Google Marketing Live Recap: What’s Changing & How It Will Impact You

Key Google Updates

YouTube Form Ads

This is an exciting addition, as Google’s stored information makes form completion extremely easy for users. This function is similar to form ads on Facebook and Instagram and affects anyone who uses YouTube ads.

Responsive Search Ad Copy + Creative Combination Limits

Advertisers will rely on Google’s machine learning to provide optimize combinations of text headlines and descriptions. This is a major step towards automating ad copy and is particularly important for high compliance industries, such as healthcare, finance, and legal, as different combinations can change the overall meaning. Companies that want specific brand names in ads will also be affected by this change.

Google Analytics Consolidated View for Conversions

Advertisers will now be able to see conversions no matter the device being used. This is important to everyone, but especially companies running integrated strategies that touch on multiple devices.

Smart Campaigns

These campaigns are the evolution of AdWords Express, and is an initial attempt to use machine learning for small businesses. The tool scans your website and can build landing pages from a Google My Business (GMB) listing, and is tailored for simplicity. It even automatically optimizes landing pages layout form the GMB listing, requiring very little from advertisers. Small businesses benefit the most from these developments.

Automated Shopping Feeds

The automated feed works by crawling website product and images and looking up SKU to match to images and automatically build a feed for advertisers. This is a huge lift for small businesses and helps them enter the market and utilize shopping campaigns without the technology or knowledge to build product feeds. While feed optimizations will still be necessary for improved performance, it’s a great start.

Reporting and Data Platform Integrations

Google is streamlining reporting by creating integrations to eliminate the need to go into Shopify, merchant center, and Google Ads separately. This looks like an endorsement of Shopify and affects anyone with a feed, especially those with a lot of feed detail who spend a lot of time doing updates and SMB who don’t have extra resources.

Key Takeaways

Overall, Google is showing that automation and ease of use are a top priority. Becoming more accessible for small businesses, and adding tool to enable them to succeed is a clear and welcome trend. These tools and developments give businesses more time to focus on nuanced strategy and perform even better on the Google Ads stage.