Google is constantly experimenting, changing, and innovating its various marketing offerings. All of Google’s Ad innovations, latest technological advancements are summarised and explained in the Google Ad Innovations site.

Published: 23 Aug 2011

Google is constantly experimenting, changing, and innovating its various marketing offerings. All of Google’s Ad innovations, latest technological advancements are summarised and explained in the Google Ad Innovations site.

Google hopes to achieve the following goals by constantly innovating its ad platform and providing marketers with new tools and technological advancements:

1.Easy – make marketers’ lives easy by providing various tools that will help marketers to:

• Effectively manage their account;

• Find out missed opportunities and make adjustments to their marketing strategies to target these missed opportunities;

• Easily target their ads on display networks.

2.Relevant – make ads relevant by providing new ways for marketers to reach their customers such as various ad extensions – sitelinks extension, location extension, etc.; product ads; media ads; hyperlocal ads, etc.

3.Smart – help marketers make smart decisions by providing them with various testing and advanced analytical reporting capabilities such as Adwords Campaign Experiment, Multi-Channel Funnels reporting on Google Analytics, and more.

Here are some of their most promising and successful innovations to date:

1.Automated Rules – with the help of automated rules, your ad account management can be easy. You can set up many automated rules from within your Google Adwords account, including running automated rules on keywords, bids, adgroups and budget. For example, if you want a particular ad to run at midnight, you can setup an automated rule for the ad to run precisely at the time you want it to run. If you want the ad to stop running after a certain date or time, you can specify that as well. Google will send you an email alert once it has executed your automated rule so you can keep track of your rules.

2.Opportunities tab – opportunities tab will provide you with keyword, bid, and budget. ideas that are optimised just for your account. In the opportunities tab, you can choose from one of three goals: 1. Increase Traffic; 2. Balance cost and traffic; 3. Maintain or decrease cost.

Once you choose from any one of these three goals, adwords will give you ideas that will help you meet the goal. In the example shown below, the goal we wanted to achieve was to balance cost and traffic. Based on this goal of ours, Google is recommending that we change our budget to $184 to get 71 potential clicks that we are not getting right now – hence missing the opportunity. This tab is great because it provides valuable insights and analysis even to a beginner with adwords and arms them with clear-cut analysis and action points.

3.New Ad Formats – Google claims that this has been by far the most important and impactful innovation they have made to their ads. Some of the most effective ad formats are:

• Ad extensions: Location extension, video extension, sitelinks extension, etc provide you with new ways to reach customers. Ad sitelinks show users relevant links to your site’s content;

• Product ads: advertisers can provide Google feeds to their product. Google with then display images of those product in your ads;

• Media ads: relevant media ad is shown to the user;

• Click to call ad feature: lets you add a phone number to your text ads. Users can decide if they want to call you or click on the links on your ad;

• Hyperlocal ads: will show business addresses with your text ads. You can also show the phone number and the exact distance the user is away from the business location.

Google is continually providing new and innovative ways for advertisers to reach their target audience, help advertisers make their ad relevant to the user search query and provide advertisers with tools and tips to optimise their campaigns. With such continued innovation, Google definitely gives both the advertisers and the users the feeling that it is there to serve both their needs – definitely a win-win situation for all.

(This article first appeared as a blog posting on Milestone Insights, contributed by Kchitiz Regmi, VP Operations & Technology, Milestone Internet Marketing).