Google's New Product Features & Updates
A few weeks ago at Google Marketing Next, Google shared new features, updates and upcoming initiatives in Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and DoubleClick. The presentation can be broken into 3 initiatives:
- Making mobile experiences better
- Smarter customer interactions with data
- Reaching the right audiences / the attribution problem
Making Mobile Experiences Better For Consumers
Google will be rolling out AMP Pages for Search Ads (currently in beta). Landing page load time is a critical factor in Google’s ad rank and directly influences how much an advertiser pays for each click. With AMP pages for search ads, AMP landing pages can be linked to from search ads and will load almost instantly from the Google cache. You can use this link to sign up for the Beta for AMP.
Smarter customer interactions with data
To help advertisers bridge the gap between how users engage with online ads and offline business, Google introduced two new features:
(1) Location Extensions & Store Visits for True-View Video Campaigns
Designed with the intention of helping businesses generate foot traffic, this new feature allows advertisers to showcase local information alongside video ads.
(2) Store Sales Measurement Tools
Google is rolling out two new tools later this year to help measure in-store sales:
The first tool will help you transport transaction data back into AdWords to see store sales and revenue by device and campaign level for your search and shopping campaigns.
The second tool will allow you to leverage Google’s 3rd party partnerships to get store sales data with no implementation on the advertiser’s part.
Both solutions match transactions back to Google’s ads but do so in a secure and private way.
Reaching the Right Audiences
In an effort to improve the quality of audience segments across search, devices, and time, Google is introducing two new audience segments:
(1) Life Events & Consumer Patterns: This audience segment will helps advertisers understand where people shop and when they are celebrating large life events.
(2) In-Market Audiences for Search: Allows advertisers to reach people who are more likely to purchase and broadens the audience reach.
Reaching the Right Audiences
Accurate attribution is just as important as reaching the right audience. "The attribution problem” has been a long-time struggle but, according to Google’s Bill Kee, Google is on the brink of solving it. With that aim, Google is introducing two reporting tools:
(1) Google Attribution (currently in beta): Helps advertisers measure the impact and assign appropriate values to each marketing touch point, across multiple channels and devices. Obviously, this makes taking impactful actions considerably easier. The best part is that this tool will be free.
(2) Unique Reach Reporting in Adwords & DoubleClick: This report provides two new metrics: unique users and average impression per user. These metrics will help advertisers better understand how many people their ad reached and how many times it was seen by a single user. Both metrics are available in AdWords today, but will become available in DoubleClick in the coming months.
In addition to rolling out tools to help with reporting, Google is releasing two updates to the AdWords interface that will help advertisers reach new audiences and work smarter with landing page tools.
(1) Landing Page Tab: Shows you, at a glance, how your landing pages are doing so that you can quickly hone in on pages that need attention.
(2) Google Optimize Integration with AdWords: This integration helps you test new versions of landing pages in minutes without a webmaster.
Building The Bridge Between Digital & Offline Experiences
Media Planning is coming to DoubleClick, which will save users time, help them deliver better outcomes, and improve workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager.
Google is also rolling out Google Survey 360, a quick and easy way to create surveys so that you can better understand how your audience feels in order to improve your marketing efforts. Advertisers can link up their AdWords accounts with Survey 360 and target their custom audiences from within the Survey 360 account. By creating surveys for people within your remarketing audience, you can get a pulse on things like purchase intent and messaging.
Last but not least, Google is rolling out Google Assistant to connect data with dialogue.
Retailers will have the ability to utilize Google Assistant in local shopping ads by sending a local inventory data feed to Google, which populates information about a retailer’s business when a consumer is actively looking.
These new features and updates to AdWords, Google Analytics, and Doubleclick allow advertisers to make smarter decisions and improve the overall experience for users.
Credits: Leandra Parks and Stephen Drisaldi
