Ultra-relevance - Google's next move to target the best ad

Google just announced a major change in Adwords with the rollout of enhanced campaigns, a change that I believe will have a big impact on both ROI for advertisers and convenience for web users. And in the good way.

It’s also a change that demonstrate one more step toward ultra-personalisation, a topic that at CANDDi we believe is the new competitive advantage for businesses on internet. As you can read it on Adwords Enhanced Campaigns dedicated website their tagline is simple: Reach Consumers at the moments that matter across devices with more relevant ads.

Ok as a disclaimer I must admit I am an ex-Googler. But my views come from the experience I gained during almost 4 years heading a team looking after hundreds of large adwords customers. Beyond management of a sale team and thanks to my background in mathematics, I also spent most of my time analysing trends and adjusting the strategy for maximizing our advertisers’ ROI.

When I left Google in September 2012 to join CANDDi one of the clear trends was that companies had a lot of issues dealing with advertising strategy across multiple devices. How to make sure the right ad with the right format and message was pushed at the right time to the right person. How could I measure the results in a easy way? The other challenge was growth of traffic from mobile platforms is staggering, Marin Software pointed out that the share of paid clicks from mobile devices went from 5% to 12% between January and December 2011. Bottom line, it was important [strategic] for advertisers to understand and adapt to the new reality: people are no longer browsing from a single computer, from a single location, and sitting on a chair.

Google has been providing ways to target devices differently for a couple of years, and smart advertisers would already have different campaigns targeted at mobiles, tablets and desktops, so why would that matter? The hard fact is it was rather complex and except some savvy advertisers, most of them didn’t know adwords could do device targeting and many other clever variations around ads. Also larger advertisers tended to see mobile traffic as not important even if it was accounting for 20% of their traffic.

So Google has just taken one huge step to make it easy for everyone: Google is now providing the tool to help advertiser automatically display the correct ad based on location, device, time of the day. It also provides a better reporting to understand the results. The benefits are not only for the advertiser, but also for the users. How many times I saw a click to call campaign running at times or days when the store was closed? As a user, how many times I saw ads on my mobile that were not giving me information that mattered to me, for example the ability to call directly the store?

After remarketing, remarketing in search (still in beta), and now enhanced campaigns Google is building all the bricks to increase relevance via __ultra-personalisation.

Frederic Abrard, 8th February 2013