Google Rebrands – and Revamps – Its Ad Suite

Google AdWords, for example, has officially become the new and improved Google Ads

It’s official! Google AdWords is now Google Ads.

With this transition, which became official July 24, 2018, Google also rebranded and re-organized its other ad platforms into new brands: Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager.

The changes are a concerted effort by Google to offer small businesses, enterprises and publishers tools that are updated, consolidated, and integrated to make advertising online easier, smarter and simpler, with less heavy lifting.

According to Google’s announcement: “These new [Google] brands will help advertisers and publishers of all sizes choose the right solutions for their businesses, making it even easier for them to deliver valuable, trustworthy ads and the right experiences for consumers across devices and channels.”

So yes, there are a lot of new changes you should know about.

Let’s take a look at the three newly named, expanded advertising platforms.

Google AdWords => Google Ads

With this transformation the old Google AdWords evolves into a platform that for the first time goes beyond Google Search to give advertisers access to YouTube, Google Maps and apps found on Google Play. It also allows users to buy display advertising on sites and in content that their target audiences browse across the web.

With small business owners in mind, Google Ads also offers a new “campaign type” driven by machine learning technology that makes it simpler for the “little guy” to get started online advertising and get results with less effort and know-how.

We’re fans of the improvements in the new Google ads experience. The layout is very intuitive and easy to navigate to find certain campaign types, landing pages or ad extensions. The revamped overview and recommendations sections provide quick insights that can certainly help improve account performance for advertisers. A few additional features that we’re taking advantage of are the audience, demographic and landing page features the platform offers. 

Google Marketing Platform

As of August 13, 2018, Google Marketing Platform (GMP) is the new ad-buying solution that skews toward the enterprise marketer. It includes the DoubleClick Marketing Platform and Google Analytics 360 under one roof. It’s also home to Display and Video 360, which is composed of the old DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center.

Google Marketing Platform is geared toward enterprise-level advertisers and marketers who are looking for advanced tools for deeper analysis. GMP integrates analytics into the ad-buying platform to help companies plan, buy, measure and optimize customer experiences all in one place. According to Google, beta testers of GMP are raving: BookIt said it saw a 20 percent increase in revenue thanks in part to the ability of the travel company to create more relevant content and campaigns after it uncovered insights about the types of travelers interested in their brand.

Google Ad Manager

The third and final new platform is Google Ad Manager. It combines what was formerly known as the DoubleClick Ad Exchange with DoubleClick for Publishers. According to Google Director of Product Management Jonathan Bellack, there’s been a “three-year journey” merging these products so users won’t see a change in functionality. As a consolidated offering, Google Ad Manager helps marketers with support for video, native and custom ad formats. This integration will help advertisers and agencies manage all ad sources in one place with the power of programmatic and data-driven decision-making. And it combines powerful analytics tools and publisher controls with advanced technology to help keep your brand safe from ad-based invalid activity, piracy, fraud and malware and from having unsuitable ads appear on your site..

Concluding thoughts

Did anyone else see this coming? We’re guessing a lot of you knew a change was inevitable, but this move makes a lot of sense looking back over the past year with recent changes that were being made within the DoubleClick and AdWords platforms. This change is exciting and will ultimately benefit millions of advertisers that utilize the platform. You need to take advantage of the new features to identify additional opportunities within your accounts. These features will help optimize different facets of your account, from ad schedules to landing page testing to supporting native and custom ad formats in one place.

We’re certainly excited about the new campaign types and features that are available in the new experience. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, start testing today!   

If you’re having trouble with or want to get more out of your paid media campaigns, Oneupweb is here to help.