Google Announces Major Rebranding and Restructuring of AdWords and DoubleClick

For 11 years Google has offered two competing advertising products with distinctive branding, AdWords and DoubleClick. Today it announced it is unifying under a new "Google Ads" brand, while also announcing new features to help small businesses in their marketing efforts.

Ever since Google purchased DoubleClick 11 years ago, it has operated two distinct advertising brands, DoubleClick and AdWords, which Google had already been running. At the time, the rationale was that AdWords and DoubleClick served different niches in advertising and both had strong brands. While AdWords was focused primarily on text-based ads, DoubleClick was focused on graphical ad banners.

Since the acquisition, this distinction grew fuzzier as AdWords started accepting other forms of ads. Google kept the two brands separate, each with its own tools and platform, but the overlap between them was increasingly confusing. Both platforms had advertising management tools and analytics, and advertisers needed to use all of them in order to get a complete picture of their advertising efforts.

Today Google announced a massive restructuring and rebranding of their Advertising and Advertising Analytics platforms. Both the AdWords and DoubleClick brands will be retired in favor of a new brand named simply Google Ads. In an interview with Search Engine Land, Google’s head of ads and commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy said that the name change is meant to resolve a “slight cognitive dissonance” where advertisers would hear “AdWords” and only think of those text-based ads the platform was originally created. “Google Ads, in our opinion, is a much more straightforward representation of what Google advertising can provide,” Ramaswamy said of the new name.

In addition to the introduction of the Google Ads brand, DoubleClick’s advertiser products and the Analytics 360 suite are being merged into the Google Marketing Platform, and the various advertising management tools for both AdWords and DoubleClick are being unified into a new single platform named Google Ad Manager.

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