Search ad innovations see strong momentum

Consumer expectations for immediacy and relevance are higher than ever, and successful brands are those that connect with consumers in those critical moments — the I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-buy moments. Based on our deep understanding of intent and context, we’ve built products like remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) and Customer Match to help you be there and be relevant in those moments. Today, at SMX East in New York City, I’ll be sharing new insight into these ad innovations.

RLSA gets even better

RLSA makes it easy to connect with customers who are already familiar with your business by allowing you to adjust your search ads, bids, and keywords based on their past activity on your website. Starting today, we’re introducing improvements to RLSA to give you more flexibility and help drive better performance:

• Reach your customers across devices. If someone visits your website on their laptop or tablet, you can now reach them with more relevant ads when they search on their phone.
• Keep site visitors in your list for 540 days. This longer membership duration makes it easier for businesses with seasonality or high consideration products to reach their customers.
• Add your remarketing lists at the campaign level later this year, making it faster and easier to use RLSA. This will work for Customer Match too.

Since RLSA’s initial launch, advertisers like Intel, TransUnion and David Jones have seen tremendous results.

Customer Match delivers results, especially when used with RLSA

Customer Match helps you reach your highest-value customers across Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail. We’ve found that advertisers using Customer Match and RLSA in combination are seeing strong performance.

At SMX East I shared this insight that we learned from many advertisers who are seeing great results. Wine Enthusiast, a retailer for all things wine, combined RLSA with Customer Match and saw a 3x increase in ROI compared to search campaigns that used keyword targeting alone.

Demographics for search ads

Demographics for search ads (DFSA) has started rolling out to all advertisers globally. DFSA lets you adjust bids for ages and genders, and even exclude them, to help you reach specific groups of customers, as well as report on how they impact your campaigns. Learn more.

Let’s say you’re a clothing retailer, and the majority of your customers are millennials — DFSA can help you to reach this audience more effectively. For example, you might increase your bids for users ages 18 to 34 to drive more sales from this valuable group of consumers.
Pairing insights like this with your search strategy can help you be there for your customers with the most relevant ad experience possible. Here are some advertisers who’ve seen success:

"DFSA was clearly a product we wanted to implement on our top campaigns. Since applying bids based on age, we've seen big gains in efficiency and engagement: searchers that DFSA identifies as over the age of 45 have shown a 65% higher CTR and a 15% lower CPA." — Rene Rios, Director of Membership Development at AARP

“With DFSA, we can concentrate our marketing dollars on the audiences most important to us. By employing bid modifiers for women ages 25 to 44, we saw CPA decreases of 25% in our campaigns compared to normal search.” — Ya-Yung Cheng, Sr. Director of Digital Marketing & CRM at Sylvan Learning

Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management, AdWords