Last week Google hosted its annual event, Google Marketing Live (#GML2022), attended by marketeers across the globe.
Like every year, speakers from different areas of the Google business presented the company’s latest innovations. This year was a truly global hybrid experience, with some people presenting in person and one virtually.
Here were some of the top announcements from the 2 hour keynote.
Multisearch
This is currently available as a beta feature in English in the U.S and allows users to search using both images and text, making it easier for customers to find products.
Another feature is hum to search – if you have a song bouncing around in your head and you can’t remember any of the words, you can hum/whistle the tune into your Google app and it should be able to tell you the name of the song.
Performance Max changes
We’ll soon see more transparency around Performance Max campaigns. Jerry Dischler shared that advertisers have seen 13% more incremental conversions at a similar CPA when using Performance Max.
As the results have been so great, Google will be adding more transparency around these campaigns, such as insights and explanations and also opening up experiments for Performance Max.
Lastly we’ll soon get recommendations on how to improve our Performance Max campaigns as they’ll soon be included in the account optimisation score and therefore feature on the recommendations tab.
Machine learning is improving
Vidhya Srinivasan explained that with language understanding models have improved significantly, making them 50% better at understanding language and user intent. She seemed very confident that these developments should make broad match keyword targeting more reliable.
Many marketeers, myself included, are nervous about relying on broad match within campaigns so Google has created a one-click experiment so we can test if broad match works for us. The stats shared in the keynote were that broad match + Target ROAS improved conversion value by an average of 20%. I’ll be interested in running an experiment to test this for myself.
Video Ad updates
Google has already begun rolling out video ads on YouTube Shorts for Video action and App campaigns and video ads will soon be shown when users are browsing Discover too.
Google says: “We’re exploring ways to help you bring short video assets to Google’s feeds so you can offer more compelling and engaging ad experiences.”
Another useful feature is the ability to create videos in just 60 seconds from the new Asset Library – an account level library for all the images, logos etc. that you might need to build an ad or video. This could be useful for small businesses that might otherwise struggle to create video content.
More visual search experience for apparel searches
Visual and immersive ad experiences are coming to search. We’ll soon see a combination of visual organic content and shopping ads teamed with rich product descriptions for apparel queries. Users will be able to swipe through extra images within the listing or tap on it to find out more details or similar products. These new experiences are launching in the US later this year.
Google Shopping updates
Google is currently piloting a brand new merchant experience which means that you can add products to your basket straight from the Google Shopping listing, called Checkout on Merchant:
This feature allows the user to hit Checkout on a listing and it’ll be added to the basket on the retailers site, where the user can choose to purchase there and then, using their preferred payment method or continue shopping on the site.
One to be aware of
Later this year Google will roll out the automatic creation of assets for responsive search ads. The technology crawls your site and existing ads to pull together headlines and descriptions to auto-generate responsive search ads. This is one that you have to opt in to, which is a relief, but that could change later down the line.
During the keynote Saurabh Sharma, Senior Director of Product Management at Google also went over the features of My Ad Center, something I covered earlier this month.
All the speakers were very passionate about the announcements they were making, so I look forward to testing the new features when they are rolled out to the UK.