Google Marketing Live

Another year, another edition of Google Marketing Live!

At this year’s event, they announced a collection of ways to improve campaigns, deliver better experiences and understand what is actually driving performance.

In this blog post, we take a look at all of these new features, what they are, and what they mean for you!

AI-powered Campaigns

The New Conversational Experience in Google Ads

You can now build better search campaigns with the new conversational experience in Google Ads. Ask Google Ads for ideas, to easily generate effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images and other assets, by analysing landing pages and Ads.

Google will be testing the new conversational experience in July and we expect it to be available broadly, later this year.

Search Generative Experience (SGE)

In the coming months Google will be rolling out the new Search Generative Experience (SGE).

Google will be experimenting with Search and Shopping Ads that directly integrate into the AI-Powered snapshot and conversational mode, as well as new formats that use generative AI. They hope this will create relevant, high quality Ads that are customised to every step of the search journey. (Eligible in the US)

Automatically Create Assets

Generative AI is coming to automatically create assets in Search and Performance Max campaigns.

They will use your landing pages to help you generate new headlines and descriptions that will better match your customers’ search queries. This will help improve your Ad relevance and keep assets fresh and on-brand.

Brand Restrictions

Google has introduced brand restrictions for broad match. This new feature will allow advertisers to use broad match and get that additional reach, whilst making sure you only match to relevant brand traffic that you specify.

You can access this feature when you enable the new broad match campaign level setting.

Smart Bidding Improvements

Advances in Google AI will allow the continued improvement of smart bidding, providing more accurate predictions, that will most likely deliver you conversions and value.

These advances will optimise more intelligently for search queries never seen before – helping to drive better performance, showing up in more valuable search moments, capturing new and never before seen opportunities.

Responsive Search Ads Top Search Categories

Responsive Ads have always used Google AI to help show more relevant Ads to your customers, but now you can review the top search categories for each of your Ads. This will provide a deeper transparency into what’s driving your Ads performance and allow you to optimise your Ads with new ideas. 

Business Information

Adding business information to your Ads (logos and names) is now available globally in all languages. Adding these assets can help your customers identify you at a glance and find what they need easily.

Advertisers adding their business information have seen more engagement with their Ads and on average an 8% increase in conversions.

Customer Connections (Performance Max)

Increase performance with new goals for new and existing customers

Google is enhancing the new customer acquisition goal in Performance Max so advertisers can optimise for new customers.

Having the option to either optimise the campaign to bid higher for new customers or exclusively bid for new customers only. Along with this, later in the year, Google will be releasing a new re-engagement goal that helps you connect with your most valuable, existing customers for increased retention.

Advertisers can also combine their first-part customer lists with Google AI for better performance at every step along the customer journey.

Performance Max Campaign Prefills

Sourced from your website, past campaigns and Google AI’s predictions, Performance Max campaign prefills will offer customised suggestions for assets and daily budgets as you create your campaigns.

These can be updated at any time based on what works best for you. Google will also be integrating recommendations into the setup flow of your campaigns later this year, giving you suggestions for what bid and target strategy to use. 

Performance Max Asset Creation with Generative AI

Powered by generative AI, Google is introducing asset creation flow in Performance Max campaigns.

Advertisers just need to provide a few details to help Google AI learn and you will be supplied with multiple options for text and images, easily added to your campaigns. The power is in your hands – you can revise, remove and direct Google AI to create more options based on your ideas.   

Ads Creative Studio

New tools available in Ads Creative Studio will allow creative teams to preview and export assets for Performance Max directly into Google Ads.

The new trend explorer will also help teams find the latest search trends to develop the latest new creative ideas for advertisers.

Explore Deeper Insights

• New experiment types within Performance Max will allow you to A/B test different configurations within a single campaign. For example enabling the final URL expansion feature so advertisers can see how it performs – this will be available later this year.
• Improved search term insights will help advertisers understand their customer intent and how they are searching for their business by including more search term categories. Apply custom date ranges, view historical insights and download them to dig even deeper. 
• Improved performance insights will be streamlined into one unified view showing several explanations and insights. 
• New asset insights will provide advertisers with more information on how their assets are performing with their audience and provide recommendations to use AI-generated assets to improve performance. 

Generative AI for Retailers

As previously mentioned, retailers using Performance Max can drive more online sales with the new customer acquisition goal, so advertisers can optimise for high lifetime value customers. Along with this Google will be launching a new re-engagement goal so advertisers can connect to the most valuable existing customers to help increase retention. 

Store sales reporting and bidding is now available in Performance Max, allowing advertisers to understand how many offline purchases occur (along with their modelled value) after customers interact with Ads. 

Shopping Campaign optimisation opportunities and profitability reports

New tools are being built to give advertisers better insights on what is driving sales within their shopping campaigns. You can now better understand the profitability of your products in your campaigns, looking at how they fluctuate over time based on budget and bid changes. You can view this new reporting feature in your Google Ads account today by implementing conversions with cart data.

You can now also identify product and category level optimisation opportunities in Google Ads at a glance. For instance, missing attributes or more granular policy restrictions and then quickly see recommendation actions for improvement.

Full-Funnel Video Solutions

Google is now offering AI-powered tools that will improve the effectiveness of your YouTube creatives. You can generate a variety of video Ads, such as horizontal, square or vertical, using existing assets from sources like your product feed or app listings with only a click of a button. 

You can also add local offers onto your products via YouTube in-stream Ads and show item availability and variable pricing based on locations of customers. These offers are shown alongside online offers, turning your product feed into a true full-funnel and omnichannel experience.

Enhanced YouTube Campaigns

During Google Marketing Live 2023, Google announced how YouTube Solutions were enhancing. With new ways to create assets, launch video campaigns and drive high-impact results.

Creative Assets with AI-powered Tools

Use voice-overs on your videos using the new Google AI text-to-speech technology. Create horizontal, square or vertical Ads using existing assets from historical campaigns, product feeds, app listings and more and make vertical video Ads from your horizontal videos, all using Google AI.

Google AI also improves the quality of your images on youTube by increasing image resolution using smart cropping to resize images.

YouTube Suitability Settings

Account-level suitability settings let you opt out of showing your Ads on or alongside certain websites, videos, channels and mobile apps that aren’t a good fit for your brand. Google Ads is now bringing out impact forecasting, which will give advertisers feedback and transparency into how these settings will impact their campaign performance. Allowing advertisers to make more informed decisions about their exclusions.

Improved Data Collection

Manage First-Party Data

Google is currently working on providing an easier way for advertisers to import their first-party data into their Google Ads account, in a privacy-centric way. Coming Soon advertisers will be able to easily and securely connect their data sources and translate data into insights in Google Ads. Improving accuracy, measurement and analysis.

Enhanced Conversions

Coming soon, Advertisers will be able to use enhanced conversions in Search Ads 360 and enable them easily in Google Ads. With new account-level controls, advertisers can quickly set up enhanced conversions across entire accounts. Along with easily activating first-party data by creating conversion-based audience lists using customer match. 

Google Analytics 4 Audiences

You will be able to build and add relevant Google Analytics 4 audiences in Google Ads, as you create and manage your campaign. Including using Google AI to predict audiences that will most likely convery. A feature exclusively to Google Analytics 4.

Fractional Data Driven Conversion Credits

Google has introduced Fractional credits with data driven attribution. Meaning if a customer clicks on a paid Ad but purchases through an organic listing partial credit for the ads will be imported into Google Ads from Google Analytics 4. This will improve the bidding performance of your campaigns as it will show the true value of each Ad / keyword etc.

Improving App Experiences

• Apply your product feeds to your App campaigns and turn them into a storefront. 

• Add promotion assets to your app campaigns to show your customer promotions when they are viewing your Ads.

• Add seasonality adjustments to your campaigns to manage user demand in peak season. Your App campaigns will optimise your bids based on conversion rate changes that you are anticipating, during seasonal events. 

Product feeds are available now, with promotion assets and seasonality adjustments due to be available in beta in a few months. 

Web to App Connect

Create an effective web-to-app experience for your customers with Web to App Connect. It provides its uses with clear, step-by-step guidance to implement conversion tracking, bidding and deep links. Helping advertisers optimise their web-to-app experience for their customers that already have your app.

New Display and Video 360 Features

Google has launched a new feature called optimised targeting for display and 360 video, which uses AI to help engage with new audiences that are more likely to convert. Optimised targeting looks beyond manually-selected audience segments in your campaign to find audiences that you may have missed.

It looks at keywords on your landing page and creative assets to find these audiences. Optimised targeting is automatically turned on for all campaigns, however this can be turned off in your ad groups settings. 

More Insights from Connected TV (CTV)

The new digital & TV report in Display & Video 360 will now allow advertisers to measure the reach and efficiency of their CTV campaigns alongside traditional TV buys. Cross-device measurement is also coming soon for CTV campaigns, so advertisers will have a clever view of what people are doing after seeing their Ads on a smart TV. Given a fuller picture of how connected TV campaigns can assist in your customer journey. The beta is available for US advertisers now and will be launching fully later this year.

Conclusion

With so many exciting new features, and lots still to come, this was a fantastic event! We’re looking forward to seeing how they progress, and how we can utilise them to help our clients get more customers online.

If you’d like to find out more about them, we post lots of free guides and tips on our LinkedIn, so give us a follow!

You can also find out more about our PPC services or get in touch with our team of experts, and we’ll help your business take full advantage of the diverse range of Google products available.