Earlier this week, Google’s annual event, Google Marketing Live 2024, took place. An event where employees from different areas of the company go on stage, in front of a live audience, to present the latest innovations coming our way.
Much like last year, the news shared this week was very AI-heavy, with new generative AI tools becoming available across many areas of Google Ads. From creating more engaging ads across Performance Max (PMax) campaigns to creating new immersive experiences in Search, AI was the centre of most of the announcements.
There was a lot said about the ‘Power Pair’ (PMax + Search) and the importance of AI-powered Search. We were told that, “beyond retail, advertisers who adopt Performance Max see an average increase of 27% more conversions or value at a similar CPA/ROAS. This is even when they already use broad match and Smart Bidding in their Search campaigns.”
Phillip Schindler (Chief Business Officer) launched the keynote, talking about Gemini and Project Astra. He then introduced Vidhya Srinivasan (Ads Product Vision) who went into more detail about how advertisers need to appear across all surfaces and devices with engaging, relevant and helpful content.
AI Overview ads
Vidhya Srinivasan described Google as a “match-maker”, matching consumers with the right advertiser at the right time. She explained that the new generative AI tools are still new and growing, and will not get everything right the first time. But Google wants to develop these tools to be the ultimate aid for advertisers, to help them do things like create ads and assets in seconds. However, she did stress that AI can’t do it all, it needs good marketers to guide it as it does not have “your creativity, strategic insights or expertise.”
She told us that Gen-AI is helping take Google Search matchmaking to new heights as search and shopping ads will soon appear in AI overviews (US only to begin with). This all sounds fantastic in theory, however, the reality (to date) is much different (see Vic’s post for more information: https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-rolls-out-ai-in-serps-in-the-us-and-everyone-hates-it/). Like Vidhya admits, AI won’t get it right all the time, but let’s hope things improve from where they are now.
New ways to search
Sylvanus Bent, Group Product Manager at Google Ads, came out next and talked about the new Search ad experiences and ads in visual search. Shopping ads will, for the first time, appear at the top of the search results for Lens searches and Circle to Search results.
Sylvanus covered the “new ways to search” and how ads are to become more relevant than ever and how ‘Conversational experience’ can help advertisers to create these ads:
- Ads that answer
- Ads for discovery
- Ads that inspire
Profit optimisation
Another big focus of the event was the importance of setting the right goals within your campaigns and implementing the correct measurement of those goals. From this they will be launching ‘Profit optimisation’:
“In the coming months, you’ll be able to optimise for profit with your Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns using data from your cart-level conversions and cost of goods sold in Merchant Center. Google AI will prioritise ad placements that help drive higher profits for your business.”
Performance Max Assets
Next was Tim Frank’s (Product Management) turn on stage and he went over the new AI-powered creative tools. He told us that advertisers who increase their PMax ad strength to Excellent see an average of 6% more conversions. He then talked about the new creative controls and customisation tools for PMax and showed before and after examples of AI generated ads for a furniture company:
He also went over how advertisers can use AI to generate backgrounds for products and create different variants of those images. Then those images are the advertiser’s to keep and can be used on other marketing channels as well. Here are some examples:
Another announcement, that was very well received, was additional reporting and controls for PMax:
- Soon we’ll be able to see where ads serve on YouTube and implement exclusions
- Assets level performance metrics will soon be available, including conversion data
- Test how the addition of more creative assets impact your campaign performance
- Revamped diagnostic insights
Demand Gen
Next up was Nicky Rettke, talking about YouTube, and most of all, Demand Gen. Demand Gen is something that was revealed last year and now reaches over 3 billion users across YouTube, Discover and Gmail.
As it says in the name, Demand Gen is being sold as the demand driving source, getting in front of people when they’re in the consideration phase. This is said to generate the demand that can then be converted by the Power Pair (PMax + Search).
“On average, advertisers who added Demand Gen to their Search and/or Performance Max campaigns saw 14% more conversions.”
Further updates launching, to try and improve Demand Gen campaigns are:
- Animated image ads
- The ability to pin video assets to different placements to control where they show
- The minimum list size required for lookalike audiences has been reduced from 1,000 to just 100 users
A lot more was covered in the 90 minute event, for the full recording see and for Google’s roundup see here.