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4 Google Ads features to improve  your keyword strategy

Back to all resources

4 Google Ads features to improve  your keyword strategy

Key Takeaways

Every day there are billions of searches online — and many of those queries are for terms Google hasn’t seen before. Take the retail sector, where 73% of all search growth is coming from new or rarely used terms.1  It’s a clear sign of the extent to which consumer habits and needs are changing as ever more people make the shift to digital.

To help you keep pace with such rapid change and capture demand as and when it arises, we’re adding fresh features and updates to the Google Ads platform all the time. From increased automation to new ways of forecasting search trends, below we look at four recent additions that will help optimise your keyword strategy and unlock new opportunities for business growth.

Predict where consumers go next with demand forecasts

The Insights page helps you identify trends that are relevant to your business, so you can understand what people are shopping for in your market through the search terms they use.

New to the Insights page are demand forecasts, which mark a major shift in focus from historical performance to more forward-looking trends. Using machine learning and past trends, the forecasts predict emerging search interest personalised to your business for the next six months.

This enables you to:

  • Review when demand is likely to start increasing
  • Identify new events relevant to your business
  • Target upcoming growth opportunities
  • View demand for the year so far
  • Compare your performance with competitors

Demand forecasts, found in the upcoming trends section on the Insights page, help you compare predicted search interest, actual search interest, and your clicks (the amount of traffic you’ve already received from this trend). With better understanding of what is likely to drive demand, you can prepare your Google Ads campaigns accordingly.

Automatically apply keyword recommendations at scale

If you’re looking to get the most out of your keywords, your budget, and the time spent on planning your campaign, recommendations can help.

The recommendations page takes your account's performance history, your campaign settings, and trends across Google, then generates actionable tips to help keep your performance on track.

You can now also select from more than 20 recommendations to be applied automatically — or manually — and edited across multiple accounts, all from your accounts manager.

For keywords and targeting, this means audiences, dynamic search ads, keywords, and more can be added (or removed) by machine-learning technology, so you can reach more people who are interested in what you offer.

You can automate your recommendations in the top bar of the recommendations section and turn them on or off at any time by updating your auto-apply settings.

Test with confidence using the Experiments page

Running experiments is one of the best ways to find keywords and develop messaging that delivers the most growth for your business.

That’s where the new Experiments page comes in: a destination within Google Ads that allows you to create, manage, and optimise your experiments, all in one place.

You can create the following types of experiment within your account:

  • Ad variations: to test text ads, responsive search ads, or the impact of a single change across multiple campaigns
  • Custom experiments: to test Smart Bidding, keyword match types, landing pages, audiences, and ad groups for Search and Display campaigns
  • Video experiments: to determine which of your video ads is more effective on YouTube

These work by enabling you to create and run an experiment on an existing campaign, testing the impact of your proposed changes. By splitting the budget equally between the original campaign and the experiment, you can easily compare results over a specified time period.

For example, you might test a new keyword match type. If the experiment shows better performance for a broad match as opposed to an exact match, you can apply this to the original campaign or start afresh.

Get privacy-safe insights with search terms report

Consumer privacy expectations are changing, and the search terms report is changing along with them. You can now get more insights on the searches that trigger your ads, in a privacy-safe way.

The update means you’ll see reporting for queries that meet Google’s privacy thresholds when they result in an impression, even if they didn’t lead to a click. This will give you a deeper understanding of how your ads perform when they’re triggered by actual searches within the Search Network.

Within your report, the Keyword column will inform you which of your keywords caused your ad to show up for prospective consumers. That way, you can see how your chosen terms work in real-time, real-world search scenarios.

The aim? To help you identify more relevant keyword themes so you can optimise your ad copy, landing page, and more.

1Google internal data, U.K., 2020

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