Google relaunches ad products suite

Google today announced the rebranding of its suite of advertising and marketing tools, in a bid to better integrate the services used by advertising clients and marketers. The move sees the Doubleclick brand disappear as its products are moved into these new brands.

The new tools will begin to be rolled out next month over a transition period.

Google Ads

Google AdWords becomes Google Ads, a new single product that represents all the ways in which businesses and brands can advertise with Google: search, YouTube, Google Play, Google Maps and more.

In addition, Google Ads is launching a new service called Smart Campaigns, designed to help small businesses looking to get started with digital advertising. “We’re making the experience simpler, and focused on serving businesses better and driving clear results for them,” said Dan Taylor, Google managing director for global display.

As part of Smart Campaigns, businesses will have access to ‘Image Picker’, a new tool that allows testing of images and text to get the best combination to drive results for display campaigns, Taylor said. In addition, driven by the insight that many small business do not have an online presence, Taylor said Smart Campaigns will also create a landing page for businesses to host basic information, such as their address, contact details and short bio.

Taylor clarified that the page will not host content and “is not meant to replace building a website” but will give small businesses a starting point for their online presence.

Google Marketing Platform

Of biggest significance to marketers is the creation of Google Marketing Platform, which combines Doubleclick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Taylor said this was a natural evolution of the two products because the “top ask from our marketers was to do a better job integrating our offerings”.

“Nowhere was that less integrated than our analytics and buying platforms,” he added, explaining that marketers had learned to link the two products, but it was a lengthy and complicated process.

As part of Google Marketing Platform (GMP), Google announced a new Integration Center to easily create links between ad products, and a new tool, Display & Video 360.

Combining features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center, it allows creatives, media teams and digital execs to create, roll out and manage digital ad campaigns end-to-end in one place, according to the company. In addition, Doubleclick Search will be renamed Search Ads 360.

“All these products existed in different places,” Taylor said. “We’re putting them in the same place for a better user interface.”

Taylor was also keen to point out that businesses can choose to buy individual services with GMP. “We are not moving to a system where it’s buy it all or buy none of it,” he said.

Google Ad Manager

Finally, Google has combined Doubleclick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange into Google Ad Manager, creating a unified programmatic ad platform for advertisers, designed to simplify how ads are served across Google’s various products and partners.

With all the talk of privacy and GDPR, Taylor said the new products “maintain Google’s strict privacy policies” and “help marketers deliver more efficient campaigns while maintaining privacy and control over their data”.

Asked whether the new tools were influenced by the ongoing concerns around brand safety, which Google has been at the centre of, Taylor said it was not the case and that plans for this new suite of tools had been in the offing for some years.