Google Marketing Live 2018 | What You Need To Know

Valuable, Transparency, Trustworthy

That was the basis of this year’s Google Marketing Live Summit, where Google Executives & Product Managers unveiled the latest updates for their suite of advertising and analytic solutions. This summit marked the continuation of Google’s effort to simplify their advertising experience with a range of changes & new tools for both marketers and small business owners.  Above all Google pushed that people don’t see value in advertising if they don’t feel value, meaning advertisers have to work harder after the click to ensure they deliver a user experience that is helpful, frictionless & personal. Google described changes in searching behavior where users look to advertisers to help them make decisions on what products to buy, client MSafe launched with a helpful product wizard to help their users find the right safe product for their needs.

Out With The Old…

After 17 years of the Google has decided to rebrand Google Adwords to simply Google Ads. The advertising platform now falls under the newly created Google Marketing Platform, a new system that puts all of its analytic & advertising properties under one roof. The rebranding wasn’t the only ticket item on this years list, the change also had a significant improvement in user experience with the addition of an integrations dashboard, making it easier to connect & manage google property integrations (an often tedious task). For brand managers, media buyer or designer you’ll love the latest collaborative dashboard that Google is introducing for Display & Video 360 users. Using their cloud technologies, everyone can now collaborate to organize campaign data, creative & audience targetting under one dashboard making the campaign planning process seamless. If your smaller business chances are you won’t be using these platforms but there are still some big feature updates to the Google Ad platform that you’re going to love…

New Google Search Ad Features

Responsive Search Ads:  These are flexible ads that leverage machine learning to test different combinations of headlines and descriptions to find the combination the drives the best results for your business (say goodbye to manual A/B Testing). The system works by providing 15 headlines and four descriptions, Google will do the testing for you. The responsive ads are also 90% bigger than traditional search ads, which can now show up to three headlines (compared too two) and 90 character ad descriptions compared to 80.

Mobile Landing Page Speed Score: A new metric that will automatically test the mobile landing page speed, which can have big effects on conversion rates. Our predictions are that a lot of people are going to be optimizing their sites or developing new websites to accommodate performance after seeing this helpful metric.

Smart Campaigns:  Are Google’s latest effort to automate the advertising process making it an ideal solution for small businesses. The system scans a website pulling Ad copy & images directly from your site. Although this sounds great in theory, if you’re an established business you should trust a Google Partner to manage your campaign for you.

New Google Shopping Ad Features

Automated Feeds: A long-awaited feature to a very tedious process, advertisers can now directly link their Google Shopping Ads feed to their website, allowing data to pass through without spending countless of hours entering information into an excel sheet.

Local Campaigns:  The new ad format is designed to drive store visits to your brick and mortar location providing users with location and an ad to drive that foot traffic.

Smart Shopping Ads: Shopping ads have been great at driving purchase conversions for your e-commerce stores but other conversion goals like traffic and form sign-ups are neglected, Smart Shopping allows you to pick additional goals ensuring you can create campaigns that are optimized to complete both awareness and micro-conversion goals.

Google Ads + Shopify: If you’re a Shopify user you’ll be pleased to know that Google Shopping ad campaigns can now be managed through your Shopify dashboard, adding another great integration to the e-commerce platform.

Youtube Ads

Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world, for that reason I was particularly excited to hear about the three new ad formats being introduced to the platform. These new ad formats now make Youtube a full sales funnel solution from brand awareness to conversion.

TruView For Reach (Awareness) – Impression based buying, helps raise awareness amongst the masses using their popular TruView Ad formatting allowing users who have no interest in your ad (at no cost to you)

Maximum Lift (Consideration ): This ad format is designed to further increase brand consideration, leveraging machine learning to show your ads to groups of audiences who will most likely buy your product by adjusting bids in real time during to maximize the impact of the ad.

TruView For Action – Designed to drive conversion by displaying a call to action during and after the video is complete. These branded banners are integrated underneath the ad player and can have specific buttons like a book now, buy now, etc. Furthermore, the ads can be paired with custom intent audiences to reach a highly interested group with a relevant ad.

All of these features will be rolled out within the next few months, with many of them already in beta.

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