Micro-Moments in a Mobile-First World
The pay-per-click marketing industry just had a “State of the Union” of 
sorts. Last Tuesday, Google presented an Ads & Analytics Innovations Keynote address at their Performance Summit. The keynote emphasized (or, rather, acknowledged) that the mobile experience is equally, if not more important than the desktop experience.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior VP of Advertising & Commerce, gave a few examples of brands who invest in micro-moments — instances where a user has a single cut-and-dry goal for searching the web. Marketers can work to direct the user experience in these moments so that the goal is completed on whichever site the marketer chooses. Ramaswamy broke these moments into four primary categories: “I-want-to-buy”, “I-want-to-go”, “I-want-to-do”, and “I-want-to-buy”. If a brand understands the user’s intent and the context with which they search.
A Change Is Gonna Come
A large part of making sure the intent and context of a search is known is preparing for a wide margin of error as to what it might be. Google announced a redesigned, more customizable method of bidding and measurement which allow marketers to spend more time and have better resources at hand to understand and act on a user’s intent. The company rolled out a 50% increase in ad text character count and introduced a system which allows marketers to adjust individual bids to set a preference for different device types. Google is also rolling out increased support for automatically generated image ads (to the delight of graphic designers everywhere).
Location, Location, Location!
Some of the changes we’re most excited about include improvements to location-based advertising capabilities. Location extensions will be expanded with increased visibilities and capabilities. Great. That’s fine. We were already on top of those. What’s really getting us pumped is the changes coming to ads on Google Maps. Google Maps is great for recommending local restaurants, stores, and activities based on their proximity to your location. We love that you can set up ads for your business to be featured at the top of a user’s list of options when searching on Google Maps. If you’re a B2C operation, this is a can’t-miss opportunity to reel in new clients.
Coming this year (or early next year at the latest) – we will be able advertise using promoted pins. Promoted pins are designed to pop up as a user is navigating via Google Maps. For example, if you’re a diner right off the highway, you would benefit from adding a promoted pin to attract people passing through on a road trip. Google is also moving forward with beacon technology. To fully understand Google Beacons takes a bit of time and more than a little caffeine. We’ll skip through the boring parts and cut to the chase for you: you can now send promotions/ads in the form of notifications directly to people’s phones when they come within a certain distance from your business. Your coffee shop can, in essense, “text” everyone in a three-mile radius to tell them about the sale on sprinkle-unicorn-whip-cream-rainbow lattes you’re running.
The Takeaways
While the digital marketing industry is taking some time to process these changes and announcements, a few things are clear:
- Emphasis and support will be going towards mobile ads (to accommodate our mobile-first world).
- Personalized, highly-targeted ads and remarketing campaigns will recieve increasing support.
- Text ads will be getting longer, with increased support for automatically-generated image ads.
- Location-based ad targeting (including map ads) expanding in both function and popularity.
We’re incredibly excited about these changes and we can’t wait to see what benefits they can offer you! We’ve been particularly interested in implementing location targeting, beacon technology, and map ads for our B2C clients. We’ll keep you in the loop as Google rolls out these changes. Contact Realnets today to learn what more about our pay-per-click advertising solutions.
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