Tuesday, 09 April 2019 10:56

New Google Ads Features & How They’ll Impact You

It seems like the tech giant, Google, is always changing or updating parts and features of their search engine. One day it may be a large document relevancy reveal and the next they are merging features together for a better user experience. FiG Advertising + Marketing is constantly researching to stay up-to-date on Google news, so today, we’ll discuss some recent feature updates to Google Ads, along with its associated products, and how they may impact your search engine marketing efforts.

What Are The New Google Ads Features?

Like the continuously improving machine that is Google itself, we can expect that every update will lead to further improvements. Because of this, in just a few short months, we can anticipate that these new features and updates we’re sharing with you today will become staples of the Google Ads experience.

Google Ad Manager Moving To “Unified First Price Auction”

Have you ever wondered how Google selects the ads that you see? Well, it’s not by chance. Rather, it's the result of a rapid, but detailed auction process.

The Google Ads that you see in searches appear because those bidders “won” an auction that occurred in the milliseconds it took for the page to load. In our modern digital age, the programmatic buying process of Google has evolved so much that a single ad can pass through 10 different auctions, all of them with different rules, before a winning bid price is selected and an ad is displayed.

Sounds complex, right? That’s because it is. The multi-step bidding process has forced advertisers and agencies to reverse engineer the bidding process and implement increasingly complicated ad monetization strategies to win those auctions and display their ads to their target audience.

In an attempt to simplify the process and create a more transparent market, Google Ad Manager will be transferring to a unified first price auction. This means that all exchanges will bid for an impression at the same time, thus removing a few steps from the complex process.

This transition will only impact display and video ads, so it will not affect other types of digital and search engine advertising efforts or other Google Ads features (at least for now). The change will take place over the next few months and will hopefully be fully completed by the end of 2019.

The new Unified First Price Auction will hopefully simplify the google ads bidding process.

 

Budget Planner Coming To Google Ads

While the rollout timeline is a bit unclear, a Budget Planner tool will be coming to Google Ads campaigns in an attempt to improve how users allocate their advertising costs for these search engine advertisements.

In a nutshell, this feature will allow you to create a budget plan based on either clicks or conversions (as the key metric) and show you (through a forecast chart and comparison tab) how your campaigns are expected to perform and how a few changes in spending will impact your KPIs.

The tool relies on real-time data that is updated every 24-48 hours to provide directional insights on how changes in spend may impact the performance of your campaigns.

Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool Updates

If you run your own Google Ads, chances are you are already acquainted with the keyword planner tool. This innovative tool already lets you:

  • Research new keyword ideas based on a phrase, landing page, or product category.

  • Discover average monthly search volume for a specific period.

  • Find search volume trends for a single keyword or group of keywords over time

This tool is a key player in strategically planning your Google Ads campaigns by helping you identify new keywords that will give you a higher ROI. But, the new updates will improve the keyword ideas feature to include new metrics and more data, while also integrating forecasting updates similar to the budget planner.

What Do These Changes Mean For Me?

While these updates will be gradual and some managers of Google Ads campaigns will see the rollouts sooner than others, these changes will make PPC advertising simpler, and yet more competitive.

Regardless of whether you take care of your own Google Ads or leverage an advertising agency to take care of it, the budget planner feature will give you more control over how your PPC budget is spent. Additionally, the keyword planner changes will just make it easier to find and target the keywords that will have better results for your business. In a more simple sense, these features will help you acquire larger bang for your buck, and who doesn’t want that?

On the flip side, a simpler bidding process may ease your headaches temporarily, but questions still remain on how the bidding process will affect current best practices.

  • How will this impact header bidding?

  • Will auction floors (minimum prices to maintain ad inventory value) require larger investment?

  • Is transparency predicted to be a problem?

Right now, there is a lot of speculation surrounding these questions and it remains a bit unclear if the new bidding process will eventually be applied to all types of Google Ads.

We can at least predict that a unified first price auction will raise prices, at least temporarily, which means increasing your Google Ads budget to deliver the same type of results. And spending on Google advertising won’t be slowing down any time soon. Aside from that, only time will tell how your Google Ads experience will change. But, we’ll be here to keep you informed when that does happen.


 

Interested in revamping your PPC strategies? Or do you want to improve your SEO tactics? Contact FiG Advertising + Marketing today to learn more about our strategic Search Engine Marketing (SEM) services.