Google AdWords Is Dead… Long Live Google Ads

Alphabet Inc’s Google announced a complete overhaul of its advertising platforms this week, effectively retiring the DoubleClick and Google AdWords brands to create a more streamlined experience for advertisers and ad sellers.

In addition to the rebrand:

• Google Adwords will become Google Ads
• DoubleClick advertising and Google Analytics will now sit under Google Marketing Platform
• DoubleClick for Publishers and Ad Exchange will be unified under Google Ad Manager

Whilst the functionality of each product isn’t changing too much, it’s an attempt from Google to streamline their offering after studying user behaviour in the hope that it will help advertisers carry out their marketing tasks more easily.

Here’s how the rebrand will shape up…

Google Ads

First launched in 2000, Google AdWords’ original remit was to allow advertisers to buy text ads to show within Google Search results on desktop.

18 years later, the online landscape has changed considerably and AdWords now supports text, display, video and shopping ads across Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and other partners across Google’s network.

The rebrand to Google Ads and redesign of the interface will ultimately help users to carry out advertising campaigns more easily with a focus on automation and machine learning.

This will be especially beneficial for small businesses without time or resources to carry out complicated campaigns as some of the bigger players can.

Google Marketing Platform

Moving away from small businesses, Google Marketing Platform will help larger buyers to plan, buy, report and improve on paid media all in one service, rather than having to rely on access to multiple products.

Former DoubleClick products including Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Search will all become part of Google Marketing Platform, as will Analytics 360 and Tag Manager 360.

Again, with a focus on streamlining and improving customer experience, Google is removing the previous headaches of having to integrate multiple separate products in one by providing a single step process.

Google Ad Manager

Lastly, two more DoubleClick products are being unified into one with Publishers and Ad Exchange now sitting under the new Google Ad Manager name.

This service will mainly benefit programmatic advertising, with a focus on delivering quality results by offering guaranteed visibility on ads, private marketplaces and more control over open auctions.

Google Ad Manager will also help publishers to generate income from touchpoints where users are interacting with content, including AMP, mobile apps, live streams and external platforms such as YouTube and Apple News.

What’s next..?

While the AdWords interface has already been released, marketers using these services will see the latest updates rolling out over the next few months.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior Vice President for ads hopes this will streamline user experience as he admits that users have been confused when previous being told to buy ads on YouTube through Google AdWords.

Now it’s expected that Google Ads will serve all channels and become more clear, with an improved customer experience – something which is an ever present concern for Google whether it’s concerning paid ads or favouring webpages to serve in results.

More importantly for users, fees are not changing and no services will be merging so you shouldn’t have to worry about losing out on functionality currently being utilised.

As mentioned previously, it’s the first time in the 18 years since AdWords was released that such a change has taken place, so Google has very clearly taken time to consider all options, assess user experience and provide a solution they think will help to keep the services lead the market for another 18 years or more.