Discover these five lesser-known Google Ads tools

Google processes billions of searches every second, with a significant portion of search results pages featuring Google ads. Funded by businesses, Google Ads proves to be a powerful tool for attracting pertinent, well-qualified website traffic precisely when individuals are actively seeking the products or services that your company provides.

Google Ads has been around for 23 years(!), and yet there’s still so much to discover about the platform, discover our “top five” lesser-known Google Ads tools:

1. Dynamic product remarketing

The initial and often overlooked Google Ads feature involves exploring “dynamic parameters.” Dynamic product marketing is only made possible by making sure you are passing through the right parameters via the Google Tag. It is incorrectly assumed that dynamic product remarketing within Performance Max is automatic. But this is only true if your pixel is set up properly.

It is a wasted opportunity if you are not dynamically remarketing to your potential customers, especially when a customer visits a potential product(s) and does not purchase.

How to access this in Google Ads

1. Click on Tools and settings > Audience manager > Your data sources > Details.
2. Review the ‘id’ parameter – if you don’t have one, you can work with a developer to ensure it passes through. It has to match Google Merchant Center.

2. Seasonality adjustments

In the era of smart bidding, many marketers place complete trust in algorithms to handle their tasks. Nevertheless, computers often lack the ability to predict or comprehend external variables in numerous situations.

If you’re employing smart bidding, it’s essential to acquaint yourself with the next hidden feature: seasonality adjustment. This relatively obscure tool within Google Ads enables you to provide advance notice to the smart bidding algorithm regarding upcoming changes.

This becomes exceptionally valuable when you have concrete knowledge that conversion rates will experience significant fluctuations. By entering these specific dates and the anticipated variance in conversion rates, smart bidding incorporates this information into its decision-making process.

How to access this in Google Ads

1. Click on Tools and settings > Bid strategies > Advanced controls.
2. Navigate to Seasonality adjustments, then click on New seasonality adjustment. Remember to click save!

3. Data exclusion

Data exclusion lets you exclude specific dates across an account, campaign, or campaign type. As Google states:

“Data exclusions are meant to account for outages or major issues related to conversion tracking. Using them often or for long periods could negatively impact Smart Bidding performance.”

This is extremely useful if you experience a conversion drop or the pixel is over-reporting. Being able to identify an issue that you can remove from the algorithm can save you a lot of potentially wasteful spend if you encounter a tracking issue.

How to access this in Google Ads

1. Click on Tools and settings > Bid strategies > Advanced controls.
2. Navigate to Data exclusions, then click on New data exclusion.

4. Account-level automated extensions

Account-level automated extensions will automatically be generated based on your website, ranging from site links and callouts to longer headlines.

The benefits of these include helping people learn more about your products and services through providing previews of special offers to help you get more clicks on your ad. It may also help improve ROI as the additional website information that appears with your ads can increase their relevance and click through rate (CTR). Lastly, it can save you time, and therefore, money!

How to access this in Google Ads

1. Click Ads & assets > Assets > More options > Account-level automated assets > More > Advanced settings.

5. Your data insights

The hidden gem here is known as “Your data insights,” a feature that leverages your pixel data to provide valuable insights into your customer base. When you explore this tool, there are two primary areas worth delving into:

• In-market audiences with high indexing: This reveals the in-market segments where your business is performing exceptionally well.
• Affinity segments with high indexing: This highlights the affinity groups where your performance is notably strong.

These insights are invaluable for refining customer profiles and personas, and they can be strategically applied in your targeting efforts. Moreover, you can incorporate these segments into certain campaigns for more precise bidding strategies.

Additionally, this information can be a game-changer when it comes to adjusting your ad copy and creative elements. Discovering unexpected interests or affinities can be both enlightening and enjoyable, and it can open up new possibilities for your advertising strategy. Dive in, and you’ll see the exciting potential it holds.

1. Click on Tools and settings > Audience Manager > Your data insights.