Here’s the gist: Custom intent audiences offer advertisers the opportunity to use the Google Display Network (GDN) to find “people who want to buy the specific products you offer — based on data from your campaigns, website and YouTube channel.” They come in two distinct flavors:

--Create-your-own. Like a trip to your favorite pizza chain (but for the GDN), you can mash topics and URLs together like mushrooms and pepperoni in order to target net-new prospects who are probably into your product or service.
--Auto-created. No idea where to start with the Display Network? Let your ol’ pal Google help! Auto-created custom intent audiences use the power of machine learning to infer the traits your prospects possess, then create audiences exclusive to your account.

My main takeaway from talking to people about this change is that the machine learning isn’t all that sophisticated yet. Other takeaways:

--The biggest vulnerability is with new campaigns.
--Be on alert when using other automation.
--Tools like scripts and bid management platforms can help keep things in check.
--Plenty of people have had no problems with the change.

In the last few days you might have seen an overlay banner in your Google Tag Manager account similar to the one above.

This is related to an email AdWords sent out at the beginning of September regarding the upcoming Safari update which introduces the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). 

The new technology intends to improve people’s privacy by using machine learning to determine which domains can track people across sites. It works by limiting tracking for the allowed domains by only letting cookies act in a third-party context for 24 hours. This article will explain what the Adwords Conversion Linker is, why it came about, and how you can implement it to avoid losing out on essential data.

Here’s what was different: During the time period in question, the company ran Facebook ad campaigns targeting higher-funnel audiences corresponding to people who have the same interests and demographics as their buyer persona. The audience size was approximately 20 million people.

The Facebook ads generated clicks and conversions as you would expect from any pay-per-click advertising campaign.

But I believe the campaigns had an additional halo effect of creating a strong brand bias among the people who clicked through to the site, which profoundly impacted the Remarketing lists for search ads campaigns, since they only target people who have previously visited your site.

After a decade of building AdWords at Google, I cofounded Optmyzr because I found it was too time consuming to run best practice optimizations. And — considering that last year over $35 billion was spent advertising on Google (more than twice what was spent on Facebook) — there is tremendous value in making AdWords perform even a little bit better.

While there are many ways to improve your ad performance, one of the most pertinent is to improve your Quality Score (QS), particularly the subcomponent, landing page quality (LPQ).

AdWords Scripts are now available in the New AdWords interface, giving users a visual refresh, as well as some new capabilities that make management a bit easier, especially for advertisers with lots of scripts in their accounts.

Here are some of the key changes:

See up to 500 script logs per page and filter by date.
See a more precise time when a script will run.
See who added a script to the account.
Filter scripts based on name or who created it.
Duplicate existing scripts.

Google text ads are highly competitive. Check out this infographic for tips (with supporting data) to help you get better ROI on your expanded text ads.

AdWords ad extensions make a huge difference in not only the appearance but also the performance of your text ads through improving click-through rates, Quality Scores, and conversion rates. Ad extensions are versatile and offer benefits for various devices and interaction types.

Some ad extensions are more effective than others, but it’s a good idea to use all of the relevant ad extensions that are available to you in your AdWords account to ensure you are not leaving any precious SERP real estate on the table. Some ad extensions are also not publicly available and require Google to approve and whitelist your account as they are in beta. Your SEM agency or AdWords account team can help highlight which ad extension betas your account may qualify for.

There are now seven new columns added to your menu of Quality Score metrics:

• Expected CTR
• Ad Relevance and
• Landing Page Experience
• Quality Score (hist.)
• Landing Page Experience (hist.)
• Ad Relevance (hist.)
• Expected Click Through Rate (hist.)

There are two main ways you can use this AdWords improvement to your advantage as a performance marketer:

1. Now you can see whether your landing page changes are positively influencing Quality Score

2. You can identify which keywords can benefit most from an updated landing page

Want to know exactly how to use Google AdWords to advertise your business? Follow this proven formula for AdWords success to get to the top of the class!

Here are a few good next steps to learn more or to get started:

• Read the AdWords help article about AMP.
• Read the AdWords Developer’s Guide to AMP, which covers some of the typical concerns around personalized content, conversion tracking, A/B testing and more.
• Test the impact for your own site. If you don’t have a testing tool, you can use AdWords’ Draft & Experiments (D&E) where you create a draft campaign, add the AMP URLs as the Mobile Final URL (for each ad), and then launch this as an experiment.

There are a few caveats when using Experiments:

• You will need a lot of conversions in your campaign to receive a statistically significant result.
• D&E decides a searcher’s A/B assignment with every query, so if your customers likely click your ads a few times before buying, this might not give you a true sense (since the conversion will be attributed to whether or not the last click followed an AMP page interaction).

TIP: Make sure every landing page in the draft has an AMP equivalent page, so this is a true apples-to-apples comparison.

The share of clicks on Google AdWords ads originating from mobile phones increased from 2016 to 2017. Check out more paid search data, including CTR & CPC trends by device type.

1. Implement Single Keyword Ad Groups

2. Use Dynamic Text Insertion for More Relevant Landing Pages

3. Add the New “Text Me” Ad Extension So People Can Directly Text You From Your Ads

4. Geo Target Your Ads to Generate 21.9% More Leads

• Of the 100 randomly selected accounts, only 67 had active Exact Match keywords
• In total, we analyzed 3,399 active Exact Match keywords
• On average, each account contained 9 exact match keywords that were stripped away during deduplication

And here’s what it means:

• {=IF starts
• (device=mobile, specifies the visitor attribute to look for
• “text to insert” is just that. The text you want to display to people who match that attribute.
• ): closes the attribute customizations
• “default text” also is that. The text you want to show up for all people who DON’T match the attribute.
• } closes the IF Function

And that’s pretty much it!

Last Friday, Google announced a major change to exact match that will be rolled out in the coming months. Exact match is a Google AdWords match type that allows an ad to show only when a searcher uses that exact wording. Close variants, another match type that first launched in 2012 and were later made a default setting in 2014, were introduced to maximize advertisers’ reach across relevant searches by matching to misspellings, singular and plural forms, abbreviations, and acronyms. Now, close variants on exact match will be used to match to queries regardless of the use of function words (like “in”, “to” and “for”) or word order.

"Though the fundamentals of ad copywriting and testing remain in play, text ads have evolved to the point where you must consider many different components. Between devices, formatting, ad extensions and audience types, writing effective ad copy is more reliant on multiple factors than ever before.

Just last month, AdWords rolled out IF functions to add another layer of ad customization. This feature allows advertisers to change the ad message depending on the user’s device. For example, a user searching on a mobile device could see a message that says, “Shop from your phone,” while the desktop message may say, “Shop our selection.”

This means you can now write mobile-preferred ads without ad customizers or creating a mobile-only campaign. Instead of writing two ads, you can now write one that changes the message depending on the device.

This new function is great, but you still must ask the age-old question: Should you segment your campaigns by device? Let’s begin our ad-writing discussion by first addressing this question."

• Write more compelling copy by using the additional space in the longer description line to write something new. 
• Don’t reinvent the wheel by ignoring your own experience from Standard Text Ads.
• Utilize the URL Path options – Google will automatically put the domain from your final URL into the display URL – however there are also two 15-character path fields available. 
• Add Target Keywords to your headlines and/or description line. 
• Test, test and test again.