As the role that smartphones play in a consumer’s life gets defined by phrases such as ‘attached to my hip’, ‘butler’ and ‘lifeline’, the device has become the companion that people turn to in ‘I-want-to-know’, ‘I-want-to-go’, ‘I-want-to-do’ and ‘I-want-to-buy’ moments throughout the day.
To stay relevant in a mobile-first world, Google has redesigned AdWords from the ground-up, changing all aspects including creatives and bidding, to workflow and measurement. “The shift to mobile is no longer a change on the horizon. It’s here. Every year, there are trillions of searches on Google and over half of those searches happen on mobile. And across the millions of websites using Google Analytics today, we’re seeing more than half of all web traffic now coming from smartphones and tablets,” commented Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce.
AdWords Re-imagined For Mobile-first
Over the last several years, Google has discovered that accounting for mobile and designing for mobile-first are two very different things. That’s why it has completely transformed how it thinks about and builds AdWords. In order to enable advertisers and developers to drive more downloads of mobile apps across Google properties, it has built Universal App Campaigns (UAC). To date, UAC has delivered more than 2 billion downloads for advertisers, across Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network (GDN). This campaign type is now also available on iOS.
Mobile has revolutionized the canvas where ads live. Earlier this year, Google removed right-hand side ads on desktop to improve the search experience and make it more consistent across devices. This paved the way for it to introduce the biggest changes to its text ads since AdWords launched 15 years ago.
Optimized for screen sizes of the most popular smartphones, new expanded text ads in AdWords provide more ad space so marketers can showcase more information about products and services before the click. The upgrades should help ads work harder across screens, especially for the on-the-go mobile consumer. Based on early testing, some advertisers have reported increases in clickthrough rates of up to 20 percent compared to current text ads.
At present, responsive ads for display adapt to the diverse content across the more than two million publisher sites and apps on the GDN. They also unlock new native inventory. “We’re also extending the reach of GDN remarketing campaigns by giving you access to cross-exchange inventory, which includes more websites and apps around the world. With this inventory, European airline SAS drove about 20 percent more conversions at a similar CPA for its remarketing campaigns,” said Mr Ramaswamy.
Google has also made changes to what bidding will look like in a mobile-first world. As marketers need more control and flexibility to optimize bids on specific devices, in the next few months, Google will enable them to set individual bid adjustments for each device type — mobile, desktop and tablet.
