2018 is a big year for Google.

Not only did it launch in September 2000, making it 20 years old this month, it also has also rebranded some of it’s software. Back in July 2018, Google launched its rebrand. We said goodbye to AdWords and hello to Google Ads. The rebrand however wasn’t user aesthetic. As much as we love the new clean logo, there were a lot of platform changes that came with it.

The rebrand aimed to bring about cohesion to Google’s marketing services and make advertisers include Search, Display, Video, Shopping, Apps, Maps, Gmail and partner advertising as one complete marketing strategy with one goal.

But what impact have we seen from this rebrand so far?

According to Forbes automating everyday business processes and workflows has become hugely important in 2018.

Responsive Search Ads

Responsive search ads are Google’s focus on automation, and therefore making our lives easier. Responsive ads allows us to create up to fifteen headlines and four descriptions simultaneously. Now for the automation; Google Ads now take over by testing and experimenting on these headlines and descriptions to analyse what combination works best for your business. This ‘winner’ is then used as your primary ad. As a business, testing and experimenting on Google Ads has always been a time consuming process. The new responsive search ads take away this headache by using machine learning to find the best ad for you. The results should mean higher click-through rates and an enhanced quality score.

Additional Advertising Characters

Expanded text ads now come with additional advertising space. Previously Google allowed for two headlines containing 30 characters each and one description line of 90 characters.

The new space includes an additional headline at 30 characters and an additional description line at 90 characters taking the opportunity to showcase your brand from 150 characters to a massive 270.

What this means for advertisers is additional space to broadcast services and keywords in the advert text. In many cases this can also help increase click-through rates as more information is displayed to the user.

Here at Laser Red we recommend the use of both responsive search ads and expanded text ads. Keep your best performing existing expanded text ads running and add in those additional lines of text. But also experiment with the new responsive search ads. For more accurate and optimised results, test just one responsive ad per ad group.

Finally, be patient! The new responsive ads headlines and descriptions can create over 43,000 different combinations. There is a lot of machine learning going on to optimise for the best results, so it might take some time to get an accurate picture of what is going to work best for your business.

Face-lift

It always take a while to get used to a new layout and you might have noticed that the dashboard for the new Google Ads looks a little different! A lot of the tools, for example keyword planner, have moved up to the tools bar (top left). While the dashboard aims to give a more visual performance of the ads by instantly displaying biggest campaign changes and a lot more graphs and charts. If you’re savvy about tracking performance these are really useful for a clean and easy way of displaying information and stats.

 

If you would like any help with managing your Google Ads campaign, or starting a fresh, our experienced marketing team are here to help. Contact us at marketing@laser.red, or give us a call on 01472 878496.