The New Google Ads Data Manager

Google today launched a new tool they say will help you organize your first-party data.

First-party data, of course, is becoming more important for marketers as the traditional third-party data foundation which the digital ad industry was built on starts to fall apart.

When consumers reject third-party cookies, or browsers do it for them, marketers have to collect that information themselves. This is party why there’s been an explosion of brand-specific apps and a resurgence in mailing lists. Sign up for either, and the brand doesn’t need to get that data from someone else — a third party — they got it direct from the consumer.

But as these new stacks of consented data pile up, getting them organized, categorized, and monetized is becoming a challenge.

Today, Google stepped in with what it believes is a solution: the Google Ads Data Manager.

To walk us through that, and what it means for marketers, our Google Ads correspondent Jyll Saskin Gales joins me. Jyll spent six years at Google and today runs the Inside Google Ads training program.

So Jyll, what is this thing?

Practically, it looks like it's kind of a combination of:

Some audience manager features, that's where you upload customer lists right now

Some conversion settings features, that's where you do things like upload offline conversions now

Some linked accounts settings, where you might link things like Google Analytics to Google Ads.

So bringing a bunch of things together that's going to help everyday marketers make better use of this first party data.

What is the Google Ads Data Manager?

Is this an actual separate site that happens to borrow from these other pools? Or is this more like Meta's version of Advantage+, where there is no actual “Advantage+ site,” it's just a branding that collects all of its generic, loose bits of AI.

This one actually isn't about AI. This is one of the few announcements that hasn't been about AI that Google Ads is making.

But Google Ads has been making a lot of updates to the interface and how Google Ads looks. And so from the screenshots we see in this announcement, we see a very different looking Google Ads interface where they brought a bunch of features together to one place.

So this sounds like not a brand new tool or somewhere else to go to. It's within Google Ads, it's within tools and settings, and it's just pulling all the different things that have to do with first party data tools and settings into one place together.

So most of it is just a reorganization, simplification, better to use interface.

The only thing that looks to be brand new is allowing you to connect more of your marketing tools to Google Ads. So for example, you'll soon be able to connect ActiveCampaign directly to Google Ads, which is great for conversion, tracking, and audience building. Right now if you want to do that you have to use a third-party tool.

More Direct Connection; Less Middleware

I do see that Zapier is actually one of the connected products. So it's not like they're eliminating the middleware providers like Zapier, it looks like they're building their own connections directly with some of these first party data pools like Active Campaign. Shopify is in here…. LiveRamp…

Shopify audiences, which is so overdue by the way. It's kind of crazy that today the only one that you can have a direct integration is with is Salesforce. What small business uses Salesforce to manage their data?

So I do think the simplification message is the key message they're pushing. Mostly just trying to make it easier to use, which, you know, if we know how the Google Ads product team works, doesn't need to necessarily be easier to use. But making these connections easier and make it easier for those who use these new integrated tools.

Pulling All Data Into a Single Pool

I guess benefit is that when you pull in all of these different audiences and lists, we then create a single Google ad audience out of that pooled data? Is that what the intention of this is?

Exactly. There's two main intentions here.

One is, as you mentioned, pulling in your own data so it makes it much easier to use a feature like customer match which lets you advertise to people who are on your customer list and use that for bidding purposes and audience bidding purposes. Right now if you want to do that you have to set up a Zap through Zapier or you have to manually upload a spreadsheet. So this direct integration will make that simpler from an audience perspective.

The other big use case is businesses use which is called offline conversion import, OCT. And that's what happens when the only conversion you can track through Google Ads is if someone fills out a form or books a demo and then you want to let Google Ads know was this a qualified lead or not, did it become a customer. Right now the way you do that is uploading a bunch of that data back into Google Ads, which understandably for most small businesses is just too complicated to do. So if you're now connecting your CRM like Active Campaign which may already have by connecting it directly to Google Ads, you won't have to manually do that anymore. It'll know not just who clicked to book the demo, but who actually later on became a customer, what the value was, integrating that all together. So it's useful for conversion tracking and audience building purposes.

Running Demographic Reports on All Your First-Party Data

I wonder if down the line they'll ever give us the ability to run reports on the demographic components. You know, if you've got some in HubSpot, some from pulling from sources that Zapier's grabbing, some from Shopify audiences, you've got all of these silos of data, each of which may have their own demographic, you’ll be able to combine them and then pull a demographic report.

You can already do that!

Oh! Tell me how.

I don't know if they'll migrate this into this new tool or not, but if you have a customer list or a converters list that you've uploaded into Google Ads or connected to Google Ads, in Audience Manager, you go to Audience Insights on the left-hand side, and it will tell you what insights Google has about the people on your list. So male, female, location, etc.

But then it goes beyond that, and it'll tell you which Google audiences members of your list belong to.

For example, are there a lot of them who are in-market for certain products or in certain affinity groups? And you can also benchmark it against the US or Canada or whatever country you're in. So you can say, for example, people who are on my email subscriber list are three times more likely than the average Canadian to be in market for SEO and SEM services. For example, it will tell you that and that's functionality that's live in Google Ads today.

And that's based on a customer list that you could create one massive customer list out of all of the pooled first party data that this new tool is promising to collect. Is that right? Like you import all of your different things, you create one big sort of custom audience, and then you can run that analytics from there. Is that what you're talking about? Or are we still stuck to doing it by each silo?

You can have one big customer list, you can segment it in different ways.

The list just has to be big enough. The smallest size today for a customer match list has to be a thousand matched email addresses or phone numbers, which usually means you have to upload a list of at least 1,100 to 1,200 people.

Right now, you would do that manually. It remains to be seen if Google Ads Data Manager will make that process more simple. Or if in HubSpot or ActiveCampaign or whatever you use, you already have all these segmentations, that should then make it easier to use those same segmentations when analyzing your data in Google Ads.

When It’s Coming

And like many things that Google has, don't go looking for it quite yet in your ads manager, is that right?

That's right, they say this is just starting to roll out, which usually means it's rolling out to the largest accounts first, and it will be fully available in 2024, which I guess is only three months away. So next three to six months, you should start to see Google Ads Data Manager rolling out in your Google Ads account.

Jyll Saskin Gales is our Google Ads correspondent. She has a fantastic Google Ads training program, which you can find at our affiliate link at b.link/gatraining 

In Brief

Amazon has reopened enrolment for its Seller Fulfilled Prime program. This is the program where merchants handle delivery, but promise to get products to the customer within the two-day promised timeframe sold by the Prime program. Originally, they’d planned to charge a 2% fee on sales through the program, but backed off. We reported on this a couple of months ago that enrollment was coming back soon; now, it’s back.

A new California bill was signed into law yesterday. It will give residents of that American state the legal right to make a single request asking that data brokers delete their personal information. Californians already had this right, but have to make multiple requests, and it’s hard to know which broker has what data… this aims to make it more consumer-friendly. It doesn’t go into effect until 2026.

SERoundtable.com is reporting today that Google appears to be editing the attributes of businesses which have Google Business Profiles. Things like changing “Cash-Only” to “No” if any alternative payment option has been set to “yes”. And removing the COVID testing center attribute entirely if it is set to “no”. The edits do make logical sense, but it might be worth checking your brand’s profile to make sure you’re aware of any changes they may have done.

A Note About the Next Week

As you might know, this newsletter and its sister podcast is a kind of side project of our agency, engageQ. We do engagement and moderation for brands.

We signed a big client last week, and I’m off to the U.S. for our Brand Briefing, our team meet their team kind of stuff.

I’m really excited by this client, and I’m hoping I can get permission to talk about them, but we’ll see.

Normally, in my absence, our associate producer Steph Gunn fills in writing the newsletter, but Steph is on mat leave and the rest of the team here is getting all the new client onboarding worked out.

So, our next regular issues will be in a week’s time — next Wednesday.

However, that doesn’t mean we’re leaving you without content!

We have lined up four deep-dive interviews with marketing scientists and industry experts.

Tomorrow: The surprising effect that privacy notices have on your brand’s reputation

Friday: New research showing that pushing ad frequency to uncomfortable levels can actually help your ad campaigns

Monday: Marketing by DNA — will “Genetic Predisposition” be a targeting criteria in Meta’s ad manager soon?

Tuesday: How one little tweak to your product page can drive way more sales — the ins and outs of conversion rate optimization.

To get these four, just subscribe free to our podcast at TodayInDigital.com/subscribe as they’ll be in audio-only form.

Some links in this newsletter may provide affiliate revenue to us.

This newsletter is powered by Beehiiv.