Google Livestream Recap: New AdWords Features for 2016

Earlier today, Google live streamed their Performance Summit, where they announced a slew of new features coming to AdWords & Analytics throughout this year. You can get more details over at the AdWords blog, but here are a few of the features we’re most excited about.

Google has some exciting new features for 2016. Image via Pexels.

Tablet Bid Adjustments

Google announced that they’re rolling out device bid adjustments for all devices, which means that the long-awaited tablet bid modifiers will finally be a reality. This was one of the items on our 2016 wish list, so we’re very excited to drive more success for our clients on tablets.

Tie a Bid to a Base Device

With mobile becoming the forefront of online search activity, sometimes it doesn’t make sense to have all default bids start on desktop. Moving forward, you’ll be able to pick your “anchor device” to tie your base bid to, and then set bid modifiers for other devices. This will allow business to truly prioritize and adjust bids based on performance of all devices, or perhaps run a mobile-only test.

Expanded Ads for All Devices

Every PPC marketer knows the importance of the existing 25-35-35 ad copy limits. Later this year, that will be a relic of PPC history, as Google rolls out expanded ads to all advertisers and all devices. Google’s initial data from expanded ad testing showed CTR’s up to 20% higher, so this will be a change we’ll be watching closely. Here’s the breakdown of the updates:

• Instead of one 25-character headline, you’ll get two 30-character headlines
• Instead of two 35-character ad lines, you’ll get one 80-character ad line
• Instead of manually entering Display URLs, AdWords will automatically extract them from final URLs

Similar Audiences & Demographic Data for Search

These are both tools that we’ve leveraged on Display for quite some time, but now we’ll get to utilize them on Search as well. With Similar Audiences, we’ll be able to target and increase bids for users with a similar online profile to our proven converters. Demographic data will allow us insight into performance by gender, age, and parental status. If you see that 45+ year old male parents who are similar to your existing audience perform best for you, you’ll be able to adjust accordingly.

Other updates included responsive display image ads, an additional focus on local search ads, an AdWords UI redesign, expanded remarketing inventory, and a voice-activated assistant in Google Analytics. 2016 is looking to be a big year for paid search, and we can’t wait to see what comes next!