Upcoming Changes to Google Adwords

By Jason Hawkins on April 28, 2014

Adwords_changes

Recently on Google’s Youtube channel, a live stream was hosted by Jerry Dischler on Youtube’s Google + Your Business Channel. On the live stream, Jerry explained that Google Adwords is planning on implementing some game changing features. He explained that people are living their entire lives online, and that reaching them with the right information and getting them what they want is critical for marketers. Some of the interesting stats that were given were:

  • Yesterday users mapped over 1 billions kilometers on google maps
  • Last month 6 billion hours on you tube and a whopping 40 % on mobile
  • Last month 100 billion plus searches were made on google.com

The key to understanding the intricacies of this advanced marketing is to understand the context. Google products are being made to help you market more effectively hence the release of the enhanced campaigns that have been being worked on over the past year. Google is now working on innovative ways to make your campaign management easier and more effective.

Let’s go over some of the solutions that intent on being rolled out by Google in the next few months. More information on the future releases of Google Products can be found on adwords.blogger.com

Innovative Ad formats

a.) Mobile – Apps are more important than ever. Google play as of may 2013 recorded over 50 billion app down loads, over a million apps, and over 190 countries that are downloading apps every single day. As marketers, it is our job to take advantage of these types of opportunities. Apps are usually being downloaded because they want a solution to their every day problems. Simplified work flows and seamless integration are going to be rolled out as a result of the growth of app marketing in a  “single integrated solution”.

Fun fact: 60 % of apps are never actually installed, Google will help you get more downloads with its new product releases. Google play keywords are now going to be recommended to drive more results from Google play apps search. Example: If you have a calorie tracking app, Google might recommend users that downloaded health apps based on app down load history from Google play users. Google is doing many other things like this to understand the way people search for solutions to help marketers manage marketing campaigns more effectively.

b.) Youtube – Google will start to encourage app downloads along side video plays based on historical downloads. It’s worthy to note that 80 percent of apps that are downloaded are only used once!

A new feature/solution that is going to be rolled out called “App deep linking” will allow you guide your visitors to a certain page in your app rather than just the application home screen. Example -let’s say use searches for hotels in San Francisco, Hotel tonight as a advertiser can guide the user directly to the result in their app for the result page of hotels in San Francisco, this is likely to encourage the user to use your application more than once, because it is an easy to use application that takes the user exactly where they want to go.

2. Insightful Reporting 

Years ago when it was all about the desktop world, things use to be easy, but in a multi-device world, measuring conversions can be difficult. From the launch of estimated total conversions, Google has been trying to do more. Shutterfly saw a 60 % increase in conversions measured over all when considering multi-device conversion tracking (i.e. mobile to desktop) and attributions. Having these types of tracking cross device conversion tracking solutions will enable marketers to get their hands on actionable data that was not available before. Offline tracking solutions are going to be rolled out and things that Google will have to consider while working on rolling out these features are:

  1. Great consumer value?
  2. protecting user privacy?
  3. actionable insights need to be delivered

Express retailer was chosen to test the Pilot estimated total offline conversion enhancement. Express realized that overall conversions increased by 102%. This type of data is invaluable as there are many types of conversions that involve offline and online visits.

3. Intelligent tools

Bulk actions rolling out. making changes in bulk instead of using excel or offline applications. Google has been getting a lot of feed back from their users explaining that managing large campaigns has been too difficult to manage. Now with the overhaul of bulk editing, things like updating 1000’s of campaigns for a holiday campaign can be done with just a few clicks. You will also be able to implement location targeting and ad rotations across a number of campaigns with ease.

Automated bidding, The goal for Google is to provide an enterprise bid management solution right in Adwords. Google is going to roll out features that allow you to set very specific goals such as  bid for higher ROI or CPC, allowing Google to do the work for you. With over one billion bid adjustments made every day, the features being rolled out will help marketers tremendously. With the new automated billing suite, you now have the ability to automate bids to maximize the number of conversions. You also have the ability to optimize revenue automatically.

Autobytel recently saw a 60% increase in conversions and profits when using conversion optimizer’s new features during a test run. A great video was provided to cover the recent additions to Google Adwords which was presented by Paul Feng. Paul Feng explains that there are going to be 2 new features that are going to be used to get more from your Adwords campaigns.

Enhanced Reporting

Adwords knows that we as marketers spend a lot of time using excel spread sheets and a lot fo time importing and exporting which is a drag for everyone. To save time Google has tried to figure out what can be done to save time and to make your campaign management less tediuos and more efficient by building a tool which allows you to do multi-dimensional analysis right inside of Adwords. Google came up with a tool that work much like pivot tables, you can drag and drop your own campaign tables with ease. More of a multi-dimensional analysis tool, the great thing is that this data is list. How is this good? Well first, it makes implementing changes really easy. Let’s say that we want to make changes live, you can do so using the table inside of Adwords without having to import or export from and to excel. Another huge benefit is that it makes exploring data much easier because you don’t have to down load and upload your data.

With this new feature you can toggle between bar graphs, pie charts, tables and more so that you can spend less time downloading, uploading into spread sheets etc. You can also expect to see automatic email reporting available so that you can schedule reports via email right from the interface.

Draft & Experiments

This feature is really exciting, here you can test out your ideas before going live! You will be able to see what the results would have been had you implemented those changes before actually going live. You can make your drafts experiments to compare it to your traffic data to see what would have happened if you went live essentially allowing you to “test” your ideas with real world data! With the click of a button after testing your ideas you can push them live seamlessly!

Google and advertisers are very exciting to see these news features roll out soon! The video below is where the news came from! Thanks for reading!



About The Author

Jason Hawkins
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com

Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.