During the annual Google I/O 2022 event, among many other news, the company announced that later this year, it will launch the “My Ad Center” platform, an advertising “hub” that will give users greater power over the ads they want to receive. According to the company, the tool will replace the current functionalities of Ad Settings and About this Ad.
This news reinforces and is perfectly aligned with the market’s growing commitment to data privacy.
In this article, you will learn about the main changes that will take place with this new product and how brands can prepare for this new reality.
And if you want to remain up to date on the main marketing news and trends, I strongly recommend that you subscribe to The Beat, Rock Content‘s interactive newsletter!
So, what’s going to change for users?
In a very intuitive way, My Ad Center will allow any user to choose which topics and companies they want (or don`t want) to see ads for while using Youtube, the Search Network and Discovery.
Themes and brands will be presented as shown in the image below:
By clicking on the +/- buttons, users will inform Google that they want to receive more or less advertisements about a certain topic or from a certain company.
In addition, as you can see in the image below, the user will also be able to block certain themes that they consider sensitive:
Another interesting option is the “Privacy” tab in My Ad Center. There, you can edit your demographics (age, gender, education, etc.) however you like. This will give the user the power to receive ads according to the targeting they want.
In addition, when using the search engine or browsing through Google’s partner sites, you will have the option to favorite, block and filter themes, and also find out who is sponsoring that link in Google Ads:
What’s going to change for brands and advertisers?
If well accepted by users, the My Ad Center solution will help to further evolve the quality of information and data intelligence on the Google platform.
At the same time, the user experience can be constantly improved, since this information will serve as a basis for personalizing and filtering the subjects that he is really interested in.
As Google is the largest search engine in the world, providing a good user experience is not an optional strategy for the company, on the contrary, it will always be a priority in its changes.
Thus, with the launch of this center, advertisers will need to be increasingly concerned with the relevance of their ads.
Promoting a good user experience and performing good segmentations in your campaigns will be crucial factors in achieving success with this traffic acquisition channel.
In addition, the user will have the option to see “who paid for this ad”, an unprecedented possibility that further reinforces the importance of branding for companies.
How can brands be prepared for that?
This change strengthens the idea that brands must strive to be more and more relevant – if your business doesn’t have a solid relationship with your audience, they just won’t put your brand in their ad preferences.
This will make it difficult for your ads to “just show up” to the audience, as the audience will have the power to decide whether they want to see you or not.
And this is a very important point when we talk about marketing strategies.
I’ve heard in a lot of places, professionals saying that paid traffic is better than organic traffic, and that’s really worrying.
A marketing strategy should not only be based on generating traffic, whether through paid media or not. Marketing is about relationships, positioning and authority, at which point content is an essential pillar.
A good content strategy has the power to build relevance and build communities and legions of fans for your brand.
Therefore, ads will not only be a channel for customer acquisition, but also for a relationship with your audience.
Therefore, don’t see ads just as a way to “push” your offers to the prospect, but rather as a channel of attraction and relationship with advertisements that are really relevant and with the power to really capture the user’s attraction.
In addition, the possibility for users to choose which topics they find interesting can be seen as an opportunity to increasingly improve the targeting of their ads and target people who really want to receive offers related to the subjects that, for them, are most relevant. .
We cannot yet say what the real impacts will be for advertisers and users, however, my recommendation is that you update yourself on the trends and revolutions that the theme “privacy” will still generate in the digital universe and prepare yourself more and more for it.
Conclusion
To reinforce its concern about issues related to data privacy, Google will take a very bold, important step to improve the experience of its users on the internet.
In this context, brands need to move in the same direction to offer increasingly better experiences for their audience, improve their online positioning and attract people who really want to consume content and promotions offered by companies.
As I said before, we cannot yet say what the real impact of My Ad Center will be for companies, but it is of paramount importance that brands start to take issues related to internet privacy more and more seriously and reinvent their digital marketing strategies.
