Goodbye Google AdWords, Hello Google Ads & More

Update:
July 24, 2018: Google Ads brand is now starting to be reflected across their product, help center, and other channels and will take several months to fully roll out.

Original Post:
June 27, 2018: Google announces three major changes as part of an effort to streamline its offerings and rebrand their advertising products along with introducing some new solutions to further simplify their advertising offerings.

• Google AdWords is now Google Ads
• DoubleClick and Google Analytics 360 Suite products are now Google Marketing Platform
• DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange are now combined into Google Ad Manager

These rebranding efforts were made to make it easier for marketers to choose the right advertising products for their needs as there was increasing difficulty from having more complex and numerous products added to their advertising offerings over the last two decades of developing and acquiring new ad products and measurement solutions.

Google Ads

Originally launched in 2000 with 350 some advertisers, the AdWords platform was an advertising solution for running text ads on desktop search. Traditionally, Google AdWords stood out as being ad advertising solution for ‘words’ which falls in line with Google Search. Now that there are so many advertising formats and the millions of advertisers spending billions across the platform simply AdWords outgrew its name. Now, it has evolved into a platform supporting multiple formats – text, shopping, display, video, and app installs – all across Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and a network of partner websites and apps.

The recent overhaul of the UI in AdWords which will switch over to the new interface starting in July. This new UI was a coincidence driven by technology challenges from an eight-year-old framework; however, it fits nicely with the new rebranding aiming to simplify the platform.

In addition to the new focus on simplicity and to better market to a growing number of small businesses, Google announced Smart Campaigns for these small businesses who need help marketing their company without the time or resources to manage complex digital advertising campaigns. This new feature uses mostly automation with machine learning in ad creative and targeting capabilities.

Google Marketing Platform

For enterprise advertising customers, DoubleClick advertiser products and Analytics 360 is now integrated under the rebrand of Google Marketing Platform to continue to help advertisers plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media buys all in one place.

Google saw better performance from advertisers who integrated use of their analytics along with their media platform. It was a simple decision to merge these two products under a unified platform. Integration between analytics and creative planning / buying products existed, but now they will be much easier to use together without having to navigate between two or more products; rather, analyzing results, creating audiences and activating campaigns all in one area.

A new feature called Display & Video 360 consolidates Google’s enterprise display advertising products: DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM), DoubleClick Campaign Manager (media planning and reporting solution), DoubleClick Studio (rich media ad creator tool), and Google Audience Center 360 (data management platform).

DoubleClick Search (enterprise search management platform) is now Search Ads 360.

Along with these changes, Google Data Studio, Optimize 360, Surveys 360, and Tag Manager 360 are all part of the new Google Marketing Platform.

A new Integration Center shows how to pick and choose these products to add and combine together, including 100 existing integrations with ad exchanges, third-party measurement solutions and other products.

Google Ad Manager

Lastly, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) is now combined as the newly branded Google Ad Manager.

DoubleClick was an ad-serving solution for desktop display ads. In 2007, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL were looking to acquire DoubleClick; however, Google beat their bids at $3.1 billion. In 2009, Google then launched DoubleClick Ad Exchange to allow large publishers to sell advertising inventory in real time.

Google moved away from traditional constraints of ‘ad servers’ and similar technologies and moved to new programmatic solutions with a framework that allows for features such as Optimized Competition, which helps maximize ad yield across reservations, private marketplaces and open auction.

With the new change, programmatic and ad network buyers there were called “AdX buyers” are now referred to as “Authorized Buyers”. Google Ad Manager umbrella will help advertisers monetize over all of the new places were their target audience are engaging, such as live streams, connected TVs, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), mobile games, other apps, YouTube, and Apple News for example.

The Rollout

Marketers will start to see the branding and solutions roll out in mid-July and through the next few months. These new changes are focused to allow advertisers free up their time and resources away from the confusion on product selection and towards simplifying and improving results for advertisers. This is a huge focus as Google earns about 85%+ of their entire income from advertising. While other businesses contribute billions to Google’s income every year, Google still makes the most of its money through online advertising. Regardless of their investments in other ventures, this doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon. Read Google’s original announcement.

If you need help driving targeted traffic to your website or you have an existing Google AdWords campaign and would like to find out the opportunities to reduce your spend and increase results – learn more about our Google AdWords / Google Ads Management.