SEO Wash-up Monday 24th January 22

Google Update

Google ads new conversion goals, tag assistant conversion support & new explanations – Google has a few new Google Ads features that are aimed at helping users manage their conversions and drive performance. Below are the new features and new explanations;

• Conversion goals in Google Ads – A new way to optimise towards your objectives at the account or campaign level. This allows you to tell Google Ads which specific business goals your campaigns should optimize for. For example, if you’re an online clothing retailer, you can set a purchase as your account default goal so that all of your campaigns can optimise for that outcome. With the purchase goal, you will be able to define which specific conversion actions, such as “completed sale”, should be used for bidding. These controls give you the flexibility to optimize for what you care about while unlocking new bidding opportunities.Google mentions that it will provide tips on how to improve your overall measurement setup. So you will start to see your conversion actions grouped by these new conversion goals when you create new campaigns over the next few weeks. Your existing conversion, conversion optimization, and bidding settings will not be changed. This means that no action needs to be taken on your part, Google explained.

• Tag assistant support for conversion – Google has added Tag Assistant support for conversion that will show you if your conversion tags are working as intended or not. The tag assistant is more of a troubleshooter tool that will help you diagnose any issues with your conversion actions and if there is an error such as unverified conversion actions, inactive tags, or no recent conversions. Google said you will also be able to see, in real time, which conversion actions are properly being measured.
• New Explanations – You can now see explanations for Target ROAS and Maximize conversion value in your campaigns page for Google Search campaigns. With explanations, you can view the reason for any change in conversion value in a single click.

Google Ads performance max campaigns available to all – Google has rolled out the performance max campaigns, although this was in beta a year ago, now it is available to all advertisers. Furthermore, they then go on to mention that it will also become the next generation of smart shopping and local campaigns, which will both upgrade to performance max next year.

The performance max is a goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. This was designed to complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels such as YouTube, search, display, maps, Gmail, and discover.

The performance max campaigns optimise for the e-commerce, lead generation or local sales goals you set in Google Ads. The search giant mentions that in order to simplify things, for coming years, smart shopping and local campaigns will seamlessly upgrade to performance max campaigns.