Part 1: The Future of Digital Marketing

In light of the recent Google Live Marketing event which was live streamed through the Google ads app, this piece focuses on the changes introduced in Part 1 of the event: The Future of Marketing.

Here’s a look at the exciting additions coming to Google Ads, cookies & privacy, and more

What’s New?

The Insights page in Google Ads now provides custom insights, which are specific to each business in order to help them discover new opportunities.

In light of consumer behaviour changes due to Covid-19, curbside pickup for local inventory ads has been introduced. This helps marketers connect local shoppers with their desired products in a safer, more direct way.

Google also enabled booking for Local Services Ads to help people connect with trustworthy and reliable professionals in their local area, all of whom will be backed by the Google Guarantee.

Plans were unveiled for Performance Max campaigns – a new way for advertisers and marketers to buy Google Ads from a single campaign across Display, Search, Discover, YouTube, Gmail and Maps. The new campaign complements existing Search campaigns, while helping business owners and marketers maximise performance in three key areas:

•Find more converting customers across all of Google’s ad inventory without the need to manage multiple campaigns.

•Drive the best performance Google can deliver against the goals that matter the most to each business owner/marketer – in a future update, it will be easier to import customer data to consider these underlying goals in campaigns.

•Richer insights into automation and how it’s working for the business. Increased transparency as a result.

The Performance Max campaigns beta is now available to advertisers across the globe. As a Blue Badge Partner, Lomax PPC can apply for access on your behalf.

Greater Focus On Privacy & Cookies

As people continue to express themselves in new ways over Google and thinking about their future in new ways too, advertisers are finding that there are now more opportunities to connect with target audiences than there ever was. This is why privacy continues to be a top priority for Google across all consumer products and services
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Google announced recently that third party cookies will be phased out and from that point on, they will not use alternative identifiers to track individuals through their personal information as they browse the internet. Furthermore, none of those identifiers will be used in any Google product either.

The search giant plans on building a privacy-safe, ad-funded internet, helping advertisers deliver business results while still improving privacy on a dramatic scale. There will be a successfully transition to a digital world without cookies, although this may require three things from business owners and marketers:

• Build greater relationships and deep engagement with customers so that businesses only use properly consented first-party data during communication.

• Use of automation and machine learning which will make forward-looking predictive marketing possible for advertisers by helping to identify key patterns and trends. With the right kind of automation, privacy-safe and effective ad selection and measurement are both possible. Marketers are therefore urged to use machine learning and automated solutions frequently as they can provide better ad visibility where data or signals may be limited.

•Commit to new technologies that preserve privacy. Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox, the open source initiative, will help businesses develop new technologies focusing on improvements in anonymisation, on-demand processing and other privacy methods. Google believes it gives advertisers the freedom to submit proposals and run experiments as and when needed; sustainable solutions for key digital advertising use cases, such as interest-based ads or measurement, among others. In fact, Google will be using these APIs for their own ads.

A New Generation Of Measurement

Google encouraged marketers to build their measurement on first-party data, enable users to make choices about their data, and, keep reporting actionable insights to fill in the gaps with modelled data.

‘Sitewide tagging’ will give marketers the data needed to deliver privacy-safe measurement. This approach to tagging enables marketers to observe more conversions and model more insights from those conversions.

A new way to measure conversions is now available even with cookies out of the equation. The enhanced conversions work by allowing tags to use consented, hashed, first-party data, such as email addresses, from wherever conversions are recorded – offering advertisers and marketers a more complete picture of how ads are performing on Google media.

Furthermore, this will improve conversion modelling and work across devices for a more detailed view on user behaviour. Insights from first-party data will also help marketers build a more future-proofed target audience strategy. With the introduction of Customer Match, marketers will be able to deliver relevant experiences and deepen relationships with customers. Advertisers will also be able to target audiences with more personalised and privacy-safe ads.

Consent Mode provides new tag settings to customise how Google tags behave before and after users make cookie consent decisions. For users choosing “no”, the relevant Google tags will adjust how they behave – for example, not using cookies where permission has been denied. However, there may be gaps in reporting when users opt out of cookies, which is why conversion modelling is now available through Consent Mode to help close the gaps and provide marketers with more detailed conversion insights.

The modelled conversions will help in optimising campaigns more effectively and, on average, help advertisers recover 70% of the conversion journeys, which may have been lost due to user consent choices.

Closing Thoughts

Google introduced a number of other welcome changes as well at the Google Live Marketing event on “The Future of Marketing”, which cannot be covered in in-depth detail in this piece alone. Request a call back or get in touch with our team to learn how we can use these new features to grow your business.