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Google Adwords is a product which changes rapidly overtime – there were a massive 18 AdWords innovations and updates in Q4 of 2013 (AdWords.blogspot.ie, 2013), averaging over 1.5 new features every week for that period! This shows how important it is to keep up to date with these changes to ensure you can get the most out of your AdWords account. It changes with new innovations and updates to suit what it thinks both searchers and advertisers would find useful. After all, this is what Google does best.
From our point of view there’s been AdWords editor, enhanced campaigns and a friendlier user interface within AdWords itself which has led to it being easier to manage those campaigns as they grow over time. For businesses using AdWords and searcher’s there’s been click to call extensions, location extensions, seller ratings and even search boxes in ads as we showed you a couple of weeks ago.
2014 looks like being no different with Google announcing its first major raft of AdWords updates in late April. There are some good changes in here for people on both sides of AdWords although there is nothing in there as dramatic as enhanced campaigns – where you needed to make changes to your account, these will be optional changes. Google is aware that Apps are becoming ever more important – 86% of time spent browsing on mobiles is through apps (businessinsider.com, 2014).
To help your business make the most of this, Google will provide better targeting options to allow people to find your app, where it will allow you to show your app to people based on the apps they use, the frequency of use and the types of in-app purchases they make. E.g. if your business has a calorie counter app you will be able to show it to people who have fitness apps already downloaded.
Over 80% of downloaded apps are used only once and then deleted (Digital Trends, 2013). To try make this stat a thing of the past Google will now allow your app to show as an ad when someone carries out a relevant search – e.g. you own a holiday website and someone carries out a search for holidays in Spain and they have already downloaded your app, the ad would take them to the relevant page within the app, in this case the holidays in Spain page. This has the potential to increase both usage and conversions on your company’s mobile app.
“Callout Extensions” will be another line of text in between your description lines and your site links. They will not be clickable but will allow you to give more information about your product or service in the ad. Callout Extensions will essentially give your ad more space on the search results page and allow you to push your competitors further down the page. This is good news as it sometimes can be difficult to get across the key messages in the ad text as we are so limited on space.
Callout Extensions – now in beta
Demographics for search ads will allow AdWords users to target customers of specified demographics such as age or sex if they are logged into their Gmail accounts. This could increase relevant traffic and conversions. However, you won’t be able to target combinations such as females between 25 - 34, it will be just by gender or age group.
From our point of view there are a couple of features coming which should make management of accounts a little bit easier including more bulk auctions, automated bidding, advanced reporting which will see flexible excel style pivot tables within the AdWords interface and also more flexible experiment options within AdWords.
Pivot tables within the AdWords interface.
As some of these updates are in beta, there are still no dates set in stone for the majority of them, and some could be quite some time away. Be sure to keep an eye on the Wolfgang blog over the next few months for more information on these updates and feel free to drop us a line on Twitter if you've noticed anything interesting that you'd like to talk about.
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