Digital Advertising Update: Google Set to Remove AdWords Review Extensions

Here’s what’s new from 01/08/17- 01/12/17.

• Google has announced that Review extensions will stop showing this month and will be deleted entirely in AdWords accounts in February.
  
• They launched in 2013, but were never easy to get approved and as such, not widely implemented.
• The idea had been for businesses to be able to feature editorial quotes about their services in their ads, but that never really panned out.

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• People’s attention wanes the fastest in feeds like on Facebook or Twitter, since an ad is merely one piece of content among many – But feeds are likely to help forge deeper connections if an ad quickly communicates a message or grabs people’s attention, says Facebook, offering massive scale and reach.
• According to Facebook, most people are comfortable with pre-roll and mid-roll video ads they can’t skip, as long as the videos aren’t too long .
• A majority of people watch such ads until completion; more than 70% do so for Facebook’s own midroll ads.
• Facebook says that advertisers can take advantage of these high completion rates by getting to the point quickly: 6-seconds and 15-seconds are emerging as standards for video ads , says the company’s research.

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Even though it garners the most digital advertising dollars, the attention paid to search has faded as growth has matured and novel channels like social and video have emerged.
However, search is poised to experience a late-stage renaissance as several shifts in the digital media landscape push marketers toward search advertising.

• Privacy restrictions will nudge marketers toward search
• Brand safety concerns are making search look more attractive
• eCommerce’s emergence as an advertising channel will benefit search
• Voice is gaining popularity and is well-aligned with search

Of course, the impact of these developments on search advertising spending will be somewhat dulled by the fact that search is already a very large market; this makes it less susceptible to dramatic movement. In fact, we still expect search’s share of digital advertising spending to decline over the next five years. However, we believe that the above factors will make the slope of that decline a more gradual one.