Days before Google Marketing Live will take place this year (July 10th), Google has announced that it will undertake a major rebranding of its digital marketing properties. To start: AdWords has become Google Ads.
What’s in a name? In this case, the 10 characters of the new title sit atop a host of changes Google hopes to bring to its business customers. As a small business owner, you should get to know the different campaign types the search giant will reveal this month.
Today, we’ll talk about the overall changes Google will make as a marketing platform, and we’ll discuss the new Smart campaign type that will be the default option within the Google Ads dashboard. Stay tuned in future weeks for details about the new campaign types expected to be available after announcements at Google Marketing Live.
Broad Strokes of Rebranding
AdWords, to reiterate, is now called Google Ads. But that’s not all you may want to remember about this rebranding effort.
Google also owns a subsidiary called DoubleClick (which develops advertisement delivery software) and runs the data management platform Google Analytics 360. The advertising software under the DoubleClick name and the entire Analytics 360 suite will now exist under the brand Google Marketing Platform. This is expected to help marketers “plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place,” according to the latest company announcement.
Furthermore, DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange software will now use the name Google Ad Manager. “With Ad Manager,” the brand’s blog states, “you can curate who has access to your inventory, alongside all your reservation and programmatic demand, and optimize your relationships for yield.”
The specific reasons behind these changes are legion. Behind all the specifics, though, is a single tenet: simplicity.
Know that Google Marketing Platform will seek to join data reporting, advertising campaign optimization, and other similar analytics under a single umbrella. Then keep in mind that Google Ad Manager will hold brand management and user experience development under a second umbrella. Respectively, the encapsulation of concepts under those two roofs is expected to make analytics and brand development simpler for companies to manage.
What About Google Ads?
What’s left for you and many other small businesses is Google Ads. The idea of simplicity accompanies the brand switch to Google Ads as well.
You have always had the choice in AdWords to complete manual or automatic bidding and to customize those broad formats in ways that work best for your business. The range of options within AdWords is extensive, and that works well for seasoned professionals and dedicated learners.
For all the merit of its options, however, AdWords can challenge newcomers and may be daunting to anyone with little time to spend learning the platform. Google Ads will try to make ad creation and management a much easier process with its new campaign types – some of which will integrate machine learning at their core.
Smart Campaigns
The new default campaign type in Google Ads is called the Smart campaign. Google’s announcement makes it clear that the new default is expected to help small business users build new ads, deploy campaigns, and track results quickly.
Google has also been light on the details of how this campaign type will function. What you will probably see is a reflection of the Smart Display campaign type already available within your AdWords dashboard.
This means that you should be able to take advantage of automated bidding, automated targeting, and automated ad creation. You can read more details about those features in the link above. In short, the default campaigns in Google Ads will likely make use of the following:
- Target CPA-based automated bidding features to increase your conversions
- Audience targeting that learns from the history of your campaigns
- Pre-formatted ads that include headlines, descriptions, logos, and images you submit to the dashboard
Machine learning should take the lead here. Google announced that it wants small businesses to “get results without any heavy lifting.” Therefore, Google’s servers will work hard to learn the patterns your campaigns create; they will learn how your audience reacts to your efforts and make suggestions regarding how your campaigns should work in the future.
In Conclusion
Take a few minutes to read through the Google’s announcement. Then make sure to follow your preferred news organizations for the immediate happenings at Google Marketing Live.
Atria’s blog will return with details about the event and the new campaign types that will come our way. Keep an eye on our blog, and don’t hesitate to contact us for any assistance with your own small business’s ads.