Miss the Google Marketing Livestream last week? You can rewatch it all on demand here, but if you’re just looking for the highlights Direct Agents has you covered! Here are the big announcements and changes coming to Google Ads this year. 

Target ROAS bidding for Video Action & Discovery

One of the weaknesses of Video and Discovery campaigns has been the limited smart bidding options of only ‘Maximize Conversions’ and ‘Target CPA’. This meant that campaigns might be hitting target CPA goals, but changes in AOV illustrate that a consistent CPA didn’t correlate with a consistent ROAS. This new update expands ecommerce companies’ ability to set more direct targets so that these campaigns optimize towards specific goals and benchmarks.

Product Feed Integration with Video Action & Discovery

If a bidding change isn’t enough to convince ecommerce companies to try out Video Action or Discovery campaigns, Google has even more capabilities available. Video Action and Discovery campaigns link with the product feed in your Google Merchant Center account to feature the products you’re promoting in your ads. This will let customers choose to click through to your ad’s final URL or click directly to a product page that interests them. This is already available for Video Action campaigns, and Discovery currently has an open beta for this feature.

Performance Max Campaigns

Over the last few years, the name of the game for Google has been simplification and consolidation. Google is taking this to the next level with the Performance Max campaign, which combines Search, Display, YouTube, and Discovery to generate site traffic and boost sales. This will allow advertisers to add headlines, descriptions, images, and videos and Google Ads will take all of these to drive conversions. The setup will look familiar to those who use App Campaigns (UAC), which already combine these campaign types to drive app installs and purchases. While this simplifies campaign management, this comes with the same downside of visibility into search terms, placements, and audiences. 

Customer Match

Are you a small business? Well, this change could help you. Google has removed the $50,000 total lifetime spend requirement for the Customer Match feature. This will allow businesses of any size to remarket to customers using first-party data. This is especially important as we move away from third-party cookies. 

Insights Page 

Google is launching an updated version of its in-platform Google Ads’ Insights page. This new and improved page will include 3 new types of insights: demand forecasts, consumer interest themes, and audience insights. This tool could provide more insight to your customers and help predict future performance. 

With Google rolling out all of these exciting new features and products, it’s easy to miss something that may be beneficial to the growth of your business. Please reach out to us here at Direct Agents ([email protected]) if you have any questions on how to get started with Google marketing for your brand.

– Timothy Bachman, Senior Analyst, Paid Media and Technology

– Andrea Duffy-Cabana, Senior Search Analyst