January 2019: Google Algorithm Updates

Just like every other month, December 2018 was awash with numerous Google algorithm updates.

However, this time around, instead of rolling out policies to tighten the market, the tech giant was focused on helping advertisers squeeze more juice out of their marketing spend – Good for business you would say.

Now, let’s have a look at some of the major Google algorithm updates and how it concerns your business:

Pay for Conversions Only in Display Campaigns
On the 13th of December, Google reinforced on its commitment of helping advertisers get the best return on their marketing spends with the introduction of conversion-based bidding for display campaigns – pay for conversions. With this bidding strategy, businesses pay for conversions only, not impressions or clicks.

 

For instance, if you set a bidding CPA of $25, and you get 100 clicks but only 10 actually converted, you will only pay $250. That is the cost of the converted prospects as opposed to paying for clicks.

However, this option is only available for display campaigns with CPA as a bidding option.

Introduces Audience Expansion Tool
According to statistics from Google, during the holiday season, over 60 percent of shoppers bought from new retailers. In addition, many marketers tend to increase bids towards the end of a campaign’s lifetime without an assurance that doing so would bring an improved result.

The “audience expansion tool” is Google’s answer to these problems. The tool is created to help businesses expand audience reach with increasing their cost-per-acquisition (CPA).

So far, marketers using these few have seen up to 50 percent increase in conversion without incurring additional costs.

Introduces New Prospecting Feature
The dynamic prospecting feature with product feeds is aimed at helping businesses get their products in front of the right audience. While this has always been the case with Google ads, this Google algorithm update or feature if you may call it will make it easier for marketers to target customers based on their interactions with products and sites across Google and its partner channels.

It is more like retargeting shoppers who had interacted with your ad or website. However, in this case, your ads are shown to them not based on their past interactions with your content or ads but based on the likelihood that they would be interested in your product.

Currently, marketers utilizing this marketing feature are seeing up to 20 percent increase in ROI.

Suggested Headlines and Descriptions for Responsive Search Ad
With the suggested headlines and description features, it is easy to get real-time feedback on the strength of the ad you are creating, and how you can make adjustments before publishing the ads.

In the same vein, if you have existing text ads that are performing very well, you can now import its descriptions and headlines over to new responsive ads. This practice has helped advertisers see up to 10 percent increase in CTR.

Introduces CTA for Video Ads
Set to be launched this January, on the 11th of December 2018, Google announced the introduction of CTA overlay for YouTube video ads.

This will help to make video ads more interactive and conversion-friendly. This feature is available when Google Ads are created using TrueView for action.

Mobile-first Indexing
Seems like 2019 is going to be the year for mobile-friendly websites as Google recently announced that more than half of the pages shown in search results are generated from mobile-first indexing practice. This is a wake-up call for sites that are still doubting the power of mobile-friendliness for websites. If you want to be safe from what is to come, get your site checked and optimized for mobile search.

Introduces Additional language support
With additional language support, we can now target audience in more languages including Italian, Polish, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Japanese, Turkish, Danish, and Norwegian.