Google has announced they are rebranding their 17+ year old brand money maker, AdWords, to simply Google Ads. Google launched AdWords back on October 23, 2000, almost 18 years ago, and was the driving force behind Google's profits and power. Now, Google wants to change the name from AdWords to Google Ads to simplify things.
Google said "we are simplifying our products for advertisers and publishers of all sizes so they can more easily reach consumers anywhere, at any moment and on any channel."
- AdWords is now Google Ads
- DoubleClick advertiser products and Google Analytics 360 Suite are now Google Marketing Platform
- DoubleClick publisher products and DoubleClick Ad Exchange is now Google Ad Manager
I see no mention of Google AdSense, but I suspect that might fall under Google Ad Manager?
Starting July 24, 2018, you will begin to see the new Google Ads brand, including the new name and logo, reflected in the product interface, help center, billing documents, and other locations. The URL you use to access your account will be changing from adwords.google.com to ads.google.com, and the help center will change from support.google.com/adwords to support.google.com/google-ads.
I hope they do their site migration correctly. :)
In any event, I'd say I saw this coming in the Google+ era when Google named their AdWords channel Google Ads, the URL is still https://plus.google.com/u/0/+GoogleAds and this was a long time ago.
Anyway, I suspect this is not a huge deal, it is just a brand change - nothing else is changing much with this. But 18 years of branding for AdWords is now gone, 22 years for DoubleClick - gone.
There is a lot more coverage of this on Techmeme if you want to read other perspectives.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
