4 Google Ads features to improve your keyword strategy

As more people make the shift to digital, consumer habits and needs are changing.

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 Google AI and past trends, the forecasts predict emerging search interest personalised to your business for the next six months.

This helps 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.

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.

For keywords, that means that the keywords the recommendations page deems relevant will be added, 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.

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 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 broad match. 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.

Consumer privacy expectations are changing, and the search terms report has changed 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 let you know 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 other drivers of growth.