Top 10 Google Ad Trends 2020
Google Ads is one of the most popular forms of advertising in the highly-digitized world we live in today. Did you know that as much as 73 percent of the total paid search market share is accounted for by Google Ads? It’s no wonder that so many businesses have made Google Ads an integral part of their growth marketing strategy.
Through Google Ads, you can reach a broad customer base, whether you are a startup or an established company. This ability to reach a huge audience, compounded by the fact that Google keeps rolling out smart improvements regularly to help businesses make the most of its advertising platform, results in high returns on investment.
Here are the top 10 Google Ads trends that you should be aware of as a modern-day business in 2020.
- Google Ads Smart Bidding
Smart Bidding makes advertising easier for business as it simplifies bidding for Google Ads. Machine learning is used to optimize automatically for conversions in each auction. All you have to do is let Google know what your advertising goal is, and Smart Bidding will tell you how to achieve that within your budget. Smart Bidding allows the use of different signals for optimizing your bids including location intent, interface language, weekday and time of day, remarketing list, ad characteristics, etc. - Google Discovery Ads
Discovery Ads is a feature that was launched by Google in 2019. It is optimized based on the search behavior and search history of the user. It is crucial that Discovery Ads are mobile-friendly and highly visually engaging and mobile-friendly so that they appear and feel more native to the feeds that they are displayed on. Based on a number of factors such as the user’s feed engagement and search history, machine learning is used to optimize ad placement. This new feature allows businesses to reach prospects in the Discover feed (personal newsfeed based on search history available on mobile), the YouTube home feed as well as Gmail. - Google Gallery Ads
In 2019, the beta version of Gallery Ads was launched by Google. This is more or less similar to Facebook’s Carousel Ads as it allows mobile users to scroll through a gallery of multiple images to get more visual information about a certain product, service, or brand. Now, Gallery Ads is a very useful feature in mobile versions of Google. It appears at the top of the results and features about 4 to 8 relevant, search-related images. Each image in the gallery comes with its own text, a static headline and a URL. Following the PPC model of Google Ads, advertisers have to pay every time a user swipes or clicks on an image. - Ad campaigns integrated with Google Lens
Google Lens is basically Google’s visual search engine. It can identify all kinds of objects and even landmarks with the help of a native app and deliver search results on your device. It is also capable of scanning barcodes, providing product details, and can even suggest where you can purchase certain products from. Although Google Lens is not yet integrated with ad campaigns, it can be expected to be rolled out very soon. - Expanded Audience Segment
Towards the end of 2019, Google launched two expanded audience ad segments – affinity audience and in-market audience. In affinity audiences, the members are classified based on search history, interests, preferences, and browsing patterns. Some examples include beauty enthusiasts and users of cloud services solutions. One the other hand, the in-market audience has members who regularly research on products and services and compare their prices. Google also launched new seasonal event segments for in-market audience members so that advertisers will be able to reach users on both Google Search and YouTube and make them aware of their offers in a timely manner. - Parallel Tracking for video campaigns
Parallel tracking decreases the loading time of a landing page by loading the landing page URL of an ad separately from the tracking URL. Instead, the latter runs in the background. Parallel tracking is critical for healthy mobile sites that can perform smoothly and speedily without a long loading time. From March 31, 2020, parallel tracking was made mandatory for all video campaigns, just like it is for Search, Display, and Shopping. - Optimization for Display Ads
One of the top Google Ads trends to watch out for in 2020 is an optimization score for Display Ads campaigns. The scores will range from 0% to 100%. If you score a 100%, it means that your campaign has utilized all of the possible campaign elements, ad as well as bidding opportunities available as your disposal. - Voice search-enabled ads
With the popularity of smart speakers and voice-based technologies, the text-based search is starting to see decline. The convenience of simply speaking to your device to perform a search and find the information you are looking for has led to a rise in voice search-enabled ads. The decline of text-based searches could mean huge trouble for advertisers, and to combat this, Google has diversified its ad segment, enabling it to accommodate voice searches. Currently, voice searches that use screens, such as using Google voice search on a phone, tablet or desktop, as opposed to smart speakers and the likes, will display ads. - Responsive search ads
Responsive search ads allow businesses to show more text in their ads and this create more relevant messages to their customers. When creating responsive search ads, you can enter multiple options including three headlines and two descriptions. Over time, Google will test different combinations and decide which performs best. These ads are able to adapt their content so as to match the search terms of the user, meaning that it would show different combinations of headlines and descriptions. Based on the search intent of the user, different ads would appear until Google finally learns which combination is most effective. - Rise of remarketing
As the name suggests, remarketing is a Google Ads trend that focuses on targeting ads to users who have already visited to take action on your site. The goal is to make them revisit your site once again so that they can turn into a sale. Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is a step towards audience-based marketing. It helps businesses to gain better understandings of their users’ shopping behaviors. It uses cookies to track user activity on your site then display ads accordingly.
