Mysteries of Google AdWords Live Stream Event Revealed

google adwords

The mysteries of the big Google AdWords announcment we’ve been hearing about for weeks were finally revealed by Google’s Jerry Dischler, vice president of AdWords Product Management, and I happened to have a front row seat!

The theme of the talk? Addressing “moments that matter” through better mobile experiences, more automation tools, and enhanced measurement features. It was all about helping marketers “win the moment” or, er, the micro-moment.

I’ll be going over the announcements and new products/features in more detail in a free, live webinar this Thursday, May 7 – sign up here – but to sum it up for you, I’ve compiled the four biggest takeaways that may or may not impact your day-to-day life as a PPC professional.

Heads up: You’ll definitely want to pay attention if you work in the automotive or finance industries, or if you’re a large/enterprise advertiser, as Google has announced some pretty cool new features for marketers in these verticals. There are also some great enhancements coming to the Display Network, bidding tools, and attribution modeling.

1. Helping Mobile Searchers Find What They Need with “Immediacy and Relevancy”

Dischler started off by talking about on-the-go mobile moments. “We’re not going online, we’re living online,” he said. “We demand the right information in the moment.” Dischler went on to explain that advertisers who respond to mobile needs with “immediacy and relevancy” in the moment will win, because in these moments searchers are “far more loyal to our needs than any particular brand.”

Fifty percent of automotive searches today are occurring on a mobile device, which is why Google is introducing two new mobile automotive ad formats including:

Automotive carousel ads, which will allow searchers to scroll through a gallery of images on the SERP, then click through for more information on each. Google stressed the importance of images to consumers doing automotive searches.
Find a dealer ads, which will make it easier for searchers to find a dealer that’s right for them based on location, price, reviews, horsepower, and additional information important to that consumer.

Both of these formats are available today in Beta. Reach out to your Google rep if you want more info.

Dischler also discussed the importance of mobile ads within the travel industry and shopping, but the features he discussed (like Hotel Ads) are not new to advertisers.

2. New Financial Products

Mobile is also huge in the financial industry (one of the most expensive and competitive within PPC), with 48 percent year over year growth in mobile financial searches, according to Google. When it comes to finance, “our users desperately want easy to understand, truly unbiased information.” Google announced a few new features to help searchers make more informed financial decisions, including:

Insurer ratings: Google Compare has helped searchers compare insurance prices, but since price is only one piece of the decision-making pie, Google is launching Insurer Ratings to help buyers make more informed decisions based on things such as reviews from customers. This feature is coming in the next few weeks.
Call a local agent: This feature allows searchers to call an agent directly from the SERP’s,
Find the right credit card is expanding to offer support for national and regional banks.
Mortgage ads for Google Compare: Buying a home can be overwhelming! This new ad format will allow searchers to compare the latest rates from a broad variety of lenders. It will help people to understand their options with ratings for each lender.

These financial products have been tested successfully in California, and are now expanding to Texas, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.

3. Improvements in Scaling and Automating Paid Search Management

Google understands that advertisers are busy and constantly in need of tools to scale and automate, so they’ve announced some new features to improve automation and help advertisers scale.

Auto-resizing for display: Remember when I used to preach that you need an ad in ALL 14 ad formats? No longer! Google announced that they’ll be automatically resizing display ads across the Google Display Network. The three sizes needed will show across 95 percent of the GDN. Google tested this with Jobs2Career, which resulted in a 20 percent increase in conversions and a reduced CPA of 16 percent. This should be a huge time-saver. (OMG. Finally.)
Improvements to Dynamic Search Ads: 15 percent of Google searches are completely unique and have never been searched on before. So Google is rolling out enhancements to dynamic search ads so that advertisers can more easily target a variety of unique keywords with the right ads and landing pages. These updates will include automatic crawling and organization of your site’s product pages. (RIP keywords?!)
Automated bidding enhancements: Bidding can drastically affect performance, which is why Google is releasing better tailored bidding with target CPA, as well as enhancing the bid strategy dashboard with a chart to compare target CPA against average CPA.

These enhancements will be coming later this year.

4. AdWords Measurement Improvements

Attributing conversion value across channels and devices is something that almost every advertiser struggles with. Advertisers are confused by which attribution model they should use and how to take action. This is why Google is releasing new data-driven attribution modeling, which will allow you to use your own conversion data in AdWords to see which keywords are most valuable for driving conversions. This is like view-through conversion for keywords. Google will then automatically optimize bids based on conversion data. This is supposedly coming to AdWords in the next few months.

In Conclusion

Overall the big takeaways here are no surprise: Google continues to stress the importance of mobile and is working to serve industries where customers are searching for information and products on their mobile devices first. And, as I mentioned in my post on big industry trends on Monday, Google continues to automate away the tasks that suck up too much of advertisers’ time.

For more detail on all these new enhancements and features, register now for my free webinar on Thursday, May 7. I’ll tell you everything you really need to know.

You can also watch the full livestream here.

What do you think? Are you excited about the coming changes?

Republished by permission. Original here.

Image: Larry Kim

This article, “Mysteries of Google AdWords Live Stream Event Revealed” was first published on Small Business Trends