You’ll find a full breakdown of the major highlights from the keynote below. If you would like to re-watch the Google Ads & Analytics Innovations Keynote, click here.

Both Google Ads and Analytics have been entirely stripped down and rebuilt to focus on a world of mobile devices. This is in response to the fact that as of last year, more searches were completed through mobile devices than desktop computers, especially on tablets and smartphones.

The Announcements

First of all, Google has made two important changes to ads in the search results. Based on their research, longer titles are more useful to users, so they have increased the available title length. Also, in order to better describe the services of advertised companies, the description length has been increased to a full 80 characters. This amounts to about 50% greater text length in the search results.

Display ads are vital, and Google has solved the issue of displaying ads across the wide range of devices out there today. Now, instead of the old way of creating each ad, Google requires only a headline, description, image, and URL. They use this information to automatically create great looking ads on any device.

In the next few months, individual bid adjustments will be available for mobile, desktop, and even tablets. This is a drastic improvement over bidding for ads that will appear on multiple devices as the bidder may not want to market to subgroups of users using certain devices.

New Features

Google Maps has been added to the Google Ad repertoire. They have been adding branded location pins, and the Maps page will bring up all local locations based on your search. There are ads in the sidebar for businesses relevant to searches. When each pin is clicked, a branded business page with directions, promotions, and phone numbers comes up. They are also adding in the ability to show results for branded pins along people’s routes when they search for directions.

AdWords had a store visit metric added, and in the past two years, it has measured over one billion store visits across the globe. This ability allows stores to measure how many of their in-store customers were driven there by online searches. In fact, that traffic is higher than a number of online purchases due to searches. Google is working on expanding and improving this technology and effect over the next years.

This, along with the keyword analytics provided by Google, is providing companies the ability to research what works in bringing customers to their online stores. Through this research, many companies have started driving more customers to their locations first, which often results in offline purchases. Due to the shift to mobile, the new features that Google has added is providing businesses the ability to get a higher return on investment by getting the right ads and results to the right customers at the right time.

DoubleClick Bid Network and Google Display Network are tools which allow advertisers the best ways to target their ads and get them to the right customers. Through evaluating tons of signals, Google is able to provide the best bidding options for ads and the ability to cross-exchange inventory. This automatically allows companies higher reach with the precision and high conversion rates of search to purchase that Google is excellent at providing, and it all costs the same as before.

Go Deeper with New Tools

Remarketing list for search ads (RLSA) is a way to focus the efforts of advertising campaigns that focuses on customers who have previously visited companies’ sites.

Google now offers Similar Audiences for Search. This works with RLSA to focus on new audiences with similar searches, providing much higher returns on investment for companies.

On the homepage of AdWords, it is now easy to read overviews of current campaigns, which allows companies to see what’s performing well and what needs attention. The ability to see what keywords and ads that are performing well, what devices they are on, and where in the world they are.

Analytics has become a suite of six tools that will integrate better with Ads. Analytics has been programmed to be intelligent enough to automatically optimize Ads, and the tools therein are easier to access and share.

Analytics will have deep integration with AdWords, which increases testing agility and reduces the setup times for a new site experiment. Some companies have reduced setup and deployment times from days to minutes utilizing this tool along with Analytics Smart Goals. Google calls this tool Optimize 360. The have advanced to where it is now open for the paid beta period.

Data Studio 360 allows companies to better collaborate both externally and internally. It allows data access, report writing, and share this information in one tool. This drastically reduces the time needed to access data, write descriptive and dynamic reports complete with data in a few clicks, and share it with colleagues, supervisors, or clients in minutes. It is even possible to virtually work with others to write these reports. Emailing this information for rewrites, editing, and review is now obsolete. It is also in paid beta and has a free beta in the U.S., to be launched globally throughout the year.

Google is also testing a tool which will allow the ability to ask a question through typing or simply talking. This tool will parse the question and analyze the data to return unique analysis of the data, without having to manually look through it and check to find the answers. So, if you needed to know a specific amount of results from certain search parameter in a certain time frame, all you have to do is ask and the tool will tell you. This is not a tool yet released, but will be soon.

What This All Means

Google Ads and Analytics have both undergone a revolution that will greatly improve targeted ads and the ability to read, understand, and share data analytics. All of this improvement translates to an increased return on investment, significantly decreased time investment, and continued low costs.

Read more about the new Google Assistant, Home, Android N, Instant Apps, Allo, Duo and Daydream.