What’s New?
Expanded Text Ads
Earlier in the year, Google did away with the ads on the right hand side of the search engine results (no sleep lost over those, they were pretty useless). However this was all part of their plan to offer a seamless search experience across all devices.
One of the key changes introduced as part of this has been the new expanded text ads – offering advertisers the chance to increase from a single headline of 25 characters up to two 30 character headlines. Google found in their initial testing stages that this change had seen click through rate (CTR) increase to highs of around 25 per cent in some cases. In addition to the headline changes, advertisers will also be able to write 80 character description lines instead of the previous 35 character limit.
This feature is now available within Adwords. Essentially, bigger ads = more space on the search engine results pages, so the sooner you can get your ads live the sooner you can begin to benefit from the extra space. Read our blog for more information
Google Maps Displaying Local Search Ads
Ads will now be incorporated within the desktop and mobile versions of Google Maps as well as on Google.com. However, instead of displaying the ads alongside, they’ll actually appear directly on the map’s surface.
These changes have all come about due to ever-increasing statistics around the volume of local searches, which have grown 50% faster than mobile searches over the last 12 months.
These changes are all designed to drive traffic through to local businesses from Google Maps. Other changes to also support this will include promotion pins and improvements to local business pages which will allow you to show offers and the like.
Display Ads Will be Responsive
Forget the need to create multiple different banner formats, as Google will create responsive display ads on your behalf. All you will need to do is provide Google with a headline, description, image and a URL.
These new responsive ads will be capable of selecting the best format and adapting the content depending on the website or app that they are being served on.
More Flexible Device Bidding
Mobile bids, desktop bids and tablet bids will be able to be managed either individually or based on each other. This not only allows the bid strategy to be more flexible, but also sits in line with the idea of mobile-first in order to meet the changing search landscape.
At the moment, advertisers are forced to select a base desktop bid and then set bits for mobile as a multiplier. This didn’t account for tablet searches which was a particular gripe for many.
In-Store Conversion Tracking
Potentially the most anticipated of them all, is the ability to track how many people saw your ad and then actually came into your store. This will be done using phone location history, which Google will use to determine if a physical visit was made.
This will hugely help to bridge the gap between digital advertising and physical in-store sales and enquiries.
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