Google AdWords has announced new ways to improve your campaign performance with the ‘new AdWords experience’.

New features in AdWords include some neat promotion extensions, something called custom intent audiences, as well as a new and improved way to test ad variations.

Here’s a quick run through of the new features, and how they can help you:

Promotion extensions

If you’re not aware,  AdWords ads can include some nifty ‘ad extensions’, which are extra informative parts of your ad, like an address, phone number, store rating, or more website links.

As of last week, a promotions extension can be added to show a specific special offering at your store that’s currently happening.

Here’s an example:

And with Black Friday just around the corner, this is a great opportunity to stand out from your competitors (especially considering how new this ad extension is).

New ad variations

The new AdWords experience has made it incredibly easy to quickly test different ad variations across text ads on a very large scale. This is a much quicker process than within the old AdWords, which could take up to hours of manual labour.

Ad variations can now be tested by simply selecting the ‘drafts & experiments’ option on the left, and selecting the ‘ad variations’ option. You can read more about how to set up ad variations with Google’s help here.

This can be done to an entire campaign, but also filtered down into specific ad groups.

Custom intent audiences

This is a new feature within AdWords’ Google Display Network, which is the advertising platform of placing ads with imagery across the web on various websites. Example of these kinds of ads would be the banner ads you sometimes see at the top of a page.

In the past, advertisers could target users by placing their ads on websites within a certain category, and also on specific websites that they select.

But with custom intent audiences, thanks to the power of Google’s machine learning, advertisers can have their ads shown to people who are interested in buying a product that only you offer.

You can read about this in more detail in Google’s help guide here.

Why should you care?

AdWords is a competitive game, so advertisers should use every weapon in their arsenal to stay ahead of the pack.

You can reap some short term gain by using AdWords new promotions extension, using it sooner rather than later, before others jump on board.

Testing is one of the key ingredients of success, which makes AdWords new testing variations option so crucial for long term success.

And lastly, custom intent audiences can increase the number of relevant people seeing your display ad, keeping you top-of-mind when your services or products are sought after.

It should be noted that these are only available in the new version of AdWords, which you are likely to have been prompted to upgrade to upon entering AdWords (multiple times a day, from our experience).

Have any questions about these updates? Feel free to drop us a comment below!

 

Tags: Ad extensions, AdWords, google