As buyer behavior continues to shift throughout the pandemic, Google Ads has committed to a better experience for its users.

Google Ads announced its top three priorities for 2022: automation, measurement, and privacy.

Now, these aren’t new priorities, per say, but more so shifting how they’re focusing on each one. Let’s take a further look.

New Opportunities With Automation

Vice President and General Manager of Google Ads, Jerry Dischler, mentioned how shifts in consumer behavior present both challenges and opportunities.

His conversations with brands have focused on the need for readiness, speed, and agility in order to drive growth. He later states:

“Over 80% of Google advertisers are now using automated bidding to free up time and improve ad performance.”

Under the Automation pillar, Google is emphasizing the use of Performance Max and Discovery campaign types.

Both campaign types focus on reaching users at scale from a single campaign. Google touts the benefits of these campaigns to include:

• More simplicity in management (less campaigns)
• Multi-channel reach
• Greater ad inventory
• Incremental conversions

For single channel campaign types such as Search, Display, and YouTube, Google recommends leaning into automation with Smart Bidding, responsive search ads, and broad match keywords.

The Future Of Measurement

It’s no secret that measurement has been a challenging topic for most advertisers. With the iOS 14 update, the future removal of third-party cookies, and more – new approaches to measurement will be critical for success.

Without meaningful results and data to back up your marketing efforts, it’s going to be harder to prove the value of marketing.

Google is rolling out new solutions to privacy and measurement including:

• Enhanced conversions
• Consent mode
• Conversion modeling
• Data-driven attribution

The solutions put into place will rely on your first-party data and privacy-safe APIs.

These efforts put the user first by respecting their privacy, but also listening to the needs of advertisers to track campaign efforts.

Delivering Expectations For Digital Privacy

It’s difficult these days to go without hearing of some sort of privacy breach. Google understands the increasing need for user privacy and controls.

While you need to build and cultivate relationships with your customers, they need to know that their data is safe and maintaining some level of anonymity.

Google has updated their privacy playbook to capture these needs both from the advertiser and user perspective. The three main highlights of this playbook include:

• Building direct relationships with customers
• Ensuring measurement remains accurate and actionable
• Keep your ads relevant

In building direct relationships with customers, you’re able to capture first party data for more 1:1 direct communication, such as email marketing or in-app messaging.

What does this mean for advertisers?

While we are all used to relying on paid media to drive the final sale and showing direct ROI, the role of paid media may need to change. This of course is dependent on your overall strategy.

For example, the goal of some of your non-branded or awareness efforts should shift to capturing first-party data, instead of the final sale.

If you’re able to capture that first-party data on the first touch, you would be able to attribute a final sale back to that original touchpoint. Just remember to shift your attribution modeling to reflect changes in strategy.

Source: Google Ads & Commerce Blog

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