We’re approaching the end of another year and it’s been one in which Google has made significant updates. Affiliates will no doubt be excited about Gmail’s AMP updates, while curious about changes to search terms.
And then, of course, changes have been made to Google Ads. Hooray for new audience segmentation capabilities.
Here are four of the most important 2019 Google updates for affiliates.
Email AMPs
On November 21st, Google begun rolling out accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) for Gmail on iOS and Android. This update shows that the internet giant believes that email will still be important in the future of marketing.
Affiliates will now be able to be more creative with their messages. Among other things, it’s now possible for you to both include real-time information and enable in-message purchases. Better interactivity, higher levels of personalisation and emails staying current for longer. There’s a lot to love.
We wrote about this in more detail here.
Broader term matches for Google Ads
Thanks to updates made this year, it’s now easier for you to source consumers from more search terms. Beforehand, you could only access paraphrases and the like through things such as typos and plurals.
But these days, things are more advanced. Through the phrase keyword match feature, for example, “iGaming affiliate program” can also match queries such as “best iGaming affiliate program” and more. And with broad match modifier keywords, you can get matched for searches that use your specified keyword in any order.
The above means that you’re not limited when users search for sites like yours, making you more efficient in traffic generation.
BERT
BERT stands for ‘Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers’. And it’s more than just something that you’d include in a school essay to fluff things out. This update utilises natural language processing, making results more accurate. For now, this feature is available in the US.
One could speculate that this is the digital company preparing for the growth of voice search. And for you, it means that you should start thinking about exactly what users would type AND say.
We talked more about this topic here.
Audience segmentation for Google Ads
Google has also made it easier to find the exact type of user you’re looking for, through multiple audience features in Ads. A useful one is that you can connect with in-market audiences to prepare for a seasonal event. This update has come at a great time for sports betting affiliates in particular, when you consider that the European Championships and Olympics both take place next summer.
Another major new tool for affiliates is the audience expansion feature. It works in a similar way to Twitter’s version – based on users you’re already targeting, you can broaden it to reach individuals with a similar persona. As with the keyword broadening tools, you can now capture more consumers than would have been the case before.
