Earlier this month, Google introduced several of their latest innovations for marketers at Google Marketing Live. We were there to capture the big reveal and have a run-down for how the new products and programs will work for real estate marketers.

The surface-level changes for Google are powerful, if subtle: Google AdWords is now Google Ads and Google is combining its marketing and analytics into one platform, called Google Marketing Platform. Below the surface are several innovations that simplify and sharpen the customer experience with stronger, more focused collaboration to deliver better results to businesses.

Google continues to place value in how businesses reach their potential customers. Changing the branding of Google AdWords to Google Ads underscores the importance they are placing on delivering a consistent experience through advertising across all Google products. Within the new Google Ads are several changes that make it simpler for businesses to reach customers across Google products.

Local Campaigns: Manage ads for a single campaign across Google products — Search, Display, Map Pack, Google My Business (GMB), and YouTube. Designed to reach nearby customers through Google’s sites and networks, Local Campaigns make it easier for businesses to manage their ads. This ad approach is exactly what G5 does best. Our team builds a digital strategy for each of our clients to target customers from top of funnel to bottom through the GMB listing, search, display, and remarketing ads. We are excited to start testing Google’s local campaigns to see where we can make further improvements to our campaigns.

Smart Campaigns: Designed specifically for small businesses, Smart Campaigns — the next step for Google AdWords Express — use machine learning to automate Display and Search campaigns based on audience behaviors. Smart Campaigns give small businesses an entry-level option for starting ad campaigns.

Responsive Search Ads: Create ads that dynamically display the right message to customers based on their search query. With this new ad type, marketers set up a single ad with several headline and description options to target customers based on their search intent. G5 is already beta-testing responsive search ads with a small group of our clients to develop the best approach to using these ads and be ready to act once they are fully released from Google.

Cross-Device Remarketing and Reporting: While search is definitely trending towards mobile, the reality is that your customers search for your brand on both mobile and desktop. Cross-device remarketing lets you create remarketing campaigns that reach your customers across all of their logged-in devices, giving them a consistent and steady experience with your brand. Cross-device reporting will soon give marketers further insight into campaign performance and audience intent on mobile or desktop. This reporting capability will also provide insight into customers’ online and offline behaviors, so marketers will be able to learn which channels and campaigns are driving traffic through their doors. G5 is looking forward to testing this feature to track offline conversions for our clients.

Advanced Audiences: Google is adding dimension to audience targets so that advertisers can target customers based on life events, consumer behaviors and patterns, and affinity within segments.

Collectively, these latest innovations from Google demonstrate how they are leveraging machine learning to create highly targeted campaigns that reach customers at the right moment in their buying journey. Coupling AI with a strong digital strategy is key to building campaigns that drive the highest engagement — and ROI — for your brand.

Like Google, G5 knows the tremendous opportunity in leveraging machine learning to build stronger marketing campaigns. The G5 Intelligent Marketing Cloud uses machine learning to gain better insights into customer behaviors online, so marketers can adjust their ad spend based on audience engagement. Marketers can leverage AI to zero-in on the specific messages that surface their audience’s intent. As a result of this better insight, sales teams are able to prioritize inbound leads and spend their time developing those that have the highest potential.  

Being a Premier Google Partner means that G5 has exclusive insight into how to best optimize ROI for campaigns. Through this partnership, we continually adjust our tactics and strategies to align our clients’ campaigns with Google’s recommendations and best practices. In fact, G5 has spent the past several years focused on building stronger local campaigns; we were thrilled to see Google putting their focus there as well. With our singular focus on real estate, we have built and refined a digital ad strategy that results in higher qualified leads and continues to outperform the real estate marketing industry.

We know that the secret sauce for better marketing is pairing better lead information with the right strategies to build smarter campaigns. We love to see where Google is heading to get businesses to emphasize local to target and engage the right prospects.

Liz Motl is a Digital Advertising Analyst at G5. With over five years of diverse experience in marketing and communications, she loves both the creative and data-driven sides of advertising. In her free time, Liz enjoys spending as much time as she can outside.