Google said it again, it will soon test ads within its AI Overviews. Philipp Schindler, senior vice president and chief business officer for Google, said this in the earnings call on Tuesday night. He said, “soon we’ll actually start testing search and shopping ads in AI Overviews for users in the U.S.”
Google Local Service Ads can now show the business’s phone number in the ad unit when you hover over your mouse cursor over the ad. It will then dynamically expand the ad to show the advertiser’s phone number.
Google has added new ad budget options and features to Local Service Ads. You can now set a maximum monthly ad spend limit for the month for some accounts.
Google has decided not to deprecate, do away with, third-party cookies in Chrome. This is something Google has been planning and testing for a while, delaying the efforts numerous times, and now ultimately deciding to scrap those efforts.
Google Ads has a new sitelinks interface, and functionality, for Performance Max campaigns. The new recommended sitelinks features are rolling out, plus there is a new numbered layout for the sitelinks.
Google has released version 2.7 of the Google Ads Editor. This new update brings a number of new features and also deprecates a number of features. New features include AI-generated assets, account level content label exclusions, account-level negative keywords and more.
Google Merchant Center Next now finally supports supplemental feed/source support. Google promised us this would come early this year, but it didn’t happen until early Q3 of 2024. That being said, feed rules still do not seem to be supported yet by Google Merchant Center Next and that was also promised by now.
Google Ads has changed what they call broad match to intent match in Japan. So now it is called ã’¤ã³ãã³ãããã (Intent Match), it was called é¨åä’è’ (Partial Match).
Google seems to be testing a query refinement ad option.
It is not news that Google now mixes in ads within organic results, but I have to say it still feels super icky to me that Google does this. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, confirmed that search ads can appear directly below organic featured snippets, as part of Google’s “ongoing evolution of dynamic ad placement on search.”