After the much-hyped “mobilegeddon” search engine shift designed to promote mobile-friendly websites, Google launched an all-out assault on the mobile advertising ecosystem. The provider of the AdWords advertising platform announced new interactive ad formats, new ad-creation tools and new cross-device conversion capabilities,
All of it is squarely focused on mobile performance. “We’ve hit an inflection point,” Google’s VP Jerry Dischler, who heads up product management for search ads, told me yesterday. “There are now more Google searches on mobile than on desktop in ten countries, including the U.S. and Japan. We’ve anticipated this moment, seen this trend coming for several years now, and have been investing ahead of the opportunity.”
Google may indeed have seen the opportunity and been investing ahead of the curve, but it’s also clear that the vast proliferation of hundreds of mobile ad networks, mobile ad exchanges, and ecosystem of demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms, data management platforms, and attribution companies grew mostly due to a gap in the market, a void that AdWords did not leave on the web, its home and native land.
That’s an error of omission, perhaps. But it’s one that Google intends to rectify, and ASAP. “We’re refreshing AdWords for the mobile era,” a Google representative told me via email. The refresh is major and comprehensive, although doubtless there is much more to come.
It starts with new ad units for mobile, where interactive advertising that is native to mobile is steadily usurping the position of once-ubiquitous text ads and banner ads. It continues with cross-device conversion tracking, in which Google uses one of its best assets, virtually unprecedented scale, to enable advertisers to track seemingly chaotic customer journeys from desktop to phone to tablet, and attribute revenue to ad spend accordingly.
It includes a new dynamic search ad unit that automatically updates when you update your website. And it also features a very impressive and simple solution to in-store ROI tracking of digital advertising, which will be expanding globally from a small North American beachhead.