Good morning, search marketers, what if you could predict the future?
Not in a general sense (sorry), but more of a "how changes in spend will impact my campaign performance" way? That's probably as close to precognition as we're going to get with Google's new Performance Planner. It's designed to help advertisers understand how to best allocate their set monthly budgets across all their campaigns based on Google's projections for maximizing incremental conversions. It can also yield insights into how changes might impact conversions, clicks and other performance metrics. To take advantage of it, you'll have to have some historical campaign data and, keep in mind, it's just a planning tool — to implement changes you'll need to download them and then upload the file into Google Ads Editor.
Go ahead and experiment with Performance Planner, but, if you're in the travel sector, you might want to hold off on making any changes until you see how Google Trips, the company's latest attempt at consolidating all its travel offerings, affects your ad metrics and conversions. The newly unveiled travel planning tool promises to help users organize their itineraries, shop for flights and accommodations and even explore local things to do. From my own experience, the interface does make it more fluid to move between the various stages of planning; and, if all those stages are done through Trips, that's more information marketers and advertisers have to target audiences who they know will be traveling through their area and looking for places to see, novel experiences to have and kitschy souvenirs to buy.
Now that Marketing Live has wrapped up, we have a better view of what Google's been building towards over the years: automated campaign types that deliver ads across multiple properties. With its array of campaign types and ad formats powered by machine learning, it's vying for the entire sales funnel. Transparency continues to be an issue, though, as multi-touch attribution is far from perfect and there are still consumer privacy matters to consider.
Advertising isn't all about the tech — it can be an art as well, and we can all benefit from being reminded of the basics. Contributor Jacob Baadsgaard does just that in today's Pro Tip. Keep scrolling for that, as well as your daily Search Shorts and to find out what we're reading.
George Nguyen,
Associate Editor
