SEA: Google Adwords is placing big bets on mobile-first experiences

Mobile is taking root in our digital lives, becoming critical for current online marketing strategies. To respond to this reality, Google has made a set of announcements in which the common denominator is to boost mobile-first innovations. Where is the search engine market leader looking to this time?
 
To SEA! With the latest version of the Google AdWords Editors (11.6) launched last week, the universal app campaigns (UAC) have undergone several changes. In particular, Google gives more relevance to interactions at the expense of downloads and, above all, lets marketers reach a larger target audience through different platforms with the optimisation of the UAC for iOS. This is, without doubt, good news. However we prompt you to not stay on the surface, but to deepen! What is the real impact of the UAC update?

A little bit of context

A lot has happened since Google presented its universal app campaigns in 2015. This new campaign type was born, according to Google, “to allow advertisers to reach consumers across Google media more efficiently and effectively” and to measure apps’ performance through a wide range of different trackers in AdWords.

At its annual Google I/O developer conference in May this year, the SEO and SEA giant indicated that the universal app campaigns have driven more than 2 billion app downloads until then. They also took the opportunity to announce their intention of extending this tool to iOS, so iOS developers would also get the chance to benefit from it.

Changes overview

And Google made this request possible las week followed by a new update of the AdWords Editor. Below you can find what the main changes are and how they can affect to SEAs daily work:

Positive aspects

• Now the UAC is also available for iOS.
  This opens up considerably a wide range of opportunities, in particular in the display field.
• Available in AdWords Editor.
  Marketers can also create and edit UAC using the AdWords Editor what let them make Bulk changes to the campaigns as well as work offline.

Negative aspects

• Marketers cannot fully control their own display campaigns anymore. The new version does not allow marketers to determine specific keywords, topics or interests to manage effectively display campaigns because now Google controls itself the delivery of display through an algorithm with the objective of delivering ads to the most relevant users.

That’s how the new interface looks like

The overall expert analysis

» „Compared with the previous version, this update is already an improvement. Especially, because it enables you to reach a wider target audience due to the integration of iOS Apps. This has to do with the fact that downloads used to be the main campaign goal before, while it‘s all about interactions now. Google optimises on the basis of interactions. However, there’s no possibility for advertisers to exclude topics or interests themselves. This is now all left to the discretion of Google“,

summarised our SEA expert Kristin Mortell. «