AdWords introduced new features and improved existing ones this year. We look at some of the important announcements made in this roundup session.
Transformation of AdWords Conversion Metric
The conversion metric saw a massive change when it was announced that the ‘Converted Clicks’ will be removed and conversions will become the default metric to measure the actions completed by a user on advertiser’s business.
Simultaneously it was declared that cross-device conversion would be included in the ‘Conversion’ column. So user’s no longer had to manually opt to show cross device conversions in the conversion column and could thus get access to preview the overall performance.
To further help advertisers get more insight on device usage, Google announced 3 Attribution Reports that helped view the cross-device activity, examined top conversion paths and click assisted conversions for each device. These were namely, Device Report, Device Path Report and Assisted Device Report.
If you wish to know about what all the conversion metric covers, read our post here.
Watch this informational video to know more:
Another valuable feature announced during the same time was ‘Imported Call Conversion‘ that would help advertisers link their call conversion to their AdWords campaigns. Hence, making it easier to determine the customer path and assigning returns to the campaign from where the traffic was driven.
The Launch Of Expanded Text Ads
Earlier this year, during Google’s Performance Summit along with some of the major updates and announcements, the one that stood out was about an updated ad format called Expanded Text Ads. The PPC space was filled with speculations of how this would impact advertisers. However Google had planned it strategically. Starting from removing right hand side ads to improve and standardize search experience across devices, Expanded Text Ads were formally available starting July.
Keeping the Standard Ads for users to compare, test and reiterate, the earlier deadline of upgrading to ETAs was extended from October, 2016 to Jan, 2017.
Removal of Right Rail Ads & Redesigning the Interface
The Expanded Text Ads was set up in the wake of a change that was not formally announced until the Google’s Performance Summit. In February, it was noticed by PPCers that the right hand rail ads were removed and instead four ads were being displayed on top of the search results page.
The main reason for this change was sought to be, in order to be consistent across device types. The mobile device also noted to see about 2-3 ads, though the number isn’t consistent and might be dependent on the search term. This also wasn’t formally declared but noted by advertises doing thorough scrutiny on Google’s activities.
Not to forget, during the session they announced the redesigned AdWords to help advertisers establish their strong foothold in the now predominant mobile-first world. The demo of the new look was scheduled in the month of May.
Click-to-message Extension, Price Extension and Affiliate Location Extension
Google opened the window to some interesting extensions, starting with Price Extension. It would be an additional information given along with mobile text ads, where advertisers could showcase their products/ services and how much they would cost.
This extension was later this year, upgraded to show swipeable cards, in order to simplify comparing the options being displayed.
Also, announced was Affiliate Location extension to help advertisers drive visitors to their 3rd party retail outlets in US. Yet another extension, creating the buzz is Message Extension. This new extension lets you strike a conversation with customer via a SMS. You can make use of this extension by creating a premeditated response and thereafter reigniting the conversation to increase your conversion rate.
A New Way To Monitor Your Bidding Decisions
Smart Bidding, conversion based automated bidding, aims to offer solutions that help tailor bids for each auction, setting alternate CPA goals by device type, flagging issues in your bid strategies.
Automated bidding introduced, three news ways to get more insights on your bidding behavior. It included alerts to identify issues, adding bid strategy status to campaign and ad groups and Standard Bid Strategy Report to track the impact of bidding statuses.
Customer Match Made More User-Friendly
Customer Match lets you target your ads to highly targeted audience list created by you. To further hone this feature, Google has removed the expiration duration till a customer stays in the Customer Match List from 180 days to ‘No Expiration’
Earlier this year Customer Match was extended for Shopping ads, that lets advertisers target their ads to a list of e-mail addresses. To further, simplify the task of managing audience lists, save time and make better optimization decisions Google announced campaign-level audience lists
Also, to make planning for the shopping season easier, Google introduced another change in Customer Match that would allow advertisers to add or remove e-mail addresses from an already existing list.
Getting Valuable Performance Insights
To help advertisers what works best for their campaigns, Google announced ‘Campaign Draft & Experiments‘ to help advertisers test the changes made to campaign and identify the prospect options that could be carried further. Later this year, they introduced Campaign Groups & Performance Targets, to track campaign performance against the marketing goals set. They went a step ahead by launching their Marketing Goals Website that displays the goals set by you and which ads will contribute in achieving those marketing objectives.
With these announcements and many more, AdWords has evolved its platform even more. We can speculate more of such changes to come around in the year 2017.
Watch out this space for roundup of PPCchat sessions, AdWords scripts, Social PPC and more.
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