San Francisco, California – The Ads and Commerce Business of Google has announced new innovations at the recently concluded Google Marketing Next 2017 event. They made it clear to the audience that these updates are thrilling for both advertisers and agencies. The innovation for this year focuses more on making AdWords, Analytics and DoubleClick, much efficient for all – especially in making reports and digesting data to better understand the online audiences.

The Keynote event was started by the Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s Senior Vice President for Ads and Commerce with the overview of what shall be expected with Google AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick for this year. Below is a rundown of interesting facts that you need to know:

• Ramaswamy presented that 87% of the world population rely on Google search in times of need. He highlighted in his talk that “search” above all, serves as the first contact point of users whenever they are curious about knowing something or doing research prior to purchase.

• 20% of worldwide searches are voice search. And what does this supposed to mean, especially for the marketers? This is a good gauge that as mobile devices evolve in a fast-paced, so is the way users search in Google.

• Ramaswamy reminded marketers to always put consumers at the heart of their brand strategy. And the only way to do that is my making a marketing strategy driven by smart data in every phase of the consumers’ searches. And that is what the current updates in Google AdWords address.

• Get the fundamentals of ‘mobile-first’ right. – The usage of mobile devices is increasing at a rate higher that what is expected, but the availability and infrastructure for mobile data around the world are not completely fast. There are countries like the Philippines with a below-average mobile data. To ensure users have a better experience as they navigate your website, it should load not more than two (2) seconds. Every second – beyond 2 seconds – delivers a much larger bounce rate.

In order to attain this, your website should be mobile responsive and all your media (photos, video, and dynamic) should be compressed in a size optimal for mobile web browsing.

• The consumer has a diminishing sense of the boundary between online and offline. – The reality of doing business today is embracing the reality that users can no longer distinguish online between offline.

70% of consumers turn to their smartphones before making an action, either buying or dining. And with that, consumers move seamlessly from online to offline – from searching locally in Google to actually going into their choice of store. This action brings consumers to a thinking that what they had experienced while searching for a store online should be exactly what they will experience as they step into the store’s entrance.

Google Updates

Below is a quick list of the updates of Google for their three platforms:

• Google Attribution

Before, marketers are left with no choice but to rely on the last click attribution as the final touch point that contributes to conversion. Now, Google has resolved the issue of attribution in doing campaigns – hence the Google Attribution. The good thing is, Attribution will be available for AdWords, Analytics, and DoubleClicks for no cost. However, there is an Attribution 360 available for a certain cost which gives more flexibility in doing customization depending on the demand for granular data by the company.

Moreover, Google will be introducing Unique Reach reporting in AdWords. This metric is de-duplicated across devices, campaigns, and formats. Now, you can measure how many people were shown your display and video ads. You can see two new metrics in your AdWords: Unique users and average impression per unique users.

• Integration of Google Optimize in AdWords

We all know that when a website is hard to use, the bottom-line of the campaign will be severely affected. Google Optimize is a tool targeted for marketers to create a landing page that can be tested for its effectivity. This tool doesn’t need the help of a webmaster and coding skills to run. Google will soon integrate Optimize to AdWords for marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of their landing pages to improve their ad quality scores.

• Google Surveys in AdWords and DoubleClick

After getting a hit from your ad, it is still hard to get from these figures a qualitative data that is essential in evaluating the success of your campaign. Google announced that it will soon integrate Google Surveys in AdWords to let marketers send an automatic quick survey to every click to extract some vital qualitative information.

For further functionalities, Google will make Google Survey 360 available for advertisers who need it.

• Google Assistant

This is the most exciting part for retail-type of clients. Google Assistant is a conversation with Google to help people get things done – this is a brief but powerful message from Jennifer Liu, the director for Google Shopping.

For a better understanding, Google Assistant is an artificial intelligence that is activated via voice command. From the word itself, it is designed to help users search for something over Google without lifting a finger.

Now, this one is by far the most thrilling innovation for retailers. Why? Because Google Assistant is designed for searches of tangible products (or even services in the future). Google is encouraging retailers to take part in making shopping via Google easy for every user by sending updates of their inventories in their branches.

You can watch the entire Keynote speeches in the video from Google below:

***

Google Marketing Next 2017 surely brought a lot of exciting innovations what will surely improve every stakeholder of Google’s ecosystem. It will surely make advertisers and agencies happy and most of all making users much happier by getting more relevant information.

If you want to know how AdWords can help your small business make a big leap in Google search engine, you can always reach iManila at (02) 490-0000 or at [email protected] for services relevant to Google marketing such Search Engine Advertising for search and display, and Search Engine Optimization to improve your website’s ranking.