Google Ads API v10.0 (2022)
Today’s Technology
Digital marketing is constantly evolving, improving, and more than ever, leveraging machine learning to develop powerful AI. This is especially true today in the automotive space. Today dealerships can automate and optimize more areas of their job than ever before.
Today, true automotive digital marketing is all about obtaining, organizing, analyzing, and orchestrating lead, customer, and vehicle data. At Fullpath, it is our belief most of this work can and should be done via automation. We have always maintained that humans are best suited for strategy, creative thinking, and analytical problem solving. Repetitive tasks, data input, data analysis, configurations, list building - these don’t leverage the true power of marketers, rather they sap the finite energy and time of those same people.
Market Context
For years now, technology giants like Google, Apple, Facebook and others have put into place the integrations, features, and practices to help marketers take advantage of the technological leaps that define the direction of digital marketing today: big data, savvy automation, omni-channel marketing, predictive intelligence and optimization.
Marketers are less and less able to get into the nitty gritty of each ad, email, or campaign to manually setup and continually optimize. It’s just no longer feasible for humans to do this at scale and with any modicum of success compared to those who leverage advanced technology. And that’s exactly why most of the marketing technology today is built around scale and automation; it’s far more efficient and more than that, the technology is more flexible than the humans.
And flexibility is needed in order to accommodate the ever-changing technological landscape. To give you an idea of why flexibility, scale, and automation are so important to digital marketing generally, but to automotive specifically - consider the following: Google, accounted for an estimated 28.6 percent of the total digital advertising revenue generated in the United States and was the largest digital ad publisher in the country in 2021. Facebook and Amazon followed, with 23.8 and 11.3 percent, respectively.
Although not the first big tech company to implement such changes, when Apple came out with a new operating system last year (which was already delayed because of industry pushback), it turned the industry on its head! Building in tighter consumer privacy settings and requiring shoppers to opt-into advertising tracking meant that the entire industry had to not only prepare for massive data discrepancies, but it also meant new tools and technology were necessary to track, segment, and advertise to car shoppers.
With such a large share in the digital advertising space, Google too is making huge changes in their infrastructure in order to set the stage for the next generation of advertising. There’s not much of a choice involved when such titanic platforms decide to pivot and release updates, enhancements, or wholly new ways of targeting advertisements. And if your dealership isn’t already set to adapt quickly, across all channels and platforms, the humans who must accommodate these changes will undoubtedly be overwhelmed.
Latest Version of the Google Ads API
It is against this backdrop that Google is releasing their newest version of the Ads Application Programming Interface (API) and will soon release even more versions (and deprecate older versions) to upgrade and ramp up the rhythm of development moving forward. The Google Ads API is the modern programmatic interface to Google Ads and the next generation of the AdWords API. The future Ads API is already set to be released in the coming months as Google is constantly evolving their technology platform and capabilities.
This API, and many of the upgrades we’ve seen Google and others push in the recent years, facilitate more automation for larger scale marketing operations. It enables the Fullpath CDXP to interact directly with the Google Ads platform, vastly increasing the efficiency of managing large or complex Google Ads accounts and campaigns. Some typical use cases include:
- Automated account management
- Custom reporting
- Ad management based on inventory
- Manage Smart Bidding strategies
Fullpath
The latest Ads API version presents some exciting opportunities for Fullpath as we mirror these big improvements within our own technology infrastructure. These changes enable us to lay the groundwork for incorporating into our platform:
- Google Vehicle Ads (formerly known as Vehicle Listing Ads)
- Google Performance Max
- Google Discovery + Lead Gen
You can learn more about the new Google API here. Stay tuned as we roll out the above ad and campaign types and increase our platform capabilities over the coming months, leveraging these Google improvements across the Fullpath CDXP core decision, optimization, and omni-channel delivery engine for our Dealer customers.
You can be sure that this Google update, and all others, are constantly incorporated into our platform as we maintain updated SDKs, enhance integrations, update relevant APIs and generally work to ensure that as a Google Marketing Partner, our platform leverages any tools and technologies which enhance the speed, scale, and specificity of your Dealership advertising.