Marketing professionals from around the world came together on 10th July to take part in Google Marketing Live 2018. The live-streamed keynote sessions covered new changes and initiatives for Google AdWords (now Google Ads), all of which aim to provide better results for businesses and focus heavily on AI and machine learning.
This annual event helps marketers and businesses all over to stay ahead of the curve and gives them the opportunity to improve their marketing campaigns and make ready for the future of online marketing.
With four new campaigns types rolling out (smart, local, hotel & shopping), and many more additions and changes, there is a whole lot going for businesses advertising online. But ultimately, these new campaign types aim to help marketers utilise machine learning to make their ad campaigns more successful.
For those of you who missed it, here is a recap of the speeches and what the main takeaways were for us.
Responsive Search Ads
Rolling out over the next few months is a new ad type, which provides automated ad testing and can help advertisers who wish to let Google’s algorithm do most of the work, run their campaigns more easily. Responsive search ads will do the following things:
- Simplify ad testing
- Mix & match multiple headlines and descriptions
- Give more flexibility
- Offer up to three 30-character headlines
- Offer two 90-character descriptions
- Have the option to pin specific headlines
Most of this is a bid to get advertisers to let go of A/B testing by pushing more for automated ad rotation. The result? This new ad type means you get 90% more ad text, which will help boost click-through rates.
Smart Campaigns
Smart Campaigns are landing as a new ad type and are designed to be simple, to help save time and to deliver real results. Smart campaigns use machine learning to help businesses optimise their campaigns and reach more customers. This is particularly helpful for small businesses.
An impressive statistic says that the new smart campaigns are 3 times better at getting ads in front of the right customers, making it an exciting change for Google Ads. We are also going to see new Smart Shopping Campaigns which:
- Run across all Google’s major properties
- Automatically optimise to selected goals
- Help hit online revenue goals
- Reduce complexity
Local & Hotel Campaigns
The new Local Campaigns are designed for businesses who wish to gain more foot traffic to their actual location. In a nutshell, Local Campaigns help you achieve offline goals. This new, fully dedicated campaign type helps advertisers to make more local conversions and store visits. Combatting the rising ‘near me’ searches on mobile, Local Campaigns allow advertisers to set a budget and the ads are automatically generated and optimized across search, maps, websites and apps.
So, if you would like Google to automatically optimise your ad campaigns simply and easily with machine learning, to increase store visits, this new campaign type is good news for you.
As well as these, new Hotel Campaigns will help you to utilise powerful bidding controls and maximise bookings depending on your ROI goal. You can connect with more travellers using this new campaign type, with Google’s latest machine learning technology.
Other Key Takeaways
There was a lot to digest at the talk this year, so we’ve put together a shortlist of other bits of important information.
- Collaboration – As part of Google’s initiative to help businesses use simple tools to be successful online, Google is combining it’s existing marketing tools in different ways. To read more, read our blog post which is dedicated to explaining what’s changing, what’s collaborating and what you need to do.
- Instant Reporting – this handy tool will help advertisers to create custom reports instantly, saving you plenty of time and effort.
- Youtube Brand Lift – this will allow advertisers to set a new smart bidding strategy for YouTube campaigns. This allows businesses to reach people who are more likely to consider a brand after seeing an ad, by using Google’s machine learning.
- Cross-Device Reporting – the new cross-device reporting and remarketing in Google analytics allows you to combine data from website visitors who have visited multiple times across different devices. This allows marketers to make more informed decisions about their business.
- New Landing Page Speed Score – this encourages people to improve their page load speed on mobile for websites that are mobile-friendly. Pages will receive a page speed score on a 10-point scale which is based on page speed and potential conversion rate.
If you feel you need help or advice for your Google Ads campaigns, give the team at Colewood a call to see how we can help.
