PPC tips: Sneak preview of upcoming Google Adwords new ad formats

I recently took the team to a ‘Learn with Google’ event at Google’s HQ to find out about the latest developments coming up on Adwords that we’ll be able to test (in the UK) soon.

There are few new PPC ad formats to look forward to....

Extended site links

Site links are getting bigger and will look more like the SEO versions, offering double the amount of space that is currently available.

It will only be available when you’re at position one and it will automatically serve different adverts from your Adwords accounts, so it will be interesting to see how this works and what will get served in practice (and how/if we’ll be able to influence it).

Status: coming soon 

Site links 2.0

I’m excited about this one: I asked for it in my new year’s marketers wishlist (#6): site links 2.0 will finally give us site-link-specific click data, so we can begin to optimise these with real data instead of intuition.

This upgrade will also mean that we can manage site links at ad group level instead of campaign level; and it will retain their click history when we edit them. Awesome!

Status: coming soon

Remarketing for search

Google entered the remarketing space a couple of years ago, whereby advertisers can retarget site visitors/ customers on sites within Google’s display network.

Remarketing for search is now in beta testing, and will allow advertisers to customise campaigns depending on the users’ previous site history e.g. perhaps brands will use tailored offers/discounts to bring people back to their site.

Status: currently in beta testing 

DCO (Display Campaign Optimiser) on GDN (Google’s Display network)

Without getting too technical, DCO optimises your placements and bids on Google’s display network to maximise the amount of conversions you get, based on the likelihood of a conversion.

This is already available, you’ll find it in the campaign settings (but you also need to be using google’s conversion tracking for it to work).

Previously, you needed 300 conversions in that campaign to enable it but the good news is that they’ve got it working so well (apparently) that now you only need to have acquired 15 conversions in order to switch it on.

Status: available now, worth a test to see if you can drive more conversions at a lower cost.

Offers extensions

Another extension coming soon to your campaign settings: offer extensions will (similarly to the extended site links) crawl your adwords account and serve up relevant offers in the site links with a ‘view offer’ call to action that could stand out from the rest of the advert.

Again, it will be interesting to see how this will work and look in practise; including how much control brands will have over the offers served when opted in and what they define as an offer.

Status: coming soon

So there you have it, a new flurry of formats to start thinking about testing, as Google continue to try and maximise their revenues from PPC and keep things fresh for Digital Marketers.  

What do you think?