Google Marketing Next 2017: what’s new

Pretty cool announcements at Google Marketing Next today!

As expected the opening speech confirms two important pillars to look at for the next coming months: mobile and machine learning.

Talking about numbers, 87% of users come to mobile in a moment of need and today 20% of searches are by voice. Mobile thus raised the bar of users’ expectations. The need for speed and a higher quality of the search results are increasing more and more. Brands needs to offer fast, relevant and frictionless experiences to address users’ needs or to predict them even before they ask.

To offer value and engage users, brands must consider three main key points:

1) Smarter with data: all interactions with customers must be driven by putting users at the core of your strategy as well as by understanding where they are in their journey. Data combined with machine learning are critical to reveal intent, context and identities, to shape the result of searches and display relevant and useful ads.

2) One step or one second: speed and simplicity on mobile have a huge impact on revenue, as users accept interactions that happen in one second or in a single step. Has been tested that mobile pages take from 1 to 7 seconds to load. For each second of delay in page load time conversion drop by up to 20%.

To meet users’ need for speed Google is announcing a new beta product: AMP Pages from search ads, that will load instantly from Google cache. But not only landing pages also ads are going to speed up: starting from today a large portion of display ads will be converted in AMP ads format on Google Display  Network that are 5 seconds faster!

3) Non-line assistance: distinction between online and offline is blurring so that there is no difference among channels. Location extensions and store visits are announced to be rolling out soon for you tube through-view video campaigns. User can check local information such as directions, business hours and in-store traffic along video ads.

The second announcement deals with attribution models. Customer journey is less and less linear and it happens on multiple devices: to understand which interaction among search, display, your site or your app really matter and measure cross device-purchases is critical for any marketing strategy. At present marketers use the last click model, but as we may understand it doesn’t explain the real users’ interactions with campaigns. Existing attribution tools are besides difficult to set up, they lose track of customer journey when users move among devices and they are not well integrated.

Google is announcing today the revamp of Google Attribution, presenting it as a new tool that helps to measure the impact of each marketing touchpoint, across multiple channels and devices. Combining data coming from AdWords, Analytics and DoubleClick and unifying the attribution features of each platform, Google Attribution gives a complete view of each single step of the path to purchase and how much credit each point deserves. Good to hear that the tool will be free and available to all advertisers!

Google Attribution comes also in an enterprise version – Google Attribution 360 – for larger advertisers and it can be fully integrated with DoubleClick.We look forward to play with the new tool and bring together all data to gain a more accurate view of our Clients’ business and improve their customers’ journeys!

Last but not least a new report is announced inside AdWords and DoubleClick. As the number of screen increases users’ reach measurement become more fragmented. Unique Reach report measure how many people of the target audience are reached by Display and Video ads and how many times, with a positive impact on budget savings and allocation.