04 Dec AdWords fall collection of news

With holiday shopping season approaching and growing pressure from Facebook & co., in the last three months Google has rolled out a lot of new functionalities, especially in shopping campaigns. Here’s a little recap of the most important ones:

• Remarketing is available in Shopping campaigns too. The main contextual targeting linked to keywords used in products feeds can be used along with lists of tracked users. Here are a few more details in the official AdWords blog post.
• New customer match audiences based on email addresses of your prospects, exactly as you can do in Facebook. By now these new remarketing lists only work in the search network, YouTube and Gmail. Here is the official announcement with some more details and a post by Larry Kim who tested Google’s recognition rates of users (which are quite similar to FB, i.e. approximately 50% of loaded emails).
• Conversions columns have been rationalized and now the difference between converted clicks and conversions has been moved into conversion actions settings (Tools > Conversions > select a conversion > edit settings > count section – see example below). Depending on this setting the two series of columns may now contain the same data.

• Moreover cross-device conversions can now be counted to optimize campaigns with automatic options such as CPAs, enhanced CPCs (or other bidding strategies using conversions data). If you want AdWords to optimize campaigns considering also conversions made by a user on different devices (previously only seen in estimated  total conversion column) you have to add them manually in Tools > settings menu (see below).

• Now is possible to set “custom” affinity audiences by specifying keywords (Google recommends up to 12) and/or sites of interest for your potential target (for example competitors’ websites). These new segments are quite easy to set, you only have to search among existing default segments and then use the create button at the bottom of the list (see example below). All the tests I have already done have given interesting results (if segments are built intelligently and not simply throwing into them almost everything related to our target ;-).
  
• New shopping and apps “cards” in video campaigns on YouTube. To see examples and some more details on the new ad formats designed to appear in the videos see the official blog post explaining them.
• In Shopping campaigns there are also new reports at products’ group level, a new metric related to click share (it is so kind of Google to make us realize how many new potential buyers we are missing, is’n it?) and some general statistics of US market shopping trends (that hopefully will sooner or later come to Europe too).
• New geolocated ads customizers available, if you have some bricks & mortar point of sales and want to  differentiate ads for each one of them. Here is a nice case study that will get you straight to the point  www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/10/05/adwords-geo-customizers.
• After the new summary reports for display campaigns launched in September, AdWords lets us know that costs per impressions (CPM) is now calculated on viewable impressions only and not on ads downloads in areas of the sites that could only have been viewed by the user using scroll bars (i.e. below the fold). Here’s the official post explaining the new metric.
• New reports of products assortment in Google merchant center for shopping campaigns. Here are the details.
• Here come the “universal” app campaigns, intended to promote applications with ads that automatically adapt to all environments in which they are running into (Google Play, Search and Display Networks). Here the help page with some more details.
• Video campaigns have been integrated in the general search/display control panel, which resulted in several new columns (set by default for new users) labeled with “interactions” (instead of clicks) or “interaction rate” (instead of CTR) and a further specification of the type of interaction (click or views) directly in data fields. Here is the official announcement from Google.
• Conversion data import time from Analytics to AdWords reduced to 9 hours (it was about 24/48h). This is an excellent piece of news for all advertisers (like myself) using the enormous flexibility in goals tracking offered by Analytics. Here is the post announcing it on G+.
• Gmail Sponsored Promotions are now open to all advertisers.
• The promotional text in shopping campaigns is destined to be replaced by an automatic extension taken directly by AdWords from landing site contents. You do not need to do anything to set it – it is just to have you prepared ;-).

Of course there are many other little innovations released over the past three months, including a new version of both Adwords Editor and AdWords official app, I only have summarized here the most relevant ones. If you think I missed something deserving more attention, drop me a line commenting the post. I’ll be for ever grateful for it 😉
For a more complete picture of new functionalities follow our profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin o Google Plus.
Last but not least, I recall to all of you who like challenges that we are still searching for interesting case stories for the next ADworld Experience (April 2016) and that we recently launched a super-offer for all 2015 AdWords video tutorials in our on line shop.
Merry Christmas campaigns 😉