Google Ads Data Hub testing audience lists for display campaigns, adding new features

Google’s Ads Data Hub, the analytics and measurement platform for Google campaign data, announced upcoming enhancements Thursday. It also confirmed it is beta testing audience activation for display campaigns.

The company said it has been updating the infrastructure that underpins Ads Data Hub (ADH) to be able to scale it to more customers and simplify querying.

Closer to real-time analysis. Google said it has reduced latency from 24-48 hours down to 6 hours for display and YouTube ads data from Google Ads and for YouTube ads bought through Display & Video 360. That means you’ll be able to run near same-day queries in some cases.

Self-service account linking. Users will soon be able to link their Google Ads, Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 accounts to ADH on their own. You’ll be able to create multi-tier account structures as well. This capability will be available in the coming weeks.

Sandbox analysis. The Sandbox testing environment is available to all customers. It has a data set available for testing query writing and get a better sense of what you can do with your own data.

Query templates. There are 20+ templates for common types of analysis run in ADH. The All events template, for example, Google says can be used to get impressions, clicks, conversions and Active View (Google’s viewability metric) results for an account. Users can submit new template ideas through the feedback form in the platform.

Testing audience activation. Google confirmed it is testing the ability to build audience lists based on clicks or conversions from Google Ads, Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360, first reported by AdExchanger. Those audiences could then be activated for display campaigns in Google Ads and Display & Video 360. It does not cover audiences on Google Search, YouTube, or other Google O&O inventory.

According to Google, the lists can be used to reach or exclude audiences. For audience activation—and as always—there’s an aggregation requirement of at least 50 users for output of any data from Ads Data Hub.

“For example, you could create an audience list in Ads Data Hub of users that have already purchased your product, then use that as an exclusion list to ensure you don’t continue to show them your ads served via Google Ads and Display & Video 360,” the company said.

A small number of enterprise brands and large agencies are currently in the beta.

Why we care. The audience activation beta hints at an evolution beyond measurement and analysis for Ads Data Hub. Note that the audiences cannot be deployed on Google Search, YouTube or other O&O properties.

The other updates should make the service easier to use and potentially increase adoption. Google said more than 200 brands, agencies and measurement partners are currently using the service and that queries increased by 145% in 2019 over 2018.

Ads Data Hub launched in 2017 for cross-device measurement for campaigns running through Google’s ad platforms. Marketers can also connect their CRM, DMP as well as third-party measurement providers to layer on their first-party and audience verification data for analysis. However, advertisers cannot extract any of that impression-level audience data from the system.

This story first appeared on Search Engine Land.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was formerly Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.