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Google is adding more automation to its tools for marketers

And YouTube is getting more local ads options.

TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 - Day 2
TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 - Day 2
Senior Vice President of Advertising and Commerce at Google Sridhar Ramaswamy
Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch

Google is putting out a new free marketing tool to help businesses and marketers process more data more easily, with the help of automation.

Called Google Attribution, the tool can help companies better target groups of consumers with content that appeals to them.

Instead of a marketer having to look separately at data from Google Analytics and advertising tools AdWords and DoubleClick, they can use Google Attribution to look at data from those tools together.

Analysis of that data is also automated, the goal being to show users more useful insights into why ads and marketing efforts are effective or not.

Currently in a testing phase, the tool is starting to be rolled out as part of the annual Google Marketing Next conference in San Francisco, where Google announces new products and improvements for advertisers and marketers. Google’s revenue comes overwhelmingly from advertising.

A major theme at the conference will be machine learning, so expect to hear more out of the conference about Google’s plans to continue automating advertising and marketing tools.

Google has also announced that it is adding new local ads options to YouTube. Now when users of the video platform search topics related to items that may be sold locally, ads with information about a local seller such as address, distance from the user and phone number may pop up. These ads are already in Google Search.

The addition is notable because YouTube is a fast-growing source of ads revenue for Google, and local ads are valuable to Google’s most prevalent category of advertisers.

Digital advertising platforms like Google rely more on small businesses than big brands for revenue. Small- to mid-size companies — a category of advertiser that especially benefits from local search ads — are responsible for 70 percent of digital ad spending, according to GroupM data cited by MoffettNathanson Research.


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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