Google Marketing Live 2018 Round-up

Following the announcement a few weeks ago of name changes, this year’s keynote focused on products, mainly powered by machine learning, and how they fit under the Google Marketing Platform.  I will focus on 4 of the products which will have the biggest impact for my clients, one particularly solution is relevant for small businesses and those new to digital advertising, who do not have the resource and time to set up google Ads

The four products I will give a quick summary of today are:

1. Responsive Search Ads
2. Mobile landing page speed score
3. Cross device reporting & remarketing in Google Analytics
4. Smart Campaigns ( for those new to digital marketing)

Responsive Search Ads
This is probably the most exciting of all products as it potentially allows the advertiser to almost double their current real estate on the search landscape. The product match combinations of headlines and descriptions based on which combinations are most relevant to the searcher and their intent.

Ordinarily, an ad is made up of two headlines of 30 characters, and one description of 80 characters. Using responsive search ads, you can have 3 headlines of 30 characters and up to 2 descriptions of 90 characters. To use this, the advertiser provides 15 headlines and 4 description lines.

The beta should be available for English advertisers over the next few months, going global next year.
I know from my experience of using Excel to create different combinations of Headlines and descriptions this is definitely going to speed up my ad setup to delivery and then saving time as usually I rotate ads evenly for a few weeks then analyse which ads worked best before pausing non-performing ads or switching headlines and descriptions.. However, this feature will allow machine learning to do the testing for me.

Mobile Landing page speed score
This is a new column within Google Ads to help focus advertisers on poor performing mobile landing pages due to loading time. it gives a score on a 10 point scale and updated daily. The score is based on various factors such as page speed and conversion rate on mobile.
This column has been added to help improve mobile conversion rates as searchers tend to lose interest if mobile page is too slow to load, and should be available today.

Cross device reporting and remarketing in Google Analytics
This announcement got a cheer from the audience. Designed to give more insight across mobile and desktop on intent.
This is available today however to access it you need an User-ID view. More details on how to set this up can be found here.

Smart Campaigns
I often meet business owners who want to start advertising online but just do not have the time and resource to do it (Or the budget to warrant drafting in an expert. However, Google announced their Smart Campaigns product to overcome this challenge.

It works by scraping your website and creating sample ads. The advertiser selects their goal (such as driving calls or increase footfall). Then the ads are delivered on the Google search network, local search results and 3m+ websites and apps through display.

Smart Campaigns can also be used to create optimised web pages based on your creatives.
It is truly designed to be simple and save time, allowing the advertiser to focus on their craft.

As I put these new products into action, I will give an update. In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions or would like to share any other scenarios/challenges you think these new products will help by using contacting me.

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