Yucca

Google call in at Yucca HQ

In a recent shake-up of the way they support agencies, Google shifted much of their UK Adwords team from Dublin to London. For the search team here at Yucca, this new proximity is something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it should mean that we’ll get a greater level of support from Google with quarterly account reviews and a wider range of courses and seminars on offer. On the other hand, it pretty much rules out the opportunity for a return to the Dublin offices and a spot of Guinness sampling.

Still, focusing on the positives, we were pleased to say hello to Fintan, our new Industry Manager, as he stopped off at the Yucca offices to take us through some of Google’s Q1 product launches and innovations. (That's him in the blue jacket.)

In previous presentations of this kind, Google has focused very much on the growth of the display network. While this is still something they want to develop further, the “big story” of Fintan’s presentation was the growth of Mobile and how Adwords can change to better cater for (and monetise) this new market. The importance of Mobile to Google is well illustrated by the fact that mobile searches on Google constitute a larger part of the entire search market than all searches on Yahoo! and Bing combined.

There were also a healthy number of Adwords innovations to talk through. Notable introductions include:

Similar Users beta release for Adwords remarketing campaigns, allowing advertisers to top-up their remarketing lists with people who have visited similar sites to theirs.

Automated Rules, which brings a touch of basic rule-based bid management straight to the Adwords interface for the first time.

New ad formats and extensions such as Offer Ads, Extended Headlines and Local Ads.

Either way, it’s always good to get the inside track on what’s going on at Google, although I rather suspected that Richie was keener to discuss surfing injuries (of which, Fintan was sporting a fine example) than the minutiae of attribution modelling.