At the end of last week, Google announced its figures for Q1 that showed Google up 16% on the year. Google cited increasing willingness by enterprises to use mobile advertising and Google tools as one of the reasons for the lift. This week it offers upgrades to those marketing tools with enhanced campaign improvements for Google+ and mobile apps.
Google, Devices
News of the improvements appeared on the Google blog, which said that the fact that people are not just constantly online now, but constantly moving between devices, is an opportunity for advertisers, not a disadvantage.
The principal advantage is context and the ability for advertisers to follow potential customers through time, device and location and push content according to where they are.
In February, Google introduced a way for advertisers to reach customers with contextualized content in enhanced campaigns. Now, it has provide two additions:
Social Annotations
Most consumers base buying decisions on information about products or services from other consumers that have already used that product. Those “experienced” users can provide recommendations, or negative reviews depending on how the product worked. At the moment social annotations on Google+ shows AdWords endorsements from people following your Google+ pages.
Currently, Google estimates that ads with social annotations have a 5 to 10% higher click through rate. So as of this week, to improve this service, enhanced campaigns will include social annotations if it is likely they will improve ad performance without forcing the campaign owner or manager to edit campaign settings.
To use this, all you need is a Google+ page with a significant number of followers and a linked website that matches the URL in your search ads.
Mobile App Targeting
The second improvement is built around apps. Apps have become an everyday part of people’s lives with Google citing research that suggests the average US consumer spends up to 127 minutes per day using mobile apps.
With this improvment, advertisers will be able to reach consumers through the apps they are using with ads placed in apps according to people’s context that covers things like location, time of day, device being used and history.
It cites the example of an app that is used most often on a Saturday evening. Knowing that, advertisers can adjust their campaigns to reach users at that time and based around key information like display signals, demographics, interests and ad group levels. The expected outcome from all this is that advertisers can reach their target audience with the right content at the right time.
This is not the end of this story. Google is asking for user feed-back on this enhancement from users to see how it is working. Presumably any improvments will be included in future verions. More as it happens.
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