are in, and we’re loving it! Here’s a sneak peek with a before and after comparison.
Old AdWords Interface
New AdWords Interface
Much more visual and cleaner, am I right?
That pretty much covers Google’s keynote presentation from last week. As a team, we look forward to this keynote so that we can take Google’s new products and features and apply them to our client programs. There is a lot here that can – and will – make our lives easier, but you know what? These same tools are going to give us an incredible amount of data that will tell us so much about our client’s target audiences and how they are interacting with their ads and website. Time saved with bid manager updates or Google Optimize integrations gives us that much more time to analyze performance and adjust our strategy. Isn’t that what we all want? To think bigger picture, create a kick ass strategy, and execute it like the awesome marketers we are? It takes a village that’s for sure.
Are you wondering how you can use these new products and features in your Google Ads program? Contact our team of online advertising experts for a free consultation on how to get started with these new features!
