Quite recently, Google made some changes in AdWords by adding new features and improving the existing ones. Here’s a breakdown of what’s been going on:
Reporting and Management Features
This part of the update is targeted towards power users – advertisers running a lot of different campaigns, angles, and spending quite a lot of money.
However, there’s no actual limit here. Everyone can access the features, and we’re sure most affiliates will be grateful for the opportunity.
- Enhanced reporting. Here, you get to use a whole new drag-and-drop interface, and some visualization tools that make creating new reports easier to grasp.
- Bulk editing. Take bulk actions on multiple ads or campaigns all at once.
- Automated bidding tools. You can automate your bidding to focus either on maximizing conversions or revenues.
- Draft mode. Make changes in draft mode, see the projected impact those changes have on your campaigns, and then roll them out to the public.
Mobile App Market Features
This part is all about giving app developers a new set of tools to promote their products. If you have your own affiliate app, you should look into this more deeply.
- App-based targeting. With this feature, you can target users based on the apps they already have on their devices. This could be a very useful tool for stealing some users from your competition.
- More ad impressions. Google gives you a whole new venue to display your app ads – YouTube videos viewed on mobile.
- Increased engagement in apps. You get to push consumers directly to your app if they’ve already installed it (helps you to get people to view your app more than once).
- Better conversion tracking. Things like overall engagement, actions, and in-app purchased will now be tracked.
Estimated Total Conversions Features
The last part of the update is Google wanting to keep investing in Estimated Total Conversions. The goal is to improve the measurements of campaign ROI, including cross-device conversions and mobile-initiated conversions that lead to in-store sales.
In the end, all these changes, apart from creating new opportunities for advertisers, go in two directions:
- Making AdWords Editor obsolete. It’s very possible that we’ll see the demise of the tool quite soon since much of its functionality gets gradually introduced into the main interface.
- Convincing us that advertising on mobile really pays off. Google is serious about pushing the mobile side of AdWords and it doesn’t seem like this is going to change in the near future.
Read more about the changes at SEJ.