• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 13, 2018

Google announced several additions to AdWords on Tuesday. The first -- focused on YouTube to improve direct-response advertising -- is called Custom Intent Audiences, and allows marketers to target people on YouTube who recently searched for products and services on google.com.

YouTube now allows brands to target ads to consumers based on anonymized information that Google collects on people across its network of sites. The video service has now added search-based targeting to its Google Preferred ad-buying program.

Marketers at Delta Air Lines, for example, could reach people on YouTube who recently searched Google.com for "flights to Florida" by creating a keyword list for the video campaign in the new AdWords experience. This is one of several features announced by Google to drive demand through search and video.

Along with Custom Intent Audiences, Google has rolled out TrueView for Action Ads, which allows advertisers to customize calls to action that appear along with their video ads on YouTube and are automatically set with Target CPA bidding. The ads can be skipped after five seconds, similar to TrueView in-stream ads.

Google Notes and a new Recommendations page have also been added. Notes helps to capture important events or details about the accounts in the performance graphs of the campaign, so anyone with access to the account can see the notations. Marketers, for example, can leave a note to explain a recent spike in clicks for a specific promotion.

The AdWords Note feature seems similar in theory to Google Keep, which allows people to add notes, lists, photos and audio to files. The feature was launched in March 2013 as a note-taking service for the web, but also provides support for mobile apps running on Android and iOS operating systems.

Google has also rebuilt and renamed the Opportunities page to help marketers focus on the most actionable fixes for the account.

On the Recommendations page, marketers will now see 16 new types of recommendations, including suggestions to set the optimal bidding strategy, add audiences, or create better ads.

In the near future, marketers will see account performance scores to help prioritize improvements to optimize efficiently for better performance.