Google Ads Updates

Wikipedia defines traveling as “a violation of the rules [of basketball] that occurs when a player holding the ball moves one or both of their feet illegally.” For the purposes of this blog post, this is, of course, the incorrect usage of the word. We’ll be talking about travel as an industry,  in the context of Google Ads. But it allows us to  link out to this Tweet , which we felt like we owed you. Being a professional marketer in the travel industry isn’t easy—competition is fierce, seasonality can be unpredictable, confusing sales cycles abound—so please savor this moment of levity before we dive into our guide. The Current State of the Travel Industry Travel industry ad spend is on the rise. There’s a good chance that in the past, as you’ve juggled all the various marketing initiatives on your plate, you’ve toyed with the idea of simply stepping back from the fray of digital advertising. Nobody’s going to fault you for thinking about doing so. But s...

Google extends extra characters of Responsive Search Ads to text ads The new text ad format will continue to roll out this fall. In the meantime, standard text ads can get longer, too. Ginny Marvin  on August 9, 2018 at 1:20 pm MORE AmsStudio  /  Shutterstock.com You get an extra headline! And you get an extra headline! Oh, and you get a longer description, too. Google will start rolling out its responsive search ads to more accounts in English, French, German and Spanish starting in September.  Responsive text ads  can display with three headlines and two descriptions with up to 90 characters each. In the meantime, the company is extending the added real estate benefits of these longer units to existing text ads. Starting at the end of this month, advertisers will be able to add a third headline and a second description as long as 90 characters — as opposed to the traditional 80-character limit — to their text ads. “While we work on...

Avoid the 8 most common pitfalls of automated bidding With more and more PPC tasks becoming automated, it’s important to understand the limitations of automation. Here are eight of the most common issues to avoid when moving from manual to automated bidding. Frederick Vallaeys  on September 5, 2018 at 1:32 pm MORE Last week, I wrote that  no one should do manual pay-per-click (PPC) bidding  in this day and age. But that doesn’t mean you can just flip an automated bidding switch on and head for the beach. In fact, automated bidding comes with its own unique challenges that still require the active involvement of an account manager. So, let’s take a look at some of the most common issues to avoid when moving from manual to automated bidding. Machines learn from your manual work Probably the biggest “gotcha” about bid automation from Google is that it relies on  machine learning , and, as that name implies, the machine has to learn before it can t...

Google responsive display ads roll out as new default display format Advertisers upload their assets and leave the ad creation to Google's algorithms. Ginny Marvin  on September 11, 2018 at 3:52 pm MORE A look at the asset performance reporting available for responsive display ads in the Google Ads interface. Google  announced  this week that responsive display ads (RDA) will be rolling out to all advertisers over the next few months. Much like Google’s  responsive search ads , advertisers provide several inputs and the ads get assembled on the fly by Google’s machine learning algorithms. Advertisers can add up to 15 images, five headlines, five descriptions and five logos for responsive display ads. Performance is broken out by asset in a new report located under “View asset details” from the “Ads & extensions” section (as shown in the screen shot above). In the performance column, Google will provide a rating of Best, Good or Low. I...

How keyword match types work after the new close match variants change Here's a free Google Ads script that delivers a detailed report on the impact of Google's inclusion of "same meaning" queries in exact match close variants. Frederick Vallaeys  on September 12, 2018 at 1:37 pm MORE As reported  here on Search Engine Land last week , Google is in the process of further broadening the meaning of ‘exact match’ keywords. Based  on a 2014 change , these keywords could already be expanded to include singular, plural and misspellings of the exact match keyword. Last year,  Google allowed function words to be added in the query  and the word order to be changed. Now Google will further expand ‘close variants’ exact match keywords so ads can be shown for searches with the same intent. Through improvements in its machine learning algorithms, Google claims it can now better classify the intent of a query. When it finds the intent is basically...