A Look at Google Ads

Have you said goodbye to the old AdWords and hello to the new Google Ads? Back in July, Google began transitioning accounts to the new interface. The update and new look is intended to provide advertisers with more great resources for managing the ever-changing world of paid search advertising. It’s an uber-competitive environment and Google Ads is there with its shiny new reporting and automation features to help advertisers drive performance. Want to automate key optimizations using AI and machine learning? Well now you can, giving you the extra time to focus on analyzing and strategy. (Not your cup of tea? We love strategy and analytics!)

What to expect: the look and feel of the new Google Ads

Overall, things are easier to find in this one-stop-shop for Search, Display, YouTube, and App ads. The new dashboard is designed in a way that allows advertisers to more quickly assess overall account performance and decide what actions to take. The old UI was predominantly grey and table-focused. The new UI is comprised of modules, cards, and is way more colorful than the old version. So that’s a plus in my opinion.

You also now have control over what you want to see. Custom dashboards? Yes please! (More on that below.)  There is room for confusion; things are nested and layered, making it a little harder to find certain pieces. But once you do you’ll find the dynamic layout is easy to move around in and, visually at least, more interesting.

How to stay successful

1. Start off by reviewing your account activity. Are the actions you’re taking impactful? How often are you assessing your efforts? Take a look at your account history. Be sure to pick a manageable date range so you’re not overwhelmed at looking through a decades worth of data.
2. The new interface has a recommendations engine which recommends optimizations based on the performance of your campaigns – rather than a campaign’s goals. Pretty neat, right? With just a few clicks, you can implement automated optimizations.
3. Go ahead and create those custom dashboards. The standard dashboard inundates you will a lot information that is meant to help you analyze and interpret overall performance and identify trends. But it’s not great for giving advertisers a look into what is actually driving performance. With a custom dashboard, you can customize reporting. There are dozens of data fields that you can select in any combination to track only the most importance metrics to you.
4. Take a look at any wasted spend. The gap between your keywords (assumptions) and your search queries (actions) is waste. You address this by adding in negative keywords.
5. Are you testing your ad creatives frequently enough? Not all tools in Ads are useful but you might try out the ad optimization feature. Writing ads is hard but testing ads constantly is important for success. There’s a default feature that generates new ads automatically!
6. The old Google AdWords had demographic targeting but now it’s possible to combine demographic factors. Try creating demographic combinations to gain more insights. You might learn something that indicates the need for a new approach to how you leverage paid search .
7. If you’re comfortable giving up control, try Automatic Ad suggestions. Actually, you’re opted into it, so if you do’t want to use it be sure to turn it off. Typically, CTR goes up when you have more ad variations running. The algorithm doesn’t give too many variations but it’s still semi-useful for those who need a little extra support. Don’t just invert headlines – change the CTA and sentiment of the overall ad to A/B test with purpose.

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The Google Ads developers knew that understanding and leveraging data gives advertisers a competitive edge. So they created a new set of reporting and insight features to help us figure out what is and isn’t working in a much more granular way.

Paid search is a data-heavy so if you need to develop an optimization strategy or assistance in muddling through the metrics and leveraging the data, let us know!