The past year has been a transformative one for search advertising, with Google Ads rolling out a series of impactful updates designed to enhance campaign performance, improve user experience, and empower advertisers with advanced tools. From the rise of AI-driven features to granular reporting capabilities, these updates reflect Google’s commitment to keep advertisers at the forefront of a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
For marketers, staying on top of these changes is more than just a best practice—it’s essential to maintaining a competitive edge. Each new feature or adjustment to the platform has the potential to unlock new opportunities, streamline workflows, or refine targeting strategies.
Let’s take a closer look at the most significant search updates on Google Ads over the past year.
Here are the key Search updates in 2024:
- Shopping Ads on Google Lens: Use Shopping Ads on Google Lens to capture customers the moment they’re looking for a product.
- Conversational UI: Google’s new Gemini-powered conversational experience for search campaigns makes it easier to create campaigns and start advertising.
- Brand Inclusions: Specify brands you want to target. Broaden the reach of branded campaigns by including relevant variations and misspellings, making it easier for advertisers to move away from exact and phrase match type structure.
- Brand Exclusions: Control brand-related queries and exclude specific brands. Prevents ads from appearing on irrelevant or competitive queries. Useful for advertisers who are looking to separate branded queries from their PMAX.
- Negative Keyword Refinement: Block misspelled variations of keywords and improve your campaign performance by reducing wasted spend.
- Enhanced Search Term Reporting: View misspelled search queries in the search terms report. Previously many of these search terms appeared under ‘Other’.
- AI Overviews: Ads in AI Overviews are now available to mobile users in the US to reach customers directly. This is not yet available for UK users.
Let’s dive deeper into these powerful features.
Top Search Updates in 2024
Here are some of the top features from the latest update:
Capture Visual Search Intent with Shopping Ads on Google Lens
Google Lens, with its staggering 20 billion monthly visual searches, is a powerful tool for consumers to discover products and services.
By using the power of Shopping Ads on Google Lens, you can tap into this vast audience of visually-minded shoppers. When users snap a photo of a product they like or search for a specific item using Lens, your ads can appear directly in the search results.
This allows you to connect with customers at the precise moment they’re inspired, driving increased brand visibility, website traffic, and sales.
Launch Your Search Campaigns with Gemini-Powered Conversational AI
Google’s new Gemini-powered conversational experience for search campaigns enables you to create search campaigns.
By using the advanced capabilities of Gemini, you can craft compelling ad copy, generate engaging headlines, and optimise your bids in real-time. This cutting-edge technology empowers you to deliver personalised messages to your customers.
Google is soon expanding the availability of this innovative tool to Spanish, French, and German-speaking markets.
Conversational experience makes it easier for less experienced Google Ads managers to launch activity. Meanwhile, more experienced search managers are expected to continue to use Google Ads Editors and spreadsheets.
Refine Your Branded Search Campaigns with Brand Inclusions
With Brand Inclusions, you can restrict your campaign’s traffic to search queries that contain specific brands.
Brand settings help your ads to appear with brands that you are related to and prevent them from serving on brands that you may not want to be associated with. Brand lists can be created at the account level and applied to individual campaigns. To add a brand that isn’t already in the Google Ads brand library, you may request to add a brand to your brand list.
Combine Brand Inclusions with broad match type capabilities and it enables your ads to trigger on a wider range of relevant search queries, while your ads will only appear for searches that include your specified brands.
Optimise Your Campaigns with Brand Exclusions
Unlike Brand Inclusions in broad match, Brand Exclusions let you choose which brands to exclude across all match types and DSA.
Brand Exclusions allow you to prevent your ads from showing on queries that contain specific brands. Your campaign won’t serve for queries associated with a brand that you want to avoid. This is available for search and Performance Max campaigns.
Applying Brand Exclusions will also help block traffic from brand misspellings and other variants and prevent your ads from appearing for searches that don’t align with your campaign objectives.
However, it’s important to monitor the impact of Brand Exclusions on your campaign performance. While they can help you refine your targeting, ensure that you’re not inadvertently blocking valuable conversion opportunities.
Simplify Your Keyword Strategy with Negative Keyword Expansions
Save time and effort by streamlining your negative keyword management. Google’s new feature enables you to exclude entire sets of misspelled variations with just one negative keyword.
For instance, instead of manually adding thousands of misspellings for a brand like “YouTube,” you can now simply add a single negative keyword to exclude other variations. This significantly reduces the complexity of your keyword strategy and helps you maintain a more efficient and effective campaign.
Gain Deeper Insights with Enhanced Search Term Reporting
Uncover valuable insights into user search behaviour with Google’s improved Search Terms report. Now, you can view misspelled search queries alongside their correctly spelled counterparts to understand how users search for your products and services.
Previously, many misspelled search queries were categorised as “Other” in the report, making it difficult to identify valuable opportunities. With this enhancement, you can now access a wider range of search terms, including those with minor spelling errors.
Reach More Customers With AI Overview Ads
AI Overviews in Search help you quickly find information and discover all the web has to offer. According to Google, people who engage with AI Overviews are more satisfied with their search results, and find ads appearing above and below the overview helpful.
Search and Shopping ads appear directly within AI Overviews when relevant to both the query and the response provided. This new ad format was designed to help people discover new brands and make informed purchasing decisions.
Now, Ads in AI Overviews are available to mobile users in the US and they feature the clear and transparent “Sponsored” label. However, it’s not clear when this will be available in the UK.
By taking advantage of these improved Search features, you can make more informed decisions and drive better results for your campaigns.
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At 360 OM, we specialise in helping businesses take their marketing efforts to the next level. Our team stays on top of industry trends, uses data-informed decisions to maximise your ROI, and provides full transparency through comprehensive reports.
