Google AdWords is dead, long live Google Ads!
In 2000, when we wiggled on Eiffel 65 and Britney Spears and the Canadian’s leading scorer was called Oleg Petrov, Google launched its online advertising platform Google Adwords. Having become a real reference in web marketing, the Adwords brand is nevertheless living its last hours. Indeed, Google announced in 2018 a name change. Google AdWords becomes Google Ads, reflecting Google’s desire to simplify its advertising platform and make it ever more accessible to businesses. This is not just a purely cosmetic change or a “rebranding”, but rather a strategic reorientation of the positioning of the platform.
Google took the opportunity to announce several other changes in a dedicated press release. Here’s what to remember:
Google AdWords will become Google Ads
Google Ads launches “Smart Campaigns” for SMEs
“DoubleClick” and “Google Analytics 360 Suite” merge into Google Marketing Platform
“DoubleClick for Publishers” and “DoubleClick Ad Exchange” become Google Ad Manager
In short, Google is not drastically changing the content of its product line but is carrying out a kind of restructuring.
Let’s look at this in more detail.
Google Adwords becomes Google Ads
When it was launched in 2000, the Google AdWords platform was intended to create online advertising on computers with text and words, hence the brand names “ad” and “words”
Google Advertising Director Sridhar Ramaswamy explained the reasons for the renaming of AdWords this way:
“The move from Google AdWords to Google Ads is about changing the common perception of advertisers because when they hear ‘Google AdWords’ they think ‘Oh, keywords and Google search.’
But today, AdWords’ product line has grown and is no longer just about buying keywords on its search engine. The range of advertising opportunities has widened: e-commerce (Google Shopping), remarketing, video advertising on Youtube, advertising for Android applications, etc. Google AdWords has become an all-terrain advertising platform.
This change is primarily aesthetic, but illustrates the expansion of the online advertising market to new platforms and formats (such as voice search).
Smart Campaigns
SMEs represent an ever increasing share of Google’s advertising revenue. To facilitate access to Google Ads for small businesses, Google Ads is launching a new type of campaign that will be managed / optimized using artificial intelligence: Smart Campaigns.
Smart Campaigns will be Google Ads’ new form of default advertising. They will aim to allow small businesses to configure their Google Ads ads more simply. The aim of smart campaigns is to be autonomously and continuously optimized by Google Ads robots. While there is little chance that the artificial intelligence of Google Ads will make it possible to perform optimization work as qualitative as a human person in the short or medium term, it should all the same make it possible to simplify the life of managers. of campaigns.
Google Marketing Platform
This novelty will be of particular interest to AdWords ad managers. You might not know them all, but Google has several ad platforms, analytics, and other optimization tools suitable for each ad format. DoubleClick, an advertising tool based on behavioral targeting, and Analytics 360, a traffic analysis tool, are among them.
They will now be integrated into a single platform, in order to allow advertisers to have access to their analysis data and to be able to optimize their campaigns centrally.
Google Ad Manager
he latest major change made by Google comes at the level of DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX). Google merges these two platforms into a single one called Google Ad Manager.
This last novelty is the most specific. It concerns two advertising platforms of DoubleClick (owned by Google) well known to advertisers, but little to the general public.
In short, DoubleClick is an ad management platform that enables agencies and marketers to effectively manage large ad campaigns across multiple different search engines and media channels. DoubleClick is particularly useful for agencies with high campaign volumes, so that you don’t have to independently manage ads and keywords on each search engine.
Google Ad Manager aims to help advertisers monetize new ways of consuming information from Internet users, such as live videos, connected televisions, mobile applications or even “Accelerated Mobile Pages” (AMP). If this topic concerns you, you will find more information in the Google Ad Manager article.
