Bing Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Quora Ads, and Amazon Advertising are just some of the tools used for the different types of online campaigns. But the two giants to beat remain, without a doubt, Google Ads Management Services Company and Facebook Ads. The first is the one that had the most important change in 2018, completely revolutionizing its brand and its platform: moving from Google AdWords to Google Ads.
Why this change? Simply because for Google the word “AdWords” was no longer able to enclose the number of services that the platform offers to advertisers:
- Search Network;
- Display Network;
- Google Shopping;
- YouTube and much more.
For these reasons, it has decided to generalize and introduce the new name: Google Ads. With the new name, however, an extremely different platform was also launched from the previous one that introduced many new functions and settings.
The main changes in Google Ads
The first big change with Google Ads is with ads on the Search Network. Until a few months ago, the platform allowed the creation of a single ad format (excluding special cases such as the countdown or keyword insertion), consisting of 2 titles of 30 characters each and a single description of 80 characters. In 2018, it introduced two new text ad formats:
Expanded text ads. In this case, we have 3 titles of 30 characters each and two descriptions of 180 characters in total. In its official guide, Google claims it has introduced more characters to give advertisers the ability to have more space to get their message across. In fact, according to most experts who have been in the industry for years, it was a purely economic decision.
In fact, with the use of new ads, the CTR generally tends to increase. What does this mean? For the same number of impressions, users click a lot more. Therefore, since Google Ads is a Pay Per Click platform, an increase in clicks is equivalent to an increase in earnings for the company.
Responsive Search Ads. In this case, the user has the freedom to enter 11 titles and 4 different descriptions. Once created, Google will decide how, when and what combination of ads to publish in the SERP.
Following this, the second change, on the other hand, concerns the In-Market audience segments that can also be used on the Search Network. Unlike the audiences of the old platform (which were for Affinity), the new ones tend to intercept users who, according to the Google Ads criteria, perform increasingly precise and frequent searches, because they intend to buy a product or service.
These are, therefore, audiences that should help advertisers get more conversions from a wider user base than the “single” keywords.
Word to the advertising expert
One of the biggest shortcomings, however, from my point of view, concerns the absence, in the new Google Ads platform, of the Dimensions Tab. It represented, in fact, one of the focal points of the old interface, since it allowed, in a single section, to conduct the necessary analyzes to better understand the progress of the campaigns.
Now, however, the functions have been separated into different Tabs. For example, to date, to carry out a performance analysis at a geographical target level, or at the level of days of the week, it is necessary to go to two different sections of the platform and evaluate appropriately.
However, great credit must be given to the “scientists” of Google. With the new platform, a significant step forward has been made in everything related to automatic bidding strategies. Currently, after having accumulated a sufficient number of conversions with manual bidding strategies, I am working to ensure that all campaigns (or almost) switch to a new automatic strategy that generally includes the “Target ROAS” strategy, for E-commerce, and “Maximize Conversions” or “CPA Target”, for lead generation campaigns.
The transition, however, must take place gradually: that is, it is always anticipated by an experiment of at least 2-3 weeks, in which the new strategy and its potential results are tested. There are many other new features, positive and negative, in the new Google Ads interface, but to go deeper and list them all, it would be necessary to write a new book.