Google is always making changes. Fortunately, they usually come in the form of improvements that make our jobs much easier! Here are some of the significant recent updates to Google Adwords that will help improve your overall PPC (Pay-Per-Click) strategy.
More Ways to Reach Customers
Google recently rolled out two new ways to reach your ideal customer on Google Search: affinity audiences and seasonal event segments for in-market audiences. Affinity audiences helps you raise awareness and drive consideration among people who have a strong interest in your products. In-market audiences are a great way to reach consumers who are actively researching or comparing products and services.
“For instance, let’s say you sell camping gear. To reach avid campers, you can pair an affinity audience like “Outdoor Enthusiast” with generic camping keywords. By adding this additional audience layer, you can reach people who are not only searching for camping products, but are also passionate about the great outdoors,” explains Google.
New Youtube Extensions
In an effort to improve interactivity on YouTube, Google has come out with new extensions that make it easy for your customers to take action. Building off of their popular extensions on Search, extensions on YouTube give viewers useful and actionable information like store location, interest forms and additional calls-to-action. This information appears directly alongside your video ad. Later this year, call-to-action extensions, which are currently available for TrueView in-stream and non-skippable video ads, will also become available for 6-second bumper ads.
Display Campaign Scores
According to Search Engine Land, the campaign optimization score that Google Ads shows for Search and Shopping campaigns is now available for Display campaigns. Scores range from 0% to 100% and indicate how well your campaigns are expected to perform based on a number of factors such as targeting, bid automation, ads and extensions and more. The score is accompanied by a set of automated recommendations with indicators of how much of a score improvement you can expect to see by accepting them.
Smarter Bidding
Google is extending the availability of bid and budget simulators to more smart bidding strategies. Bid simulators help you understand your potential performance at different bid levels. To date, these simulations have only been available for campaigns using manual bidding or Target CPA. To make it easier for you to get more insights from a wider variety of campaigns, Google is adding bid simulator support for the Target ROAS bid strategy and a new budget simulator.
“For example, let’s say you’re interested in seeing how a higher target would impact your performance. Using data from the auctions you participated in over the last 7 days, this tool will show you what would have happened assuming everything else (e.g., your ads, landing pages, competitor ads, competitor bids etc.) stayed the same,” explains Google.
Multi-country feeds
Start showing your products globally with multi-country feeds, which allow you to target multiple countries that share the same language by using a single feed in that language. For example, if you upload product information in German for Germany, those products may be automatically available to show in other German-speaking countries, such as Austria and Switzerland. You’ll just need to set up shipping and location targeting for these countries in your Shopping campaign in order to start promoting your products in these new countries.
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