EP 24: Google Ads News Roundup For Q4 2020

About once every quarter, I plan to do a news roundup from the world of digital marketing, so today I’m talking about what’s new over on Google ads.

Hey everybody, Jim Lastinger. Hope everything’s going well for you. Hope your business is doing well and getting ready to wind up 2020 on a positive note and hopefully, we can all get 2021 off to a strong start.

So one of the plans I’ve had for this podcast since the beginning is to do my best to keep you up to date with what’s really important in the digital marketing industry. So there’s always lots of changes being made to the various ad platforms, new features being added all the time, new ad formats, new types of campaigns, new networks that you can target. So there’s a lot to go through so I want to help you guys out by filtering through all of that for you and really trying to distill it down to what’s important, what’s actually going to make the most difference for you. So that’s what I’m talking about today. Specifically, I want to, for this first episode like this, I want to talk about the last couple of months over on Google Ads and what the most impactful changes they’ve made. There’s been a few changes there so we’re going to talk about those today.

First up, this is a big one that you might’ve missed, but this is a change in the requirements to be able to use data-driven attribution. Data-driven attribution is a machine learning attribution model that you can use for your conversions in your Google Ads account. So basically if a customer clicks on multiple ads or campaigns before they convert on your site, the attribution model determines how that credit for that conversion is split between those different campaigns. The data-driven attribution model, it’s a machine learning based way to assign that attribution. Basically, like I said, it’s based on machine learning, but it’s also based on countless conversions from thousands of different ad accounts. It’s pretty cool stuff and it seems to work really, really well with all the accounts that I’ve tried it with.

Previously, you had to have over 600 conversions per month or something like that to be able to be eligible for that. But now they’ve cut that number in half, so this is available to far more accounts than it was before. 300 conversions a month is still a big number, and most accounts aren’t going to qualify for that, but if your account does qualify for it, then that’s fantastic. You should definitely use it. I always recommend every advertiser experiment with the different attribution models and then use the attribution modeling report inside Google ads to find the right mix for you. It always depends a bit on your business’ specific needs and what your goals are. So take a look at all the data and make the decisions that make the most sense for you. But now with more people being eligible for the data-driven attribution model, you have another option at your disposal.

Next up is the ability to add promotions in your shopping campaigns. So we’ve been able to have promotions on search campaigns for a while through the promotion extension, now we’re able to add that to shopping campaigns. This is something that’s been expanding for a while and it applies to most accounts now. So you can configure your shopping campaigns to be able to pull promotional information from Google Merchant Center and display that alongside your ads. For a customer to be able to see that your store has a sale going on on a particular item is going to be a big advantage and should lead to better conversion rates. So you’ll find these options in Google Merchant Center under their promotions tab. I’ll probably do a full episode about this at some point in the near future so stay tuned on that. And I’ll put a link in the show notes to any articles about this stuff, so take a look at the show notes as well.

The last Google Ads news item I’m going to cover today, and this is one, I think, has a lot of potential going forward. It’s currently in beta, but Google has recently added some audio ads on the YouTube platform. So you can think of these as radio commercials that will play as people are listening to YouTube audio. Things like music consumption through YouTube continues to grow, and Google is beginning to put together more radio like features like channels, genres, that kind of stuff. So the whole audio platform for YouTube seems to… It promises to be big going forward. So we’ve got audio only ads coming to YouTube. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the announcement about this. And like I said, I’ll have links to all of these news items in the show notes over at jimlastinger.com/24 so go there and read about these items for yourself.

That’s all I have for today so I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing in 10. Until then, take care. Have a great day. Bye for now.