Google has re-branded its advertising platform from Google AdWords to Google Ads.
Google says “We launched AdWords nearly 18 years ago with a simple goal—to make it easier for people to connect online with businesses.”
The purpose of this change is to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to connect with relevant customers across all of channels and partner sites to advertise across all networks.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce says, “Mobile is now a huge part of our everyday lives. People quickly switch from searching for products to watching videos, browsing content, playing games and more. As a result, marketers have more opportunities to reach consumers across channels, screens, and formats.”
Google has made the executive decision to integrate its ad products under three new brands: Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ads Manager.
Let’s start with Google Ads- What’s new in it?
Google AdWords is now Google Ads
The new Google Ads interface contains many new features. It includes advertising across Search; Google Display Network, which includes apps and websites, Gmail, and YouTube. This will make it even easier for businesses to deliver valuable, trustworthy ads and the right experiences for consumers across devices and channels.
Google Ads also helps all businesses to connect with the billions of people for:
- finding answers to their queries on Search,
- discovering apps on Google Play,
- watching videos on YouTube,
- exploring new places on Google Maps,
- browsing content across the web, and much more.
Google is making easier for people to reach the relevant brand through Google Ads. Google has introduced Smart Campaigns for small businesses to do more. It is a smarter and easier way to target visitors who are ready to call, visit the store to make a purchase or go online.
What’s New?
After implementing Google Ads, the URL changed from adwords.google.com to ads.google.com, but to user data remains the same. After logging in to Google Ads, you get the overview of your account, same as it was in Google AdWords, but with a different user interface.
Most probably some of the features are the same as Google AdWords. Besides that, Google has introduced some new features in Google Ads. Let’s take a look at these features:
Overview
The main page that appears after logging into Google Ads is the overview page. It provides the summary of your ad. This overview is displayed in a visual dashboard format that provides standard performance metrics such as biggest changes, campaigns, keywords, new words appearing in recent searches, most shown ads, auction insights and other key metrics.
The overview page helps advertisers quickly find out what overall account performance is. As a result, they can take quick decision to optimize the performance of ad and achieve the desired target for their business.
It shows the best performing keyword and the impression of your ad in which searches took place. You can also check to the total cost of your campaign and the individual cost of each keyword that is clicked. It provides segmented metrics with complete details to focus on what’s important for your Google Ads campaign.
In short, the overview page is the complete summary of the progress of your ad and its performance.
Recommendations
With the recommendation feature in Google Ads, you can get more out of your Ads. It helps to improve your campaigns.
As per Google “Each recommendation provides customized suggestions to help increase your campaigns’ performance. Recommendations can introduce you to new, relevant features, help you get more out of your budget by improving your bids, keywords, and ads, and can work to increase the overall performance and efficiency of your campaigns.”
Once Google creates an ad recommendation, the user will receive an email notification and then will be able to review, edit, or dismiss these ad suggestions within the Recommendations page.
Recommendations page can help you:
- Google Ads checks your historical data like the performance of your campaign and what people search for on Google to provide you a recommendation, which might increase the performance of your ad.
- It helps you to make improvements in your ads by providing suggestions, which allows you to take decisions instead of conducting research.
- The Recommendations page can help you keep your account fresh. It provides suggestions for keywords, change bids, create new ad and more.
Thus, the recommendations feature of Google Ads can help the advertiser to show their ad to relevant customers and fine-tune their ad campaign.
Dashboards
With new Google Ads, you can create custom dashboards. Dashboards provide a single place for you to review integrated performance statistics from across your account. It allows you to gather your most relevant data so you can quickly spot issues and opportunities for your business.
You can easily create custom dashboards. It helps you to control what performance metrics to include and what format to view it in. The custom dashboard enables advertisers to customize reporting and track it in real time. It is also simple to share, download, and annotate your dashboards for smooth collaboration.
Dashboards help advertisers to put together the strategies needed to boost the performance of the ad and achieve target goals.
Predefined Reports
Predefined reports formerly known as dimensions is another new feature of Google Ads. It provides more information than dimension tab with a new user interface. Predefined reports allow you to view data graphically. It helps you view, organize and analyze your data.
New predefined reports allow you to place a large amount of data into multi-dimensional tables, line charts, bar chart, pie chart, scatter chart and customizable dashboards. Data gathered from these reports will help you build a clearer picture of what really goes on in your account, and you can use these findings to optimize your account more effectively.
Responsive Ad (Display)
We are in an internet era. People use the internet to search for anything and everything. Whether it’s the search network looking for products and services or a Google partner site or Google Maps, people search on dozens of different sites, networks, and platforms.
With the introduction of Google Ads, the small business can now use Responsive Display Ads with Google’s new default ads experience. A fully-integrated, multi-channel experience where each network works together.
With Responsive Display Ads, you can create ads in minutes driving anything from website visits to phone calls, leads to your website and store visits.
Google Says “For 90 percent of small business owners, the main goal of advertising online is to get customers to call, visit a store, or make a purchase.”
Along with Responsive Display Ads, you can add images to your Ad, which can help you stand out for your product or services. You can add up to three images to your ad.
As you can see in the above image, your responsive display ad for mobile will look like this. Ads with the image, short headline, long headline, description and business name will be shown on the display network, YouTube, and Gmail. It is very helpful to advertise your product or service through images and some description. This is totally different for desktop ads.
The above image shows the sample of a new responsive display ad for desktop/computers. As per the size of your image, you can select the example for your ads to show on display network, YouTube, and Gmail.
Google helps you to reach the right people at right time. Responsive Display Ads is currently available for the U.S in beta testing. Besides that, it will be available to all advertisers by the end of the year says Google.
New Responsive Search Ad (Beta)
After re-branding Google AdWords to Google Ads, Google introduced a new responsive search ad. Currently, new responsive search ad is in beta phase. It comes with lots of new features.
New responsive search ad shows up to three headlines instead of two in the regular search ad. By the way, you can add 3 to 15 headlines with 30 characters. Besides that, Google will show only potential ads assembled using your assets with the top three headlines.
It also shows up to two 90-character descriptions, which is only one in the regular search ad. You can add 2 to 4 descriptions that appear below the display URL.
“The best practice for responsive text ads — writing headlines that are relevant to the keywords in the ad group and including at least one of the keywords in your ad group in the headlines — remains valid.”
There is an option available in the new responsive search ad, which allows you to “pin” headlines and descriptions at specific positions. By using multiple combinations of headlines and descriptions, your ads will have the opportunity to compete in more auctions. This will help your message reach more customers by showing up for more searches.
Google Marketing Platform
Google Marketing Platform is the combination of both the DoubleClick advertiser network and Google Analytics 360 to one entity.
It will allow enterprise marketing teams who enjoy using both analytics and ads together. For better reporting, understanding, and results in a single location. This will make it easier for both parties to “plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place.”
The Google Marketing Platform now contains new features like Display and Video 360. While, this tool aims to enable “creative, agency, and media teams to collaborate and execute ad campaigns end-to-end in a single place.”
Google Ad Manager
The Google Ad Manager is the new platform with a combination of DoubleClick Ad Exchange and DoubleClick for Publishers.
This platform is designed to do even more for Google’s partners by earning them more money, more efficiently, wherever people are watching videos, playing games or engaging with content, and however advertisers are looking to work with them. It will help advertisers reach people on platforms like smart TVs, Apple News, live streams, AMP, gaming, apps and more.
Conclusion
The new Google Ads experience is the best choice for advertisers. It is growing with new features and keep on developing. The user interface and features have received great upgrades.
Reporting and dashboard feature of new Google Ads helps advertisers to monitor their campaigns and ads. Alternately, helping them to create ads to attract relevant customers.
The new responsive search and display ad is a new change in the advertising platform. Similarly, it can help advertisers to show their ad to relevant customers and gain their respective targets. It allows busy advertisers to create ads in minutes.
New Google Ads experience is open and ready for all advertisers. They can show their product or service ads on Google and partner networks.
Today we live in the mobile-first world. Likewise, for any sort of queries, people first search on the mobile. They conduct a research for a product or a service, watch videos on YouTube, download apps from Play Store or use a smart digital assistant to conduct a voice search.
Above all Google AdWords is now Google Ads and will keep on growing with smart new features in the near future.