Google Ads: The Upcoming Changes Announced at ‘Google Marketing Live’

Published On: June 4, 2019 | Categories: Digital |

On May 14, 2019, Google held their annual ‘Google Marketing Live’ event in San Francisco. The event provided a look at how marketers can take action on new consumer insights. Here is a breakdown of some of the updates revealed during this event.

Discovery Ads

The first big announcement that came from the event was Discovery Ads. This new feature is primarily mobile-focused, but will give advertisers and brands the ability to promote their products through multiple locations in the Google Network. One of the biggest aspects of this new feature is that the ads are feed-based, meaning they look like native content.

Gallery Ads

These ads will show up in the search results. Instead of being text only, there is the option to include images as well. This gives advertisers and brands the ability to tell a story through a series of up to eight images. These ads will be available in Google Ads later this year.

Gallery ads have the following characteristics:

Up to three headlines
A 70-character tag with each image
Between four to eight images

App Deep Linking

This new capability will allow advertisers to send people directly to a company app from an ad, instead of sending them to the website and then directing them to the app. This new feature will only work if the consumer has the company app already downloaded and installed on their mobile device or tablet. With this feature, Google also announced that there will be more robust measurement and optimization options.

Custom Smart Bidding

Not all conversions are created equally. For example, visiting a product page is not as important to a company as somebody completing a purchase or requesting an appointment. With Google’s new smart bidding update, advertisers will be able to assign conversions at a campaign level, allowing them to create conversion specific campaigns and be more tactical at a campaign level.

Bumper Machine

Video is a great tool for brand awareness and a quick way to capture an audience’s attention. Bumper ads are six second video clips that are non-skippable and appear before or in-between YouTube videos. Ad sequence and bumper ad videos tend to perform better while allowing brands to tell a story through multiple videos ranging in different time durations. With the new Bumper Machine tool, advertisers will be able to place a video up to 90 seconds long, and through machine learning, the tool will create a collection of bumper ad video clips for advertising purposes. This will help reduce editing costs and provide a fresh new perspective of where to go with the creative.

Better Audience Targeting

Google is combining both in-market and affinity audiences, giving advertisers the ability to create better custom audiences. With this new rollout, there will be improved impression forecasting–not only on search campaigns but display and video as well. Advertisers will also have the ability to create custom audiences based on seasonality and select a specific time frame for ads to target an audience.

Google Shopping

The biggest change from this new functionality is the ability to checkout or directly purchase an item without being redirected to a company website. All purchases through Google Shopping come with a Google guarantee. This means that if something goes wrong with your order, such as receiving the wrong item, Google will refund the money back or help facilitate fixing the problem.

Privacy

Google is taking new steps to make sure all of their consumer data remains private and safe at all times. With the heightened importance of and focus on data privacy and security, Google offers advertisers three different recommendations to ensure audience collections is done correctly:

Learn about what data we collect as a company and why we are collecting certain data
Find ways to build more direct relationships with users
Understand and respect people’s privacy

Google is trying to become the one stop shop for all online advertising needs, while directly competing with companies like Amazon. All of the changes coming to Google will help advertisers increase performance, as well as making sure that the ads being served to consumers are as relevant as possible. These changes are either currently available or will be rolling out in the next few months.