Google Ads released Target Impression share bidding strategy

This automated bidding strategy is aimed ad generating maximum reach and awareness.

Sometimes it may be useful to focus on Impression share in order to reach a high visibility. It is not only interesting for your brand terms campaigns, it may help achieve a high visibility on non-branded terms campaigns when you want to put forward a big launch or a unique action or promotion.

With Target Impressions share bidding you can just do that. It is the new automated bidding strategy from Google Ads now available in Belgium. The bidding strategy is set at campaign level and gives you three options in terms of placements: .

1. Absolute top of the page (position one)
2. Top of the page (above the organic results)
3. Anywhere on the page (above or below the organic results)

Once you choose the placement, you are then able to set the impression share percentage target. This can go as high as 100%. The maximum CPC bid limit allows  to control bidding but Google recommends not to set the max bid limit too low.

Although we believe that Impression share is a metric that can be controlled easily, we think that this automated bidding strategy can be time-effective while setting short-term awareness campaigns and thus definitely worth the try. But the performance will still depend on the keywords used in the campaign that demand some guidance at start-up and during optimization phase.

But once definite keywords are chosen, the target Impression share bidding strategy can be an easy feature to turn on and off during crucial time periods for a brand or an advertiser.

Better budget plans with Search ads 360

The new budget management tool offers interesting new features.

A new budget management tool in search ads 360 now helps better optimize budgets in line with goals and performance objectives.

It allows to manage and forecast budgets for an optimal spending spread, directly in the Search Ads 360 interface. The new budget management interface makes it possible to manage budgets for the search advertising networks of Google Ads and Bing Ads.

The new tool enables to create different budget groups, where campaign segments may be defined that reflect business objectives or structure. Within a budget group, a plan may be set up to manage adspends on any given period.

The tool  not only allows to better control under- or overspend,  but also to create a budget bid strategy which automates changing budgets and bids.

The budget management tool is in Beta but don’t hesitate to reach out to your search expert in order to get additional information on this new tool.

Search: more flexibility for advertised brands

More visibility with the new Google text ads

Find out how to add a third headline and a second description to your campaigns.

Expanded text ads were released in July 2016, but with this new release from Google, we can now speak of “Super expanded text ads”. This is not the official name of course, but starting from August, you are able to add a third headline and a second description to your text ads.

The character limit will stay the same for the headlines but the description lines allow us to add 10 more characters to the text ads. 3 headlines and up to 2 descriptions will provide a better visibility for advertised product or service.

Also new: Responsive search ads

 Responsive search ads have the same look and feel as the text ads (now with 3 headlines and 2 description) but takes advantage of Google’s machine learning in order to show the best combination depending on the search query and historical data. You can provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions for a single responsive search ad and Google will decide which one to show.

We definitely recommend to use the larger text ads as well as the new responsive search ads since they will take up more space in the search results and will be more relevant thanks to their flexibility.

New Agency Dashboard to manage thousands of locations

One-third of all mobile searches are related to location and we can help your business get closer to the customer.

People are searching more and more for something nearby, a car dealership, an ice-cream shop or a grocery store. With Google My Business helps optimize this.

Where previously, we as an agency were limited to 100 locations per account, we can now manage thousands of locations in the Google My business platform using one single account. Google launched an agency dashboard that lets us manage multiple listings faster and more intuitively.

Some improvements to the platform are:

• manage all  locations under one account
• send and receive invitations to manage listings
• location Groups
• user Groups
• search

Going local ? Let us know and we would be happy to work on a strategy to improve your local business results.

In-Market Audiences for search now available in Adwords (and Bing)

You can now target users based on purchase intent signals and this is what you should know about it.

What are In-market audiences?

In-Market Audiences is well known and used in Adwords Display campaigns and targets consumers who are most likely to make a purchase based on intent signals such as search queries and website history of a user. There are multiple audiences available going from apparel to travel each with more detailed targeting options. The Consumer Electronics audience is for instance divided in audio, game consoles, televisions and more.

What can this mean for you?

In-market audiences allows you to expand the reach to those who may not have interacted with your site but are interested to buy your product or service. You can add similar audiences and in-market audiences together and it will be a great way to shift part of your budget on new customer acquisition. Testing will determine whether the categories of the in-market audiences match your product and make consumers convert so you can analyses and make the necessary bid adjustments if needed.

For SEA this is a new way of working by using broader (generic) keyword types and overlaying this with In-market audiences. This shifts the focus from specific keywords match types to a more machine learning approach, which in turn could prove successful in combination with smart bidding. A trend Google promotes more and more but Bing is also going the same direction by launching the same product in the US.