{"id":103308,"date":"2016-06-06T21:59:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-07T02:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/context-king-google-adwords-announces-major-changes-2\/"},"modified":"2024-12-31T06:28:53","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T11:28:53","slug":"context-king-google-adwords-announces-major-changes-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-gb\/insights\/blog\/strategy\/context-king-google-adwords-announces-major-changes-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Context is King as Google AdWords Announces Major Changes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google’s announcement of a bevvy of changes to the AdWords and Analytics platforms<\/a> at their Performance Summit last month felt like a list of long-awaited answers to questions that search marketers have been asking for years. When are they finally going to monetise the maps channel? When are we going to be able to modify tablet bids again? When is search going to get some of the extremely valuable audience targeting capabilities that display channels have enjoyed for so long? When will we get meaningful support to connect online to offline behaviour for brick-and-mortar locations? The answer to all of these questions, evidently, is now (or at least very soon), and it has the potential to be very, very impactful for those of us who spend our lives creating and executing paid search programs<\/a>. While there was a huge list of important platform updates, the common theme running through the announcement was the enhanced ability to leverage the context of a user’s search for marketing purposes, allowing marketers to get beyond the keyword and really speak to the intent of a search.<\/p>\n

Local+Mobile= Big Opportunity<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Let’s start where the announcements did – focused on the critical dimensions of mobile and local for search. On the heels of bundling ads in the maps channel <\/a>with core search (and away from search partners) just a couple of weeks ago, Google has announced a new local search ads product that offers a branded pin with additional promotional content and a Promoted Pins product that allows brands to show their logo on the map with a line of promotional text\u00a0outside the context of a specific search term. This means that brands with bricks and mortar locations can display a branded, promotional experience when Google Maps users are looking for their brand specifically, the products and services they offer, and even when they’re navigating to an unrelated destination.<\/p>\n

These things represent a pretty massive shift in Google’s willingness to open up the valuable real estate in this channel to marketers. These ad formats will be tied in directly with the local listing data in the Google My Business<\/a> accounts, so having an actively managed data set now becomes even more important for location-based brands who want to maximise the local search space. Google is now saying that roughly a third of mobile searches have some form of local intent and that local searches on mobile are growing at a pace that is roughly 50% faster than mobile search overall. They clearly realise that allowing marketers to leverage location-based inventory like the maps will be critical to their success moving forward.<\/p>\n

To aid in the measurement of these new local formats, Google also announced that they will be rolling their Store Visits<\/a> feature out of beta to general release. This is a feature that uses mobile phone location technology to measure whether someone who searched for a location actually showed up. That means that Google’s vision is for\u00a0brands to be able to promote their\u00a0physical locations through search and Google Maps with a mechanism to determine whether or not local searchers actually made it into the store. This is a huge step for marketers who have been trying for years to bridge the gap between clicks and bricks. It’s not hard to envision a future where mobile payments, signed-in environments, and CRM data connect the dots all the way from local search to purchase, revenue, and profit.<\/p>\n

Targeting New Audiences Through Search<\/strong><\/h2>\n

One of the announcements from the summit that seems to have gotten a bit lost in the excitement surrounding\u00a0other features is the roll-out of new audience targeting capabilities for search. Google announced that similar audience lists (based on existing remarketing lists) and demographic features – two targeting options previously available only on the Google Display Network – will be available for audience targeting in search. Along with Google’s announcement of CRM targeting through their new Customer Match product<\/a> late last year, these new targeting options will give search marketers key tools to refine targeting and messaging to critical audience segments through search.<\/p>\n

Being able to leverage the context of a user’s on-site behavior through Retargeting Lists for Search ads, their transactional history with a company through Customer Match, their off-site behavior through similar audience targeting, and the basic audience attributes through demographic targeting will give search marketers a toolkit that starts to look a lot more like what has been possible in online display and paid social channels for quite some time. Targeting only users in a\u00a0specific demographic segment could open up new search avenues for brands who have struggled to achieve ROI in a competitive category. Finding behaviorally similar audiences to those who have taken a high-value action on your site could give brands a much higher level of control and efficiency as they seek new revenue opportunities through search. These are major steps on the path toward really robust audience targeting in search, and the impact could be huge. Now, if we could just hear something on third-party data, well, let’s not get greedy.<\/p>\n

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