Google has announced some new updates to Ads Manager that will better enable advertisers to take a broader view of their ad assets and campaigns, and may help to highlight new opportunities, based on new creative combinations, targeting tools, CTAs and more.

First off, Google’s now referring to ‘ad extensions’ – like sitelinks, callouts and additional images - as ‘ad assets’, which aligns the broader scope of Google’s new approach to your various add-on elements.

And with the shift to these being viewed as additional assets, Google’s looking to make it easier to manage them as well, by providing a broader overview of the assets that you can include within your campaigns.

As you can see here, sitelinks, for example, are now more natively integrated into the ad creation process, as opposed to extensions being added in a separate step.

As per Google:

“As you create assets and apply them to your campaign, the preview tool will automatically update so you can see them in the context of your ad. In addition, Google Ads will now recommend assets based on your chosen campaign goal. For example, if you’ve selected “Leads” as your campaign objective, we’ll automatically recommend that you add a lead form asset.”

So, essentially, Google will now provide more assistance in adding assets, as opposed to you having to manually gauge what’s best in each process.

Google’s also added a new ‘Ads & assets’ menu, where it will display stats for all of the assets across your account, providing more context on which elements to include.

“You’ll see headlines and descriptions in the “Asset” table view, while the “Association” table view will show assets like images and prices. As you review associations, you’ll be able to see how your creative assets perform at the account, campaign and ad group levels.”

There’s also a new ‘Combinations’ report, which will display sitelinks, callouts, and images alongside your headlines and descriptions, making it easier to review your ad approaches from a higher viewpoint.

In combination, the new reporting tools will provide much more oversight of your Google campaigns, and their related elements, which could help to uncover new opportunities and options to optimize your results.

Google says that unified reporting in the ‘Assets’ page will roll out over the coming weeks for all campaign types that previously supported ad extensions, while the updated combinations report will roll out ‘in the next few months’.