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So there we have it, this year’s Google Marketing Next has come and gone for another year. As usual it’s left us with some insight into the future of marketing, what’s needed now, and how Google can help advertisers achieve the results they need.

Missed the Keynote? Have no fear, we give you the highlights for you to takeaway from Google Marketing Next 2017.

We’ll be following up with some more in-depth pieces about each of the key announcements over the next few weeks.

Google Marketing Next 2017 – Key Announcements

Don’t have time for the detail? Get a snapshot of what happened below…

Landing Pages

More landing page reporting and insight in the new Adwords interface.
New Adwords AMP Landing Pages Beta for Search & Display Ads. Sign up here

Measurement

Unique Reach is coming to Display campaigns in Adwords and DoubleClick
- Earlier announced for YouTube, This update allows you to see the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user across devices, screens and platforms.
Location Extensions and Store Visits available for YouTube and TrueView campaigns soon.
Store Sales Measurements – Later this year there will be 2 new tools to help measure store sales accurately & completely.
- Import transaction data into Adwords to see store sales & revenue at the device and campaign for search & shopping campaigns.
- Take advantage of Google’s 3rd party partnerships with no implementation on our end. This will be US focused for now as it relies on credit and debit card transactional information.

Audiences

Audiences; Better Audiences, Brand New Audiences, Broader Reach for Audiences across channels.
- Better Audiences – Youtube Audiences can be retargeted on Search
- Brand New Audiences – Consumer Patterns (where people shop) and Life Events (when biggest milestones are happening) on YouTube will be new audience pools to target via these intent rich signals.
- Broader Audiences – In Market Audiences for Search Ads. Reach more users who are likely to purchase based on previous search signals. Many are already seeing a +10% increase in Conversion Rates.

Google Assistant

We will soon be able to provide the Google Assistant with Local Inventory Ads. Find out more here.

New Tools

New Adwords Interface will start rolling out for millions more from today.
- By the end of the year it will be available to all. Find out more here.
Google Optimize integrates with Adwords.
- Quickly and easily create new landing pages and apply them to combinations of campaigns, ad groups or keywords – no coding or webmaster required.
Google Survey 360 now integrates with Adwords.
- You can now create a survey and use your remarketing lists to target a specific audience via Adwords.
Smarter planning in DoubleClick Bid Manager.
- A new workflow has been created to help you save time & improve performance. This analyses past data and finds the right inventory and targeting to reach the right audience. You can then approve and activate with one click.
Google Attribution and Google Attribution 360 – Beta coming in the next few months
- This tool will allow advertisers to fully understand and measure the impact of their marketing across devices and channels – all in once place, at no extra cost (excluding Attribution 360).
- This also makes it easier to compare models such as Last Click to Data Driven Attribution so that advertisers get more insight into their marketing spend.

Google Marketing Next 2017 – The Detail

Micro Moments featured throughout

Ensure you identify yours and utilise the Google products available to help target these moments that matter

People turn to search to “just get things done” in those critical micro-moments. If advertisers aren’t there in the moment that matters, we all lose out.

This has been a focus for Google over the past few years as a way to reiterate the growth and importance of both Mobile and the need to be relevant. Context has also changed the game here; understanding this is key to being even more relevant. For example; understanding if someone is close to a store, or even inside a store, will mean that we will tailor a message for their need in that moment.

Identifying the micro-moments that matter most will help you work together with Google to target the right users, at the right time, in the right place. Whether users are in ‘Need-To-Know’ or ‘I-Want-To-Go’ moments, we need to be able to use the right message and right Google products to give users the best customer journey through our brand and path to purchase.

Themes this year are Intent, Data, and Machine Learning.

For Google, in order for advertisers have the consumer at the heart of everything that we do we must first fully understand 3 new realities for business; Smarter Data, One Step or One Second, Non-Line Assistance.

Credit: Google Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick Announcements Keynote

Smarter Data helps us to understand Intent. Advertisers must put the consumer at the heart of everything

Customer interactions must be smarter with Data. Your data must be used to drive insight each micro-moments, and Machine Learning can be used to help deliver relevance and useful experiences.

Based on a user’s Intent, Context and Identity; even though a user could be searching on the same keyword e.g. [cheap hotels] and shown an ad from the same advertiser, the message they are shown should be different. In the background, Google’s machine learning is working to help identify the most relevant ad for that user.

Innovation = Data + Machine Learning + Technology

Following on from Micro-Moments, Google reiterated that it’s Machine Learning is only going to get stronger this year.

Machine Learning can take into account hundreds of insights into consumer intent and context in real time. We now have more access to this data than ever before, and Google was keen to show of it’s technology in being able to enable this data – to help us make sense of it all.

Google showed off some of it’s new machine learning with some examples from Google Photo’s and Google Translate.

One Step or One Second. We simply have to get the fundamentals right with Mobile

If a page load time goes from 1 second to 7 seconds, the probability that a user is going to bounce more than doubles. In fact, for every 1 second delay, conversions can fall by up to 20%.

Credit: Google Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick Announcements Keynote

Speed and simplicity on Mobile equals revenue. There was further discussion about the recent successes with AMP pages via Search, and this is something that Google also look to move out across their other products this year.

Understanding Non-Line Assistance

Consumers no longer distinguish their experiences between online and offline.There is no longer a distinguishing line between the channels; the customer is the channel. Consumers move seamlessly between contexts to surfaces, for example; many users use search on their smartphone to find ‘places to eat near me’ and then look to visit the store. 70% of those who bought something in a store first turned to a device for relevant information.

Credit: Google Ads, Analytics and DoubleClick Announcements Keynote

Machine Learning has helped to power ‘In Store Visits’ measurement, and is something that Google are continuing to work on for this year.

Google Marketing Next 2017 – The Highlights

So there we have it, this year’s Google Marketing Next has come and gone for another year. As usual it’s left us with some insight into the future of marketing, what’s needed now, and how Google can help advertisers achieve the results they need.

Google Marketing Next 2017 – Key Announcements