Latest News
Introducing New Google Ads Features For Search Campaigns
If you manage your own Google Ad Campaign, you will know that Google Adwords has now changed to Google Ads. It isn’t just the brand name that has changed, however, the Google Ad Manager Platform has also been re-developed to create a sleek UI with lots of extra features and tools added to help not only improve the performance of your campaign but to also provide more reporting options for campaign analysis.
We have been working with the new Google Ads Platform now for a few months and, to be honest, it has taken some time to explore all the tools and features now available and to test them out.
Here are some of the new features which will help improve campaign performance:
1. Responsive Search Ads
Previously the old Adwords allowed for 2 headlines and one description for each ad. Responsive search ads now allow us to add a 3rd headline and an extra description. These are called Expanded Text Ads. The extra headline and description may not always show, however, if Google does choose to show them, you are likely to see increased click-through rates as your ad will be more relevant and will be providing more information about your product or service.
2. Ad Suggestions
This is a useful tool if you are short of time or aren’t feeling particularly creative. Google will create variations of existing ads that may boost performance of your search campaigns.. Research has shown that ad groups with 3 or more high quality ads can get up to 5-15% more conversions than ad groups with only 1 ad.
3. Exact Match Close Variant Keywords
People search in lots of different ways for the same thing, but we don’t want hundreds of keywords to manage in a campaign, so we choose to set some keywords as ‘exact match close variants’, and this means the keyword in your campaign could be triggered by someone searching on close variations that share the same meaning as your keyword. The old ‘exact match’ keyword option used to just exactly match that word, but now with Google’s machine learning, exact match will now match the ‘intent’ of the search, instead of just specific words.
4. Local conversion insights to optimise your local advertising
Google will now report on location extensions to not only include actions on the extension itself, but also ones that occur after the ad click on the Place Page of your Google My Business listing. The new metrics include clicks to call, directions, website visits, orders, menu views and other engagements. You need to link your Google My Business account with your Ad account to enable this. The new conversion actions will be reported in the ‘All Conversions’ column, but not if you are using Smart Bidding Strategies such as Target CPA or Maximise Conversions, as these will be relying on the ‘Conversions’ column.
5. New Words Insight Card
We used to rely on running the Search Terms report to analyse new search terms that are triggering the ads but which aren’t in our keyword lists. From there we would make a decision to add them or exclude them to refine the targeting. With the New Words Insight Card, this virtually does the job for you. It monitors new search terms and alerts you when new ones show that could improve campaign performance. You can drill down to see if any of these new words are generating conversions, or it can show you words that prove to be low converters, and perhaps would be better to add as a negative keyword to stop the ads showing for this particular search term. It is good to still check your Search Terms Report as you will get a more complete view of the search terms associated with your ads, rather than just a summary of the best new words.
We hope this article has provided some useful insight into the new functions that have been launched with the Google Ads UI this summer. If you are struggling to get to grips with the new Google Ad management platform and need some help and guidance, or you are finding your campaigns are not performing as well as you expected, then please give us a call on 01252 622129.
Louise Cranstone at Whizz Marketing is a Certified Google Ad Specialist and Whizz Marketing is an accredited Google Partner Agency.
Check us out at www.whizzmarketing.co.uk
Telephone No.01252622129
