Google Marketing Live
Google Marketing Live is the yearly event at which the search giant unveils its latest products. In 2019, the two-day San Francisco event took Discovery as its theme.
Here’s a summary of the highlights from both days:
Mobile app upgraded
A better Google Ads app will allow users to edit and create more responsive search ads, and manage more campaigns wherever they are, while also receiving new notifications and recommendations.
You will now, for example, be able to create your ad directly from the app. You will also be able to add new or negative keywords, pause those which are performing poorly, and opt in to all Smart Bidding strategies.
Where there are new chances to enhance performance across all your accounts, the app will notify you.
At the same time, you’ll soon be able to use Google Ads’ local campaigns, whether you have enabled store visits management or not. And ads can now link pages and users within a business’s app.
Finally, businesses can now also highlight product-specific offers and information within campaigns, while a fresh Google Maps inventory allows brands to serve ads in more places.
Audience expansion
A new tool expands advertisers’ reach to create more conversions at the same average cost-per-acquisition or CPA.
Discovery ads
These native ads appear across multiple Google feed environments. The corporation has described them as ‘visually rich, mobile first and using the power of intent.’
(Essentially that means information Google has gained from searchers’ previous activities.)
Advertisers create a specific Discovery campaign, and then Google uses machine learning to optimise the best-performing combinations. These ads are set to become available to advertisers worldwide later this year, and the Discover feed now reaches 800 million users globally, with ads shown in mobile browsers, the Gmail promotions tab and YouTube’s home feed.
The idea is that users are helped to find things they didn’t even know they were looking for!
Shopping ads
Google’s Smart Shopping campaigns will allow retailers to optimise their Smart Shopping for store visits and display their local inventory information, as well as specifying where their shopping ads are displayed.
It will also become possible to shop across more of Google’s services while adding items to a single, unified shopping cart.
Showcase shopping ads, introduced in 2016, give retailers the chance to ‘showcase’ a list of products in response to non-branded, broad-category searches, for example, ‘summer dresses’ or ‘outdoor furniture’.
These ads are being extended to Google Images, plus YouTube and Discover feeds.
Gallery ads
This is a new image-based, visually compelling ad unit showing a gallery at the top of the search results which users can scroll through. The gallery offers 70 characters for each of the four to eight images, paid for on a pay-per-click (CPC) basis. These ads, for now, are only available on mobile.
Fresh bidding controls
More customised ads with more exact bidding are available thanks to new automated bidding controls. These include greater control for seasonal adjustments, for example for one-off promotions.
Bumper machine
A new tool has been designed to automatically create YouTube six-second bumper ads from longer ones. The social media giant is reportedly alpha-testing this machine.
Talk to us
If this all sounds too complicated then why not check our PPC packages. If you have any questions about anything related to any of these latest developments, we’ll be glad to talk them through with you.