If you didn’t have time to watch Google Marketing Live, this brief recap highlights the most important aspects and updates talked about during the event.
Search ad updates:
- Mobile landing page speed score: Slow-loading webpages are bad news. This feature helps optimize the web experience by testing your website and telling you, on a scale from 1 to 10, how fast your page loads on mobile devices.
- Responsive search ads: Google has been encouraged to drop manual testing and this feature basically automates this process. If you are willing to trust Google’s algorithm machine, you could save yourself a lot of time. All an advertiser has to do is input 15 headlines and 4 description lines; Google will do the rest by mixing and matching your input using the combinations that perform best.
- Measurement across devices: With device overlap, you can see from which devices your content is being accessed.
Advertiser tools for small businesses:
- Smart campaigns: It’s simple, saves time and delivers results. It helps show your ads to the correct audiences — increasing calls, purchases and visits. Google asks a few questions and customizes your campaign. The Image Picker allows you to choose from a few images or upload your own. Google then combines images and texts selected, trying out which ones deliver better results.
Hotel campaigns:
- Hotel ads will not only allow guests to book right on Google but will also target bids to specific countries of origin and destination. You can also set specific budgets for each campaign.
Local campaigns:
- These are aimed at directly increasing store visits. Searches “near me” have increased dramatically, and this feature allows advertisers to take advantage of this trend.
What’s coming for YouTube?
- TrueView for reach: YouTube’s content is 95% audible, 95% viewable — a characteristic that allows it to ensure that ads will be seen. This new feature allows advertisers to pay only when an ad is seen.
- TrueView for action: This allows call-to-action buttons to be placed on a branded banner — a feature that will increase visits for advertisers.
- Maximize brand lift bidding: Basically, it tries to deliver ads to those more likely to consume a brand. Google will combine survey and search data to process information about how people respond to your brands, giving information about where your audience is.
Google marketing platform:
- This merges the advertising and analytics platforms. It includes Google Analytics 360, Google Optimize 360, Google Data Studio, Google Surveys 360, Google Tag Manager, Google Double Click, Search Ads 360, Display and Video 360 — all combined and working together.
Google aims to have every component of an advertising campaign managed automatically with its tools and platforms. Very few inputs can create highly effective campaigns. Here at Kazoo, we take advantage of these changes and improvements to make better use of our clients’ budgets and make every penny spent worthwhile.
