Google Ads is rolling out several new features ahead of the holiday season.

The platform has made the changes in a bid to improve insights, expand access to the Search top slot, reduce onboarding time for local inventory ads, and enable marketers to quantify the impact of online-only bidding vs. Smart Bidding for store visits.

Why we care. It’s important to stay up-to-date with Google’s latest features, and test them, so that you can gain early learnings to help shape your campaigns and bidding strategies.

What’s new? Google Ads is launching several new features to help drive efficiency for digital marketers, including:

• Enhanced insights – Google Ads is updating its product page with more details regarding product issues, for example, stock inventory, missing feed information and high bidding targets (like ROAS). This is to help you better understand the performance of categories, brands, product types, and custom labels, giving you the power to make smarter, data-driven decisions.
• Local inventory ads update – Google Ads is cutting down the average onboarding time for local inventory ads and has also introduced a new local store unit ad format. You can use this new format to better showcase your brand to potential customers as it combines inventory data from your local product feeds with imagery and information from your business profile.
• New A/B experiments – You will now be able to quantify the impact of online-only bidding vs. Smart Bidding for store visits and store sales by running A/B experiments. This feature is currently available for Standard Shipping campaigns but is also being rolled out to search campaigns in the near future.
• Expanded access to the Search top slot – Google Ads has implemented a new interactive ad format that shows business information, such as opening hours, and prompts customers who have shown explicit local shopping intent (like searching “near me”) with productive business actions, such as directions or calls.

What has Google said? The changes to Google Ads were unveiled via an announcement on its blog. A spokesperson said:

• “This holiday season is just around the corner, which means one thing: shoppers and retailers alike are working on their checklists. In fact, today’s shoppers are being more intentional with their holiday purchases, with 74% planning their shopping ahead of time.”
• “AI-powered tools are transforming businesses’ ability to move faster, better understand the intent of their customers, and engage them in new ways across the path to purchase.”
• “Today, we’re excited to share new tools to generate insights and new features to help you do more with Google AI.”

Deep dive. Read Google’s new ads and insights features announcement for more information.