This week Google announced several new capabilities that have been recently released or will be soon in the areas of mobile, online-to-offline conversion tracking, and enterprise-level feature enhancements for AdWords.
It’s important to note that no existing capabilities are being taken away and use of these new capabilities is optional (unlike Enhanced Campaigns from a year ago). Also, a few of these capabilities have been available for awhile in either open beta or full release, while most others are being released over the next few months and quarters.
Here is a quick recap of the announcements along with Skai’s point-of-view:
Mobile
AdWords Updates: Google has a few new offerings focused on promoting new app downloads and a new re-engagement campaign type to take users directly into already installed apps. Also announced was an enhancement to reporting that will allow measuring conversions from app install through to in-app purchases.
Skai POV: Based on enormous client interest, Skai has been making significant investments to enable marketers to measure and attribute the value of mobile relative to other marketing mix possibilities. Via our offerings in the areas of ad buying, measurement, and reporting on the go, we are encouraged that Google is putting significant focus in mobile that will allow us to provide even more sophisticated functionality. At Skai we believe it’s a temporary phenomenon that 12% of media consumption happens on mobile while at the same time mobile only constitutes 3% of total ad spend. Over the next few years we’ll see tremendous mobile ad growth, and it’s great for the industry that Google is doing its part to enable advertisers.
Online-to-Offline
AdWords Updates: Google reiterated its release of Estimated Total Conversions from last October, the first step into showing how Google search advertising might convert across both devices, but also eventually with phone calls and store visits.
Skai POV: Conversion tracking is critical for all sophisticated marketers, particularly retailers, so we are pleased to see continued investment from Google in this area. We will be exploring ways to incorporate Google’s data to augment our significant current capabilities in tracking online to offline. We currently work with a number of customers to track online to offline through 3rd-party platforms LiveRamp and RevTrax, and through our industry leading call conversion optimization solution.
Enterprise Capabilities
AdWords Updates: Google is working on enhancing the AdWords interface with several useful capabilities including bulk actions to ease campaign setup, basic automated bidding, the ability to preview what a campaign might look like, and initial support for generating more advanced reports.
Skai POV: We are encouraged to see that Google is making investments in the AdWords interface that sophisticated marketers have required for years. Skai has always been focused on improving marketing performance by building additional functionality on top of the capabilities that AdWords provides. Our clients are telling us that in addition to saving them time through a number of automation solutions, more than ever, the capabilities we provide in objectively helping them optimize across search engines and across channels, coupled with our advanced bidding, forecasting, and budget management, are driving significant efficiency gains.
We’ll be monitoring Google’s progress toward these new offerings this year and look forward to bringing further advanced features and innovation to power your digital marketing program.
-
-
-
-
-
Copied!
