Today in Digital Marketing - Google Ads: Everything That's Happened This Month

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, December 10th. I'm Todd Maffin. Welcome to our Tuesday edition. And if you're new to this, we have swapped down to a twice a week format. Tuesday's deep dive interviews with marketing scientists, platform experts and so on. Friday's a full wrap up of the week's events. And we are giving away three $100 gift certificates to Amazon. We want to know what you think of this new format. Do you hate it? Do you hate the new schedule? Do you like it? Here is the link. It's b.link slash new format. The link is also at the top of the show notes. Go there. Tell us. It takes 18 seconds. Tell us what you think of the new schedule. Good or bad. We want to know. And then you'll get a chance to win. Again, that's b.link slash new format or tap the link at the top of the show notes. And now today's show. Ad platforms like Google and Meta and TikTok are constantly announcing new features. Thankfully, that slows down a bit during the holiday shopping period so that we advertisers can just focus on sales without having to worry about the ad platforms adding and removing things. But there have been some changes which may have gone under your radar. And with me to go through them is our Google Ads correspondent, Jill Saskengales. Jill worked at Google for six years.

Starting point is 00:01:10 She's now host of the Inside Google Ads course and podcast and a highly sought after Google Ads coach. Hello, Jill. Hey, Todd. So what are some of the things you're seeing in your client's Google Ads account right now that you think not enough people know about? Yeah, there's a couple little new features that flew under the radar, probably because they have nothing to do with AI. The first is the message asset. And this is one of those everything old is new again. Years ago in Google Ads, there used to be something called the message asset. And basically, assets are these optional things you can choose to show

Starting point is 00:01:44 with your ads. So your phone number can show with your ads. That's a call asset. And basically, assets are these optional things you can choose to show with your ads. So your phone number can show with your ads. That's a call asset. Your in real life location can show with your ad. That's location asset. There are site links. There are call outs. Weren't these called extensions? They were called extensions. And now they are called assets, just to confuse us further because the word assets now means two things in Google Ads, but yes, it does. Okay. All right. Yeah. So there was a message extension quite a few years ago where people could text you from your ad. They weren't used very much. They didn't work well. That got killed. But now there's something called the message asset. And instead of being a text message, it actually opens WhatsApp. So people can WhatsApp message you directly from your ad. And if the user clicks on

Starting point is 00:02:26 that, it can trigger a conversion called conversation started. And what happens if someone doesn't have WhatsApp on their phone? That's an interesting question. I don't know if the asset just wouldn't show at all, or it would and would prompt them to download it. My guess is that the asset wouldn't show, but I'd have to double check that. I'm not sure offhand. I wonder why they went away from it. I mean, like SMS is kind of ubiquitous. Google has a bit of a stake in it, as do all of the platforms.

Starting point is 00:02:54 But WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which is Google's arch enemy. Surprising, right? But it's there. I have some clients who are just starting to test it out for like service providers and stuff, it can be really helpful. You know, people don't always want to pick up the phone and call. So this is a nice happy medium, the message asset. It's interesting, too, because I think a lot of people who are in the US and to a lesser extent,

Starting point is 00:03:18 Canada don't necessarily realize the significance of WhatsApp globally. It's not used a ton in North America, but in Asia, in Europe, it's massive over there. And perhaps with all the legal woes Google is finding itself in recently, incorporating a product from a competitor like Meta, you know, who knows whether that was part of the decision-making process at all. True, true.

Starting point is 00:03:43 All right, what's next? Something else I've seen that was part of the decision making process at all. True, true. All right, what's next? Something else I've seen that definitely went under the radar is called Google Engaged Audiences. So this is a brand new type of audience that will automatically show up in your Google Ads account. You don't need to do anything. And it's an audience of people who have interacted with your Google ads before. So it's a new kind of remarketing audience you can use rather than having to set up, you know, Google tag or Google analytics for connect your YouTube channel. This one is just automatically, obviously Google knows the users who've interacted with your Google ads on Google platforms, and it can create an audience of those people. So you can remarket

Starting point is 00:04:19 to them again. But it doesn't take into account or does it take into account the type of ad? Like, is it just, you know, like you can buy on Meta's platform, for instance, you can buy a group of people who are, well, you can, you can set, I think this works on Google as well. You can say, I want, I really want engagement. I want clicks. That's the objective I want. And it will go and get you people who click a lot. That doesn't mean they're buying anything. That doesn't mean that they're clicking on brands like yours. Is there some intelligence based into this engaged audiences or is it just straight up a flat, hey, this person clicked a lot. Let's put them in this

Starting point is 00:04:50 group. Yeah. So to be clear, it's a little different. It's not people who click a lot. It's people who have engaged with your ads before. So the Google audience in my account. No, I probably didn't explain it correctly. So the Google engaged audience in my account is people who have engaged with my Google ads on Google platforms. So whether those are search ads, ads on Maps, ads on YouTube, people who have engaged with my ads. And so this is a really nice feature, especially for smaller business owners or people who have some kind of legal or regulatory reason why you don't want to implement customer match or website-based remarketing. This relies on no third-party cookies at all

Starting point is 00:05:25 because it's all Google-owned data. Google knows who engaged with your ads. And so this is a way for you to show ads again to people who have previously interacted with your ads. It's called a Google Engaged Audience and it's automatically created in your account. Can you do the opposite? Can you say, I only want this to be seen by people

Starting point is 00:05:43 who have never clicked on one of my ads? Yep, you could exclude this audience as well. Absolutely. You can use it for inclusion and exclusion across Google Ads campaign type. There must have been some update with Performance Max, I assume. Of course there was. Well, there were many, many, many. But the one that I'm surprised more people didn't notice is that there is now asset group level reporting in Performance Max. What does that mean? Remember, most campaign types in Google Ads, you have your campaign, and then you have ad groups that live within your campaign, and you can always see ad group level reporting. In Performance Max, we don't have ad groups, we have asset groups, and you used to be able to see no reporting. So let's say in your campaign, you had an asset group for shoes, an asset group for pants,

Starting point is 00:06:29 an asset group for shirts, you would not know of your campaign performance, whether it came from shoes or pants or shirts. But now you can, it is not there by default. But when you're on your asset group view, you go to columns, and you can add all the performance columns, all the conversion columns, and really see how your different asset groups within Performance Max are performing. So this is one that I've been on so many calls recently. People say, wait, what? Since when have you been able to do that? So it's a change this year.

Starting point is 00:06:55 You can actually see that asset group level reporting and decide if you want to break your asset groups into multiple campaigns, if you want to pause them, if one is getting all the spend, etc. Is this a trend? Do we think that in the next year, Google will begin to, or I guess to be fair, to be a bit more accurate, continue to let us see a little bit more into the depths of our PMAX campaigns? Because in the past, PMAX, especially when it first launched, was just a black box. It's like, give us a budget and we'll do the rest. And now we're starting to get some of this stuff. Do you think that trend is going to continue? Is this a good thing? I do think that trend is going to continue.

Starting point is 00:07:30 No, Google does not want to give us transparency into PMAX, not because Google is evil, in my opinion, but because you can't do anything about it. It's a black box. So if you can't optimize based on it, even with asset group level reporting, you can't actually do anything about that. You can't say, wait, wait, wait, spend more on this asset group instead of that one.

Starting point is 00:07:49 But adoption is not where it needs to be. Google needs more people using PMAX. Now, if you set up a new Google Ads account, you're actually opted straight into PMAX, not smart campaigns anymore. In order to get more advertisers, especially the more sophisticated advertisers using more PMAX, Google has to give a bone. And so that bone now isn't necessarily always more control, but we are seeing more and more transparency features come to PMAX. And then there's an announcement I think some people may have missed, and that is that call ads are going away. They are. That was one that was not on my 2024 bingo card, but sadly, call ads are going away. They are. That was one that was not on my 2024 bingo card, but sadly, call ads are going away. And so in a search campaign, you can have a responsive search ad,

Starting point is 00:08:29 which is what we usually think about. That's default. And there was this other feature called a call ad. It's a kind of ad that mostly showed on mobile. And instead of the blue link being a link to go to the website, the big blue link would say call and then a phone number. And if you click it, it would call. And those are actually going away, which is a shame. Again, a lot of service providers have used these home service providers, the kind of smaller businesses where a lead is just someone calling and the owner picks up their cell phone and talks to them. I've seen these be very popular, but they are going away. And so if you want to make sure you can keep getting calls from your Google ads,

Starting point is 00:09:02 you want to have the call asset as part of your account. You want to make sure you can keep getting calls from your Google ads. You want to have the call asset as part of your account. You want to make sure you still set calls from ads as your key conversion objective. And then your phone number will be able to still show with the responsive search ad, but it will not be the main thing someone does as a result of seeing your ad anymore. And these assets, formerly called extensions, are, if I remember right, are not within your control. You put in a bunch that you are willing to have it display, and then it will pick and choose whether the call is the asset block that gets put in or whether another one gets put in. Is that right? Exactly. You can provide,

Starting point is 00:09:37 there's up to 12 different assets you can use right now. I would call six of them kind of required. Everyone can use, and six, including the call asset optional, you may or may not want to use. And Google decides if you show any assets at all, if so, which ones, though, the more assets you have, the higher your click through rate tends to be. So the higher your ad rank, the more chance you normally get to show assets, which of course leads to higher ad rank again and on and on and on. Is there any if a business really relies on or relied on that call ad format and sure they can put a call asset in now and hope for the best that Google will will choose that asset to put in. Is there anything that we can do either in the ad copy or the structure of our campaign to give it more of a chance for that phone number to be the asset that Google chooses to show? Yes, my number one recommendation, if you what you really want is phone calls for your business

Starting point is 00:10:30 and you're a big call ads user is to let the bid strategy and the conversion action guide you. So most people when they set up conversion tracking for your campaigns, a conversion could be a lead form or someone calling you from your website, or someone calling you from your ad. If the thing you want someone to do is call from your ad, then make that the only conversion action this campaign optimizes for, because then what is Google Ads going to try to do? Drive as many calls from ads as possible. And of course, someone can only call you from an ad if the call asset shows. And then you want to make sure your bid strategy matches that. This would not work with a manual bid strategy. You would need a conversion-focused bid strategy to tell Google, the thing I want you to focus on is getting these calls from ads. I guess the third piece of advice

Starting point is 00:11:13 I have that is not based on empirical data, just what my intuition tells me, I always like to give that as a caveat, is when you are creating your responsive search ad to go with this strategy, you'd probably want to stick towards the minimum required assets. So don't try coming up with 10 different headlines. You can just do the bare minimum three. Don't try to fill out all four descriptions. Just do the bare minimum two. And then have your call asset, set it on a conversion-based bid strategy, set it to only optimize for calls from ads. That would be one way to really set you up there for success. The other option, and I can't believe I'm even saying this, but that's how Google Ads works now, is Performance Max, which of course shows on a lot of different inventory that could try to drive calls. And again, you could set your

Starting point is 00:11:53 Performance Max on a local objective using your Google business profile as the guy trying to get calls to your business profile, or again, setting the one conversion action for your performance max campaign as calls from ads and letting it figure that out for you from there. If a brand or a small business really has a call ad currently, what happens to those ads when call ads disappear? It will stop serving. So this change is coming in, I want to say March 2025. So by the end of this year, you won't be able to create new

Starting point is 00:12:27 call ads, then existing call ads will stop serving. So you'll need to create a responsive search ad. Now that I've said that, I wouldn't be surprised if Google goes ahead and upgrades your existing call ads to responsive search ads. But of course, that's tricky to do because existing call ads don't have the same assets that responsive search ads do. They just have one or two headlines, one or two descriptions. That's it. So if you know that you use call ads a lot, I would not wait for this change to happen to you in March. I'd recommend you start testing those responsive search ads now to make sure you're ready for when this completely changes over. I feel like in the past when they've done this, they've sort of obliterated a format.

Starting point is 00:13:08 There has been some sort of now, whether it's been successful or not, or relevant or not for a brand, but they often will, as you say, sort of like try to shift some of that content into the new format. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So cross fingers, maybe they'll give that a shot. But I think you're right. I think, you know, if they're going to be doing this at scale, which of course they are, it's going to make some mistakes. It might work for you.

Starting point is 00:13:28 It might look awful for you. Absolutely. And we see that, you know, I was just auditing a Google Ads account today that still had broad match modifier keywords. Those were deprecated three years ago, friends. But they were still running. They just don't work the same anymore. And expanded text ads. Again, they had been automatically converted into responsive search ads. They were definitely not expanded text ads

Starting point is 00:13:49 anymore. So try to keep up with the times, folks. All right. Thanks, Jill. Thank you. Jill Saskengales is our Google Ads correspondent. You can learn more about her Google Ads training program at our affiliate link, which is todayindigital.com slash GA. Joe will be with us the second Tuesday of every month right here on this new format. And remember, we are giving away $100, three actually $100 gift certificates just to get your feedback on this new schedule. Again, it's todayindigital.com slash new format

Starting point is 00:14:19 or tap the link at the top of the show notes. You'll also be able to watch our full unedited interview by going to our newsletter. It is in today's newsletter that is free to sign up to today in digital.com slash newsletter. I'm Todd Maffin. Thank you for listening. See you Friday for the wrap up of the week's developments in digital marketing. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots.

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Today in Digital Marketing - Google Ads: Everything That's Happened This Month

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