At this year’s Google Marketing Live event Google’s top brass announced multiple new game-changing initiatives, all of which are linked by one common thread: machine learning.
If you’re a digital marketer using any type of Google ads, 2018 will be a year to remember for automation (and probably also the last year you need certain members of your team).
‘Smart Campaigns’ is the machine-learning buzzword of the moment. While certain aspects of campaign management like dynamic headlines have had an option for a while, now, every facet of a campaign can be automated. From bidding to creative to targeting and beyond.
Here’s a quick summary of 4 new automation opportunities announced at Marketing Live:
Responsive search ads: Responsive search ads are now live. This new ad type allows you to set up one ad with multiple headlines and a handful of descriptions and Google will now automate the A/B testing for you. What’s more, they also give benefits to advertisers that hand testing over to Google rather than do it manually.
Local campaigns: Local campaigns is a new type of campaign created to drive more store visits. The ads are generated automatically based on ad creative elements you supply, as well as the location. Google then automatically optimises ad delivery across Search, YouTube, Maps and websites and other apps in its ad networks.
Smart Shopping campaigns: Google’s new smart shopping campaigns automatically optimise ad delivery across Google’s properties and ad networks according to the advertiser’s previously defined conversion goal value.
Maximize Lift: Maximize Lift is a new Smart Bidding strategy for YouTube campaigns. It automatically optimises delivery to users who are most likely to consider a brand after seeing a video ad. Maximize Lift will be available later this year.
Why Should You Care?
Machine learning is here to stay, and it’s taking over the advertising space. It’s making Google Ads accessible to more people and cutting a lot of the grunt work (and guesswork) out of PPC advertising.
This is great news for small businesses and one-man-bands as it means you no longer need to dedicate so much time to running successful ad campaigns. It’s also great for most marketing agencies as it means less time needs to be taken up with execution, which allows you to focus on the more important parts of your big-picture strategies.
For PPC interns or small execution agencies, this news might be a little concerning, but adapt or die is a concept anyone in the digital marketing field is familiar with by now.
To learn more about automation and how you can make use of the campaigns, click here.
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About Steph Von der Heyde
Our resident wordsmith’s love of digital lured her over from advertising to the online space, where she fell in love with content marketing. Since coming to the online world Steph has made her mark on all outgoing CleverClicks copy and is passionate about using words to build brands. Her obsession with the writing is rivaled only by her love of trail running, yoga and green juice. When she’s not submerged in content strategy you’ll find Steph in Downward Dog.