Google announced yesterday a raft of new innovations, including new ad formats, new data driven solutions and automatic ad resizing.
Jerry Dischler, VP of Product Management, provided the update during the Adwords livestream of 2015. The video at the bottom of this post covers the update in full, but it is 44 minutes long, so as a summary, here’s what Google announced:
Mobile Searches
Google announced that mobile searches have now officially taken over desktop search queries in ten countries around the world, including the United States and Japan.
New Ad Formats
There are now new ad formats for the automotive, hotel and mortgage/insurance industry. Of these three, we found the automotive industry ad format the most exciting new ad offering, which will not only impact the ads for the direct automotive brands, but also local dealerships.
The ad, as shown below, displays images again (after image extensions have been depreciated last year after a beta test) and will allow users to swipe through the different images and click for more information. Clicking the image will display additional information to the consumer. When depreciating image extensions, Google did mention that these might return, but in a more innovative way and we would not be surprised if this is the first vertical of many to roll out.
Image from Searchengineland.com
In addition, hotel ads are now rolling out globally, and are enhanced – however this is not a big change since these ads were already in place.
Image from Searchengineland.com
Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic search ads are being overhauled. This ad format allows you to tell Google to target queries based on your content, or specific parts of your content. Google will look at your content and dynamically generate a headline and find the right landing page.
This will now become easier to set up since Google will inform you about categories at the start of the set up. Overall competition for keywords will likely increase, since accounts that do not feature many keywords may now start competing for more queries by implementing dynamic search ads.
Attribution
Users are currently able to see the attribution of keywords directly within the Adwords interface, and in greater detail in Google Analytics by using the attribution model tab. However, Google will now help you analyse your queries and show the incremental uplift that they drive within a conversion path. This will then be used within their bidding solutions.
Overall
Taking last and this year’s Livestream changes announcements into account, we can see that Google is pushing mobile hard, and that they are continuing to take steps to get closer to what bid management platforms have previously offered us.
The ability to have better data driven optimised bidding – including their new reporting – are big steps towards a system that takes a lot more into account than the click on one ad.