What's new with Google

Being the world’s leading search engine, Google constantly comes out with updates and improvements. Whether you’re a searcher or an advertiser, they always try to provide more data to help you find what you’re searching for. However, keeping tabs on all of the significant changes being rolled out with Google consistently evolving can be challenging. To make things easier, we put together a brief list of the most important Google updates that will be happening in 2022.

What Updates Have Already Happened?

Now that we’re almost halfway through the year, Google has rolled out quite a few updates that have been very helpful to their users working with Google Ads. Mostly, these updates have provided value in giving advertisers more data and better chances of being seen by a possible lead. Some notable changes that have taken place this year include:

Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max is a new Google Ads campaign type that allows advertisers to access all of their Google Ads from a single campaign. It’s designed to be an addition to your standard Search campaigns to help you find more leads across all of Google’s channels, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps.

Performance Max helps you drive leads based on your specified campaign goals, creating an optimized performance in real-time using Smart Bidding. Performance Max combines Google’s automation, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, etc. They’re all focused on reaching your specific advertising objective (CPA or ROAS) and using the creative assets and audience signals you provide.

Experiments For Google Ads 

Google has rolled out the new Experiments page to make A/B testing easier for Google Ads campaigns. This page in Google Ads can help advertisers create, manage, and optimize experiments in one easy to reach place.

With this update to the Google Ads platform, advertisers won’t have to create a new campaign to begin testing. Now, you can select a campaign and create a custom experiment in one step. It allows you to specify how long you’d like it to run and how much of your original campaign’s traffic and budget you’d like to use. This is an excellent way to streamline your testing and figure out different ways to improve your campaigns.

What’s Coming Next For Google?

Google does a great job of looking to the future and working towards making a better search engine for their users and advertisers. They consistently roll out updates and provide more applications and resources to improve their advertising platform. Some significant updates that are coming soon will include:

Deprecating Expanded Text Ads

Starting June 30, 2022, Responsive Search Ads will be the only available ads to create for Search campaigns. The switch to Responsive Search Ads is based on automation. Rather than have many ads with different headlines and descriptions, Responsive Search Ads are preloaded with ad copy that uses machine learning to choose which headlines and descriptions to use for a relevant query. Google reports advertisers seeing a 7% increase in conversions with the switch to Responsive Search.

You’ll still be able to use your Expanded Text Ads. However, you won’t be able to edit, only pause or enable. 

Possible Speed Bumps In Data Collection

With the newest iOS14 update, users can block third-party cookies from tracking what they do on most sites. This poses a problem to digital advertisers since they won’t be able to track their users effectively. Google is working towards mending this shift in data privacy by promoting tools such as Customer Match. 

Customer Match allows advertisers to use their first-party data from sources such as Google Analytics to help optimize their ads to reach a specific type of audience. Customer Match is a relatively new tool to Google and can expect to get some updates this year to help advertisers collect the necessary advertising data and keep users safe.

The Takeaway

The primary takeaway is that Google is constantly updating its platform to provide users and customers with the best experience possible. Many of these updates come up quickly, and if you aren’t privy to them, you may get left in the wake of the update. Make sure to keep an eye out for Google’s changes and take note of what’s coming in the future.