Google are always innovating and updating. Changes can happen very quickly so it can be challenging to keep up with them.
While there always seems to be a lot of buzz about the changes they make to their organic search algorithm, there has also been a lot of buzz lately about some of the changes they have made inside Google AdWords.
While some are more significant than others, here’s a recap of the some of the major changes that have occurred over the last three months.
- Bulk Editing – change announced Dec 2012
- AdWords for Video Reach & Frequency – 30/1/2013
- Enhanced Campaigns – 6/2/13
- AdWords Express Can Now Be Managed in My Client Centre- 15/2/2013
- AdWords Editor Update – 22/2/2013
- Search Funnels Now Appearing in AdWords – 13/2/2013
- Measuring Brand Lifts From Google Adwords – 11/3/2013
- Product Listing Ads Will Now Appear in Mobile Phones – 12/3/2013
Bulk Editing
You can now make large-scale changes inside AdWords without having to use adwords editor. This means you can select thousands of keywords and adgroups across multiple pages and copy the data to edit bids and budgets as well add & edit new keywords.
For example, suppose you had a campaign dedicated to “roses” with all a lot of adgroups and search terms with the right match modifiers and want to create a similar campaign for a different flower type. It is quite painful manually typing keywords and adgroups that are similar. Instead you can save time by coping the adgroup & keywords and use the “change keyword text” to replace everything with the word “roses” to a different flower type like “orchids.”
AdWords for Video Reach & Frequency
Launching in January, AdWords now displays reach and frequency metrics for video campaigns in the AdWords interface.
This new feature will give you more insight into how many unique viewers have seen your ad and the average number of times they’ve seen it. It will help advertisers measure their AdWords Video campaigns against traditional television metrics. These metrics can be viewed at a campaign, ad or targeting group level.
To access the metrics, you can customize your columns by adding the metrics in from the Performance section.
You can also let select your goals from four different metrics and Google will automatically pull the metrics into your reports.
The four goals include:
- Building brand awareness
- Optimizing for conversions
- Growing your audience
- Driving more views
Enhanced Campaigns
Essentially, enhanced campaigns allow you to create one large campaign instead of several smaller campaigns, and then make bid adjustments based upon various criteria based on your prospects’ device, location, and time of day. There are three major features of enhanced campaigns. These are:
- The loss of the ability to target by device (e.g. desktop computer, mobile phone or mobile tablet)
- The ability to change your bids based on device, location and time of day
- The addition of new and upgraded site-links with improved reporting data
Enhanced campaigns is by far one of the biggest changes made by the Google team over the last few years. There is a lot to take in.
We have written a separate blog post about it and you can find out more information about enhanced campaigns here.
AdWords Express is Now Available in My Client Centre
If you have an AdWords Express account, it can now be linked to a My Client Centre which is a AdWords management tool that helps agencies and other third parties manage multiple client accounts.
You can now also create AdWords Express accounts directly within the My Client Centre interface.
This can save time and overhead by eliminating day-to-day management for local, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
More detail about this can be found on the AdWords blog.
Adwords Editor Updates to Version 10
AdWords Editor has been upgraded to a new version to accommodate all the changes to enhanced campaigns. According to Google you will be able to:
- Upgrade campaigns to enhanced, either individually or in bulk.
- Set campaign level bid adjustments for mobile devices.
- Set bid adjustments for targeted locations.
- Specify device preferences for individual ads (Mobile or All).
Search Funnels in AdWords
Advertisers will now be able to see search funnels inside their AdWords account following an announcement by Google in February.
Currently in AdWords, you can see data in relation to clicks, impressions, click through rate. If you have your AdWords and Analytics account linked, you can also see bounce rate, pages / visit, the percentage of new visits and average visit duration. This feature provides the benefit of helping you identify landing page or targeting issues so you can aim to convert more engaged visitors.
However, with the addition of Search Funnels advertisers can now better understand how their keywords work together to drive more conversions. This means that you can adjust your columns to display not just your conversions but also your assisted clicks, assisted impressions, click assisted conversions, impression assisted conversions.
The benefit of having search funnels inside AdWords is understanding which keywords assisted conversions. Many business often don’t pay a lot of attention to this because they are looking at last click conversion data not assisted clicks.
This helps businesses move beyond attributing conversions from the last click to all clicks.
Why is this important? It’s important because searchers often visit your website via an ad, do some research and compare prices and then later come back to your website to purchase. When they come back to purchase their search query might be totally different. For example, they might look for you by your brand name instead.
Understanding what keywords help businesses understand what keywords people typed in at an earlier phase of your sales funnel.
Understanding assisted clicks helps you determine which keywords have driven buyers into different phases of your funnel. Not understanding this might mean that some keywords are paused that probably shouldn’t because they helped lead to the purchase at an earlier phase of the funnel.
Measuring Brand Lift In AdWords
Google announced that a new tool in AdWords called “Brand Lift Surveys” where businesses can measure the performance of their display campaign via surveys that use traditional marketing measures like brand awareness or purchase intent.
Currently this feature is only available to measure the impact of YouTube advertising campaigns (Yes – YouTube advertising campaigns can be managed via AdWords) but this looks like it will eventually be expanded for brand advertisers who use the display ads like banner ads and video on the Google Network.
The surveys are powered by Google Consumer Surveys which where launched in the first half of last year. Whilst the Google Consumer Surveys are currently only available for businesses targeting users in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, it appears that Australia will still be able to take advantage of this feature within AdWords.
As a former brand marketer, I find this feature really exciting. Not only will this be a more cost effective solution for brand advertisers, it also means that you can obtain data in real time. This gives you the opportunity to adjust your campaign quickly. In the past, I have had to wait weeks (and sometimes months) so see the data. By the time, the data was available my advertising budget had been spent. When yu are spending millions of dollars on a brand campaign it can be very frustrating.
We think this is a smart move from Google. While a lot of discussion about AdWords tends to focus on direct response, not all advertisers are concerned about this. For many advertisers, building their brand is more important. Based on what we see in Google AdWords I would have to agree. The best and strongest converting keywords are those that relate to brand.
You can find out more about this new way of measuring brand campaign performance here and consumer surveys here.
Product Listing Ads Will Now Appear in Mobile Phones
Google announced on March 12, that product listing ads will now appear on mobile phones.
This means that businesses with a Google Merchant Account and who have upgraded to enhanced campaigns will be able to display their ads on Google Search on both desktops, tablets and mobile phones. You can see an example of what this will look like on your mobile phone by looking at the image on the left.
With mobile search increasing rapidly, it means retailers with an online presence will now be able to take advantage of the constantly connected consumer and display images of their products.