Google Ads Update: 4 New Features on Insights Page

Google Ads New Insights Feature #1: DEMAND FORECASTS

Informed by past seasonal search trends, demand forecasts use machine learning to predict emerging search interests over the next six months, serving insights relevant only to your business—i.e., based on the categories where you advertise. This means you’ll see more forward-looking trends with real-time data that replaces predictions as they come in.

Under demand forecasts, you will be able to view two types of insights:

• Account insights: These are forecasts based on your existing ads.
• Suggested insights: These are forecasts of upcoming opportunities to advertise in new areas relevant to your business.

Thus, you can use demand forecasts to identify upcoming opportunities, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and review when demand for your products or service is likely to increase—and by how much and for how long—so that you can schedule your ads accordingly.

For instance, let’s assume you are a retailer of electronic devices. After scouring through demand forecasts you come across a prediction that search interest in “gaming laptops” will soar upwards from the middle of November and peak on Black Friday before tapering off in the following weeks.

To help you understand this forecast, you’ll see trendlines for predicted search interest, actual search interest, and the volume of clicks you have already received from this trend. You can also view the specific search terms predicted to increase and better prepare your budgeting, marketing, and merchandising accordingly.

Pro tip: Since the start of the pandemic, consumer behavior can and has been highly volatile, so evaluate demand forecasts predictions with your own data before making decisions based on them.

Key benefits of demand forecasts:

• Demand forecasts unveil upcoming forecast trends so that you can configure your campaigns and get your ads in front of more shoppers.
• Demand forecasts identify search terms that drove the most searches for a trend over a period of time and pinpoint if there is additional demand you could capture.
• Demand forecasts let you monitor your campaign as emerging trends unfold and compare your performance against your competitors’.

Google Ads New Insights Feature #2: Consumer Interest Insights

How are people searching for your business on Google? Consumer interest insights analyze the search terms that drove the most impressions to your ads in the past 56 days and groups them into themes and subthemes, each with key performance metrics like:

• The number of people who searched for each theme or subtheme
• Each theme’s interest levels
• How each theme performed in your account

Pro tip: Once you’re aware of these themes, you can update your ads and product pages to include similar keywords and phrases.

Key benefits of consumer interest insights:

• Consumer interest insights help you understand what your target customers are searching for using intent-based themes. This eliminates the hassle of sifting through individual search terms in your search terms report.
• Consumer interest insights can identify which of your campaigns and ad groups are capturing the most demand based on the themes—and recommend ways to capture more.
• Consumer interest insights provide actionable tips for incorporating your top trending themes across your creatives and landing pages.

Google Ads New Insights Feature #3: Audience Insights

Like consumer interest insights, audience insights help you learn how customers search for your business, products, and services but with deeper insights on their profile, interests, purchase intent, and the types of ad copy and creatives that resonate with them.

As an electronic device retailer, for example, you might discover that people interested in gaming laptops were drawn to the headline “best gaming laptops of 2021” and that this segment led to 63% of the conversions in your campaign.

On top of learning their purchase intent, you might also find that this high-converting segment is predominantly males between ages 17 to 35 who are role-playing game enthusiasts and mostly search on desktop.

Using these insights, you can optimize your campaign with ads that target this audience profile.

Key benefits of audience insights:

• Audience insights can help your ads reach new audiences who haven’t visited your site but share similar interest and purchase intent as your existing customers.
• Audience insights break down your audience demographics, locations, preferred devices, and interests.
• Audience insights can facilitate your decision-making, from ad targeting strategy to determining what bids to set.
• Audience insights benchmark your ideal audience data segments against the general population to help you visualize their profile.

Google Ads New Insights Feature #4: Change History & Auction Insights

With change history & auction insights, you can learn how shifts in auction competition or changes in your Google Ads account impacted how your ads ranked on Google’s SERP.

To this end, the auction insights report—available for both search and shopping campaigns—comes in handy for comparing your ad ranking performance versus your competitors participating in the same auctions as you. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bidding and budgeting by highlighting where you are succeeding and where you could further optimize your campaigns.

Note: Auctions refer to Google’s process of deciding which ads will appear on the SERP for each specific search and in what order—or whether any ads will show at all.

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With these new insights launching in the coming weeks, Google Ads is giving brands access to more data to stay on top of search trends, which should help them better target customers and maximize sales.