On 27th May 2017, Google held their annual event telling the world about all the upcoming features and launches within the world of Google AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick and this year definitely didn’t disappoint. Thousands of digital marketers tune in to listen to the keynotes for all the different areas to see what they can look forward to and at Biddable Moments, we did exactly the same thing!
If you want to watch the video for yourself you can do or you can read this post which will give you some of the key things that we took away from watching the event ourselves.
New Google Products
Every year during this event Google seem to announce at least one new product launch and this year they gave us three: Google Attribution, Google Optimize and Google 360 Surveys.
Google 360 Surveys
This new platform allows you to create a survey and find a specific audience sample from all across the web. It gives us the ability to get results from surveys really quickly meaning that in some instances we can avoid time-consuming A/B and move straight to consumer feedback.
Read more about it here: Google 360 Surveys
Google Attribution
One of my favourite launches this year has to be Google Attribution. With customer journeys taking more and more touchpoints before a conversion takes place, it is imperative that we pay attention to how each channel complements each other. Not only that, we need to understand how much of the conversion value should be attributed to each channel. With Google Attribution, a data driven attribution model is now possible and I am super excited to see how this integrates with Google AdWords and DoubleClick over the coming months.
Read more about it here: Google Attribution
Google Optimize
When Google removed the old platform that allowed you to test different landing pages, it was a real shame. They tried to integrate it within the Google Analytics platform but I personally don’t feel that this has ever really taken off. Google Optimize sounds like the old platform is now back but with all the additional bells and whistles on!
Read more about it here: Google Optimize
New Google AdWords UI
The long awaited change to the AdWords interface is finally starting to arrive. Having worked with the AdWords platform for over 10 years now, trust me when I say it needed a refresh. It has pretty much looked the same since I started; the technology has come on leaps and bounds but the UI has remained pretty static. I have been playing around with the new interface on a few accounts over the past week and I can’t wait for it to be rolled out to every account.
The team over at Wordstream have already found a few cool hidden features!
Life Events in YouTube and Gmail Ads
We have had a lot of targeting options available within YouTube Ads and Gmail Ads but the one thing that has been missing is the ability to target people based on big life events. When we talk about big life events I mean things like weddings, new babies, new homes, new cars etc. These are all events that mean people’s buying habits and behaviour changes.
Google understand when these events are taking place based on all the different signals that we give off and they are giving advertisers the ability to target people reaching these life events across YouTube and Gmail. I am hopeful that this will also come to search advertising in the near future too!
Other Writeups
There have been some great write ups of the key takeaways from the event that I would recommend you take a look at including ones on: