What Google’s advertising changes mean for you
Google is actively refining their paid advertising. Given that $19.1 billion of the $21 billion they made in the second quarter of 2016 was ad revenues, it’s no wonder.
Continuing to develop the way businesses can interact with their customers through ads, the latest releases present exciting new opportunities for companies to promote their products and communicate their propositions.
In particular, Google have created new ways to increase advert real estate on search engine result pages to drive greater click through rates (CTRs). Here are a few of our favourites
As of 31 January 2017, you can only create ads in the expanded text format.
That means you can include more characters, so there’s more opportunity to highlight the features and benefits of your offer. It also means more prominence for your headline and better stand out for your business.
It’s early days, but there is growing evidence that Expanded Text Ads are improving CTRs.
Back in November, mobile overtook desktop as the most used device for search. Enhancing paid search advertising for mobile is now core to Google’s ad revenue strategy.
Price extensions for mobile ads were introduced last year, enabling a simple listing of prices for key products, brands or events. Google has now refined this, creating up to eight price extension cards that can be seen by swiping across the page.
Swipeable price extensions are easy to implement, allow multi-product offers in one text ad, and are easy for customers to use.
However, they are only available on ads that appear in the top position on mobile, so you’ll need an effective Pay Per Click campaign to take advantage of this feature.
Google recognise that 40% of shopping related searches use broad terms like “women’s athletic clothing”. Serving specific product ads for non-branded broad terms may not deliver the most useful results for people who are just researching so Google have introduced new showcase shopping ads.
Showcase Ads have three branded images per retailer, showing a range of products and a promotional message. Users click through to a retailer’s Google shopping page to see the full range of products. This creates a greater brand presence for advertisers with more opportunity to appeal to the searcher.
Google doesn’t charge for click through from a showcase ad, only from subsequent and more focused shopping ads.
Click to call has always appealed to retailers who want to encourage greater customer interaction. Since February, call extensions have been automatically added to mobile search ads for businesses with a landing page containing a phone number. There is an opt out option for those who don’t want to use this feature.
It’s clear that Google is not slowing down in its development of improvements to its search and shopping ads. We look forward to bringing you news of further upgrades in 2017.
If you would like to find out more about our Paid Search expertise or what these improvements mean for your business, please get in touch.
