Yesterday the AdWords team at Google announced some new and amazing features that will be launched over the next few months. As a Google Partner, we’re always excited to see AdWords make it easier and more cost-effective for our clients to reach their customers. These are some of the top AdWords features that will be available to advertisers in 2014.
App Promotion
More than one billion apps have been downloaded in the United States in 2013. Brands are using apps to make it easy for their customers to engage with them. I believe that in the next three years brands will see their apps as important as their websites, and invest heavily in them.
The new AdWords platform will make it very easy to promote apps. If you have a weight loss app, for example, you’ll be able to advertise on other similar apps that show Google ads. You’ll also be able to target keywords and optimize your campaign for downloads, so you can bid more on keywords that generate app downloads and less on keywords that don’t. And, one of the coolest features that AdWords announced yesterday is the ability to target people who already downloaded your app but only used it once. According to their stats, 60% of apps are never installed and 80% of them are only used once. With this new AdWords feature you’ll be able to take these people back to your app and encourage them to use it again.
Offline Tracking
In the last two years, Google has become really good at tracking phone calls (using third-party software.) We use this feature in every lead-generation campaign we run. But Google is now taking this a step further by providing offline conversion tracking. Many of our retail clients that advertise in AdWords know that a lot of their customers find them online and then go into the store, but find it difficult to measure how valuable this is. And, without a dollar figure behind this it’s very difficult to decide how much brands should invest in search marketing.
In their presentation to Google Partners yesterday, Google showed a case study of a retail store that saw an increase in ROI of 106% once they started tracking retail sales that started with a Google search. We think it’s really cool that we’ll be finally able to measure the ROI of in-store sales generated online.
Optimize for Maximum Conversions and Revenue
Conversion Optimizer is an AdWords feature that learns what works and what doesn’t and adjusts bids accordingly. It bids more on demographic segments, keywords, ads and ad groups that are more likely to convert. Until now, you could optimize for clicks (to get as much traffic as possible), conversions (to minimize cost per conversion) and return-on-ad-spend or ROAS.
In the next few months, AdWords will allow advertisers to optimize for maximum conversions and revenue. Optimizing for maximum conversions will be great for lead generation companies looking to grow fast and acquire as many new clients as possible. Optimizing for revenue will be an amazing feature for ecommerce websites, because it will bid more on products that have higher profit margins, allowing brands to get the best bang for their buck.
Multi-Dimension Pivot Tables
This is a feature that I, as a data analyst, got so excited about that I actually started dancing in my office as I was watching Google’s webinar. If you’re not familiar with dimensions, these are basically different ways you can segment a campaign. For example, if you segment by time of day, you might see that most of your transactions take place between 1pm and 5pm. This means that you want to adjust your bids accordingly, so you’re bidding more when conversions are more likely to happen and less when they’re less likely to happen.
Time of day is just one dimension, and there are hundreds of them such as country, city, device, age, gender, etc. The better you understand what segments are more likely to convert the better your campaign performance will be.
Until now, we—marketers—were relying on third-party software and Excel pivot tables to do this analysis. But now Google announced the launch of multi-dimension pivot tables that allow us to perform all this analysis on the fly without having to export files, analyze them in Excel, make changes and import the changes back into the account.
Drafts and Experiments
This is another feature I’m extremely excited about. At Digital Aptitude we like saying that we don’t have the answers but the data does. We don’t make decisions based on what we think we should do. We test, measure and analyze. For example, let’s say that your goal is to get as many high-quality leads as possible within a certain budget. If we test two different ads and the first ad provides more leads than the second ad, we’d keep the first one and pause the second one.
Until now, this was possible for certain campaign aspects, such as keywords and ads. But with the launch of Drafts and Experiments you can make as many changes as you want to a campaign, launch it as a test and analyze whether it performs better than the original one. Because the best way to optimize a campaign is to test everything to figure out what works, this approach makes it really easy to test and it will revolutionize how AdWords campaigns are optimized.
You can watch the entire webinar here:
