Google are fairly consistently rolling out new AdWords features and beta trials. Some of are useful, and others seem to just follow their own higher-level objectives: to promote mobile, self-service and YouTube, for example.
Here are a few features that we’d love to see in the platform to solve some of our own advertising constraints.
1. Audience Overlays on Search
Google’s audience lists are quite incredible in their relevancy and reach, but are limited to just YouTube, Display and GSPs.
Allowing users to utilise demographic and audience bidding as a search overlay would be hugely powerful; particularly on highly-generic terms that an advertiser might otherwise not bid on.
For example, a fashion advertiser isn’t going to bid on the keyword dresses; it’s far too generic, expensive and not likely to generate sales.
That advertiser may generate sales on dresses, though, if they were able to only target women that:
- are in their age bracket,
- have interests aligned with the brand,
- are similar to their existing customers.
2. Matched Keyword Adjustments
At the moment there are only positive and negative keywords. Ie: those that you want to target, and those that you don’t.
User behaviour isn’t always this black and white, however. Where a keyword generates return, but is lower-value, it would usually be split out on its own. This can be logistically-difficult at scale, however, and isn’t always worthwhile.
Allowing advertisers to set keyword bid adjustments would allow users to drop their bid for lower value keywords (or increase bids for high value keywords) without having to create new ad groups.
For example, you might bid on your brand name but bid 25% less for +forgot +password, and 50% more for +buy.
3. Greater B2B Audiences
Promoting B2B services on search and display can be hugely difficult – particularly in determining intent. Audience lists are fantastic at targeting users that have shown interest in a product or category – but there’s very little for business.
Given the amount of time that people spend on the internet at work, it’d be quite possible to identify a user’s profession, place/type of business and the business services or products that they may be interested in.
4. Custom Data in AdWords Columns
Custom columns have been a great addition to AdWords, allowing you to calculate CPS (cost into revenue) and other metrics.
What would be hugely powerful, though, is the ability to populate these columns yourself. We have a client with a complex ROI algorithm that has very little relativity to CPA (due to the margins of different products).
We are calculating this ROI externally with AdWords Scripts and Google Sheets. If it was possible to re-import this back into a column in AdWords, though, we could filter by this value and make live bid changes. Inputting average margins by campaign/category would be another great use of this feature.
5. Multiple Ad Custimisers per Ad
We’ve had a huge amount of success using ad customisers lately, showing lowest price, average delivery time, stores in an area and many other live data.
Unfortunately, though, you can only use one per ad. Now that expanded text ads are 50% longer, this is a great opportunity for Google to open this up and allow users to use multiple per ad.