A lot of interesting changes at Google This Week with Google AdSense related search for content pages, Google’s My Business Business Calls API, Follow and Welcome Offer deprecation, Search Ads improvements to Ad Extensions, and more.
- Google Search Ads Improvements To Ad Extensions
- Google Ads Issue Results In Missing Conversions From Data-Driven Attribution
- Google Analytics 4 Integration With Display & Video 360
- Google AdSense Launches Related Search For Content Pages
- Google Display & Video 360 New CTV Management, TrueView For Shopping Deprecation
- YouTube’s Metadata For Educational Videos, Dedicated Shorts Shelf On Desktop
- Google’s My Business Business Calls API
- Google Ads Standard Shopping Campaigns Will Remain Available
- Follow and Welcome Offer Deprecation
Google Search Ads Improvements To Ad Extensions
Google Ads announced several new improvements including sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets from higher levels that can serve with extensions of the same type from lower levels.
Here’s what’s changing in Google Ads automated extensions:
- Starting in mid-March, automated extensions can be shown with manually created extensions. So if you have created two sitelinks manually, Google ads can show two dynamic sitelinks, for a total of four sitelinks.
- In the coming weeks, Google Ads will provide a report for “Automatically created” extensions. You can view these in the table view of the Extensions page.
The Google Ads Extensions page
- Also starting in mid-March, sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets from higher levels in your account can serve with extensions of the same type from lower levels. Here’s a before and after from Google Ads that illustrates what this change looks like:
Google Ads Issue Results In Missing Conversions From Data-Driven Attribution
Google Ads suffered from a reporting delay for a portion of conversions using data-driven attribution. Product liaison Ginny Marvin confirmed on Twitter that the issue has been resolved, bidding was not affected, and the company is working on recovering the attribution data.
Google Analytics 4 Integration With Display & Video 360
Google announced the integration of Display & Video 360 with Google Analytics 4. GA4 users will now be able to export audiences from GA to DV360 for targeting and export conversions from GA to DV360.
This integration is available for the first time in the free GA4 product, opening up the usage of this integration to a wider range of organizations. However, users of the enterprise GA4 product will enjoy an enhanced version of this integration, with dramatically higher limits on the number of audiences and conversions that can be exported.
Google AdSense Launches Related Search For Content Pages
Google announced the launch of “related search” for content pages, a new AdSense feature that displays search terms related to the content of the pages users are reading, designed to drive ad revenue while encouraging more engagement from visitors.
You can create related search units in your AdSense account, style them to match the look and feel of your site, and start using them with a simple code change.
To use the related search on your content pages, you need to complete the necessary contracting steps for AdSense for Search.
Google Display & Video 360 New CTV Management, TrueView For Shopping Deprecation
Google Display & Video 360 teases new connected TV frequency management solutions to control the number of times people see ads across YouTube and other CTV apps. Google will also remove the option to create a new TrueView for shopping line items and all Flash creatives will be permanently deleted.
YouTube’s Metadata For Educational Videos, Dedicated Shorts Shelf On Desktop
YouTube announced creators can now optimise educational videos with additional metadata that will be displayed in search results in the future.
YouTube also announced that channel pages on the desktop will now have a dedicated section for all the creator’s Shorts videos which has the potential to drive more views to Shorts content and brings channel pages on desktop to parity with the mobile experience.
Google’s My Business Business Calls API
Google released a new Google Business Profiles API awkwardly called “My Business Business Calls API” for obtaining call history data.
The new My Business Business Calls API lets you obtain call history data that you can currently see in your Google Business Profile manager under the “calls” section.
Service: mybusinessbusinesscalls.googleapis.com
To call this service, we recommend that you use the Google-provided client libraries. If your application needs to use your own libraries to call this service, use the following information when you make the My Business Business Calls API requests.
Discovery document
A Discovery Document is a machine-readable specification for describing and consuming REST APIs. It is used to build client libraries, IDE plugins, and other tools that interact with Google APIs. One service may provide multiple discovery documents. This service provides the following discovery document:
https://mybusinessbusinesscalls.googleapis.com/$discovery/rest?version=v1
Service endpoint
A service endpoint is a base URL that specifies the network address of an API service. One service might have multiple service endpoints. This service has the following service endpoint and all URIs below are relative to this service endpoint:
Google Ads Standard Shopping Campaigns Will Remain Available
Google Ads product liaison Ginny Marvin confirmed on Twitter that Standard Shopping campaigns will be supported for the foreseeable future.
Hi Mike, Can confirm, standard Shopping campaigns will be supported for the foreseeable future.
— AdsLiaison (@adsliaison) February 17, 2022
This will come as a relief to advertisers that still rely on Standard Shopping’s manual controls and capabilities, especially with Google Ads’ continued release of more automated products.
Follow and Welcome Offer Deprecation
Google announced in the local business forums that it will soon be deprecating the Follow and Welcome Offers features for local business listings. Google Community Manager Kara said, “soon, customers will no longer be able to follow businesses on Google Search or the Google Maps app”.
It is not clear when “soon” is exactly but the “Follow” feature launched in 2018, allowing searchers to follow businesses through Google Search and Google Maps.
Thank You for Reading
Have you noticed Google’s My Business Business Calls API or any other changes from Google this week?
Check back next Friday for the latest from Google This Week.
