The AdWords 2017 roadmap

At Google Marketing Next, we got a glimpse at the road map of upcoming features and changes to AdWords in 2017. The keynote was light on details as the audience was mostly executives from the big ad agencies. One thing that stood out was how much machine learning and AI are changing even the online advertising landscape. Here are some of the highlights of the road map:

In-market audience

Advertisers often wish for the ability to target beyond just the keyword. They want to be able to distinguish between someone doing research for a paper and a prospective buyer. There are no details on how this works, but AdWords will soon offer in-market audience targeting. Internal tests show a minimum 10% improvement in conversions. This will be a big boost for advertisers, although the additional demand will drive per-click rates higher.

Custom audiences

For the US there are 493 in-market audiences for the network, which makes it hard to narrow down the audience that is right for product and vertical. The good news is that Google will soon roll out custom in-market audiences, allowing you to add a series of keywords that someone would use for that audience.

Life event targeting

Using machine learning, Google will be able to predict when someone is going through a life event like graduation or going to college. With its new Tensorflow processing units, along with the behavior online that corresponds to that event, the accuracy of predicting a life event will increase greatly. AdWords users can now target their in-market audience by life event.