Google, a brand born and blossomed from online search, is making what it calls “one of the biggest enhancements we’ve ever made” to the software that matches ads to website properties based on relevance.
In a blog post that went live today, the company announced it would soon change the way in which advertisers find homes for display ads, helping them be more exact in targeting consumers interested in their products and services.
“It makes it possible to optimize [display] campaigns at the keyword level,” said Brad Bender, director of product management for display at Google. Previously, advertisers could only reach this level of granularity with search marketing campaigns.
The company calls its upgraded system Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting.
The blog post, authored by three Google staffers, says:
Let’s say you’re running display campaigns for a Travel Agency who offers a vacation packages in several Caribbean islands. In the past, you would have created themed ad groups targeting vacations to Turks and Caicos and the Caribbean. Now, with this new keyword level transparency you might realize that the keyword “Turks and Caicos vacations” is 4 times more profitable than the keyword “caribbean vacations”. You can optimize your campaigns to aggressively target these high performing keywords, and be more conservative on “caribbean vacations.
“We think this is going to make life a lot easier for many advertisers,” Bender said. “It enables advertisers to take all the learnings and expertise they’ve built getting their campaigns to perform on the search side and applying that to the display side.”
One unnamed advertiser who helped beta-test the new system saw a 40% increase in conversion and a 14% increase to its click-through rate.
Along with the tweaked contextual targeting system, Google is adding a Display Network Tab to its AdWords interface to better allow display campaign management.
“For nine years, AdWords customers have been buying display campaigns through an interface designed for search,” the company said on its blog. “This is like trying to run in glass slippers – it might work, but it’d be a lot more effective with the right running shoes. So we’re giving display its own tab within AdWords.”
Nick Barbuto, digital technologist at Dare Toronto, said this change was, in some ways, inevitable.
“Enhancing the ability of dissecting a media buy based on more granular reporting is an expected and natural evolution of the AdWords system, especially considering Google’s roll out of a unified privacy policy,” Barbuto said. “As these targeting ‘signals’ increase, so does Google’s ability to monetize their inventory in a more finite way.” The company, he said, benefits from both its scale and robust data offering. “Not just any company could attempt this.”
Barbuto added that these changes may lead to even broader ones for media as a whole, and not just those found online.
“The internet is just the starting point for these types of buying scenarios. TV, radio and mobile will eventually be bought based on consumer context rather than derived metrics from viewership of specific programming. Targeting based on demo alone will be relegated to only the spray-and-pray media buyers.”
