AdWords recently announced the most significant changes to the system since Enhanced Campaigns, and NO, despite what you heard, it had nothing to do with removing keyword data.

To set the stage, VP’s from AdWords promised the new ideas would present advertisers with innovative ads, insightful reporting and intelligent tools. Google announced these three things:

1) App Ads and App Deep Linking

AdWords is moving beyond simple app ad extensions and will launch new ad types to tie several platforms together right in the standard interface. The ad types are meant to push heavy app downloads — according to Google, everyone and their mom has an app — and then increase actual engagement with those apps. They’re doing this because the stat they shard of 80% of all apps are only used once and that the market is ripe for crazy amounts of new revenue. My first thought is, “well, that’s only from apps in Google Play!”

The new ad types also allow what they are calling App Deep Linking, which is supposed to drive high conversions with great users experiences. Basically, instead of the standard app experience of being brought to the app’s home/main page, the experience will take you to the page where you would expect to be taken. In other words, they are introducing real destination urls to apps. Read more about it here.

To me, Google really disappointed general advertisers by announcing this because it’s such a niche idea. I have clients that want to promote apps, but most are iOS focused and this idea is being fought by Apple’s platform being pushed to all advertisers.

2) “Better” Measurement & Offline Conversions

Continuing the conversation around Estimated Total Conversions and Universal Analytics data, AdWords said advertisers will soon see the full picture of their ad’s impact, including phone calls, conversions across multiple devices, and in-person conversions/sales. Even though they cited a case study with Express showing a 102% increase for in-store sales, they didn’t go into detail on HOW this is accomplished. Sure, we can see correlation — we could already do that! — but we still cannot point 1-to-1 for AdWords ads pushing in-store sales (some exceptions obviously apply).

3) New Interface Tools

This is by far the biggest segment of the announcement, the most exciting and it has the most potential to line their pockets with our cash. Within this section, they announced several new ideas:

• Bulk Actions: this is essentially pulling the AdWords Editor right into the interface, allowing changes like adjusting campaign settings for location, ad rotation, etc across campaigns.

• Automated Bidding: queue part one of the scheme to remove third party tools, AdWords is now giving advertisers more advanced rules & algorithms to automate bidding. Some of us PPC’ers are very skeptical about whether this will actually benefit our clients or just give Google a larger pool of money to dive into throughout the day. Sure, set a ROAS or CPA rule and then go on autopilot… we’ll see.”

• Advanced Reporting: part 2 of their scheme to remove third parties is advanced reporting. Outside of bid management, advertisers pay 2-5% of their ad spend to vendors for fancy, visual reports. AdWords demoed a new in-interface tool allowing regular advertisers to dynamically create reports in a drag-and-drop style with live data. For small agencies and clients, this is going to be a huge benefit that AdWords can boast. One participant of #PPCchat posted a video about what many of us were thinking, “Meanwhile at Kenshoo and Marin… http://t.co/G8zYrAmFw1.” The tools of course promise nothing but great results, but we’ll see if their many smaller client stick around or not.

• Drafts & Experiments: this could be fun. There will now be a Demo/Lab mode you can turn on and test a series, or mass, of changes to your account, see the predicted results and THEN decide whether or not to push the changes live. Doesn’t this already exist? Yes. Kind of. Sorta, but not exactly. This is essentially a better experience of AdWords Campaign Experiments and something third parties have been using for a while now.

While some of the changes may or may not groundbreaking, One thing is for certain, they will get a lot of people excited. Google ended the show of announcements abruptly and did not announce dates for when all of these new idea will actually be available.