New AdWords Features Announced to Adapt to a Mobile First World

It’s no surprise that we’ve been living in a mobile-first world. More than half of the trillion searches that happen on Google come from mobile devices. That world is here, and at the annual Google Performance Summit, they dropped some big changes on how they’re going to adapt to this mobile shift.

Below is a small glimpse into the innovations that Google announced that should roll out sometime within the year.

New Local Search Ads on Google Maps

According to Google, location-related searches account for nearly a third of all mobile searches and have grown 50% faster than overall mobile searches in the past year. In order to keep up with this trend, Google announced their new local search ads, which will allow the ads to show up on Google Maps, including desktop and mobile versions. One of the features will include “promoted pins.”

With these branded pins, users can see them when they’re using Google Maps nearby. Once a user clicks on the pin, a redesigned local page will pop up, giving advertisers and marketers the opportunity to promote in-store discounts and local product inventory.

Device Bid Adjustment Changes

Currently, advertisers are able to increase their mobile bidding. With Google’s new bid changes, they’ll now be able to bid separately across ALL devices—desktop, tablet, and mobile. Along with expanding bid adjustments for each device type, Google is also changing the bid range from +300% to +900%. This change will allow PPC advertisers to bid on the devices that make the most sense to their campaign and what goals they are trying to accomplish. Advertisers will be able to set a default bid for one device type and then have an option to set bid adjustments for the other two.

Expanded Text Ads

Back in February, Google eliminated right hand side ads in order to create a more unified experience across devices. And now, they have announced a vital change for text ads. With these expanded text ads, Google is giving advertisers two 30-character headlines. As of right now, we’re stuck with only a single 25-character headline. Along with the headlines, Google is now offering a single 80-character description line, as opposed to its current two 35-characters. According to Google, this character increase could bump up CTRs by 25%.

As for display URLs, these will be automatically generated from the final URL.

Responsive Display Ads

In order to compete with social and mobile networks, Google announced their new responsive display ads, which will up their game in native and mobile display ads. In the picture below, you can see a few examples as to how these display ads will resize automatically to adjust to the overall look of the content displayed on the publisher’s native ad inventory.

Because certain sites have been relying on other networks for native advertising, these new display ads will “unlock new native inventory in apps and mobile sites on the Google Display Network.” Advertisers will only have to provide headlines, a description, an image, and a URL, and these responsive display ads will be built out automatically. According to Google, these ads have currently brought in more than two billion app installs.

New Interface

Along with these exciting new features, the AdWords platform is getting an entirely new makeover. Seems like a refresh is long overdue, considering it’s more than 15 years old and the interface hasn’t even been touched since 2008.

As far as functionality goes, you won’t see any changes to how campaigns are structured or ran. This redesign is primarily focused on how performance data is going to be displayed. In order to do that, Google has created an “Overview” screen, which can be viewed at the campaign, ad group, and ad levels. This overview will mainly serve as a snapshot into your campaign’s performance.

There’s no escaping it—the mobile-first world is here. And it’s vital for businesses and advertisers to act on it. Get a jumpstart on your competitors and use this time to take advantage of these innovations by rethinking your PPC strategies and creative before these changes roll out.

Want to learn more? Click here to listen to the keynote speakers go more in depth on the new features discussed at the Google Performance Summit.