The Advertising Week has begun full swing with many platforms using the forum to announce changes and additions to their product offering.
Google’s Waze, a navigation app that also powered the official app for the event, introduced its first native ad product named Favorite Brands. Marketers can now invite Waze users to tap an ad to ‘favorite’ a brand to make their favourite stores and restaurants more accessible in Waze’s mobile map. Waze officials informed that this change will also surface customisable brand messages in some on-the-road features such as planned drives, calendar sync and speed limit. Dunkin’ Donuts is the first brand to sign on for this ad product, which will be in beta testing for the remainder of the year.
Waze has 65 million monthly drivers worldwide, which presents a sizable audience for brands with physical stores to make a play for. By integrating brand messaging into its app, Waze manages to deliver location-based native ads in the form of utility with minimal disruption to its user experience. Brands that are looking to drive store traffic and engage their customers to build long-term relationships should consider giving this native ad product a try.
Google also added four changes to its ad products.
The first of these is cross-device retargeting, where Google updated its Google Display Network and DoubleClick Bid Manager to help brands retarget Google users across devices based on their Google profiles. Mobile ads get more local as mobile ads on Google Display Network can now include a business address and pull directions and photos from Google Maps. Home Depot tested the feature and reported an eight-time improvement on its ROI compared to its regular mobile ads.
Also, Google updated the offline measurement tools in its Google Display Network to bring more data to the table. The search giant says its measurement tools will also employ a five-million-user panel to gauge whether the display ads drive retail purchases with 99 per cent accuracy.
The platform is also doing TV and YouTube ads comparison. With an upgraded version of its Brand Lift measurement product, Google is enabling marketers to compare the frequency of Google searches that viewers carry out after seeing a YouTube ad versus a TV ad.
All together, these additions aim to make Google’s ad products more accountable and local. For brands looking to reach a mobile audience via search ads, these new updates should come as welcome news that can further improve their digital campaigns. Retailers in particular should learn to adopt these features to enable in-store attribution tracking and cross-device retargeting for more effective campaigns.
