Google recently held its Marketing Next event and announced several changes to its suite of advertising-related products. In this article, I’ll address four of the changes that are important to ecommerce merchants.
Google Optimize
This new product from Google will integrate with AdWords to help advertisers create and test landing pages, without needing coding skills or webmaster assistance. Here is Google’s description:
With the Optimize and AdWords integration, you can quickly and easily create new versions of your landing pages and then apply them to any combination of AdWords campaigns, ad groups, and keywords — no coding or webmaster required.
There are multiple companies — such as Unbounce, VWO, Optimizely — that provide this service for a fee. But in typical Google style, it will offer Optimize for free to AdWords advertisers. The features on Optimize include:
- A/B testing;
- Native integration in Google Analytics;
- Advanced targeting such as geography or user behavior;
- Support for single-page web applications.
If you’ve been wanting to do more A/B testing on, for example, landing pages, but have been held back by a lack of resources, this is a good option — create landing pages in Optimize’s WYSIWYG editor, with its full activity log and preview option.
For more, see “Google Optimize: No Excuse Not to Test” and “Google Optimize: Setting Up Experiments.”
Life Events Targeting for YouTube and Gmail Ads
Life Events are targeting enhancements for YouTube and Gmail ads, for occasions such as graduations, marriages, and babies. For certain industries, such as wedding suppliers, this is very helpful. But since many of these life events could involve gifting, most ecommerce advertiser can take advantage
For advertisers looking to tap into Life Events, here are three suggestions.
- Create ad copy that specifically speaks to the event(s) you’re targeting like “Great Gift For Graduation!”
- Repeat that message on the landing page.
- Consider using Optimize to A/B test landing pages.
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