You should have seen the content at Google Marketing Live!
With 101 mentions of AI (counted by Boris Berec using AI) Google made it very clear they want all marketers to embrace the new AI era and revealed 30 new product updates, mostly consisting of…you guessed it….AI
To save you the trouble of scrolling through their lengthy round-up (it’s here if you insist) below you can check out what we found to be the most interesting updates:
1. The Power Pair - PMAX & Search
We first tested PMAX when it came out as a BETA and whilst the lack of control was disappointing, the results spoke for themselves.
However, lately, we’re finding most businesses struggling to get the results they used to from PMAX and we’re seeing utilising standard shopping work better to rebalance the results.
Why?
- They can’t get it to focus on new customer acquisition enough because it’s a miracle to see a case where a brand is successfully excluded.
- Results in Q1 showed an increase in placements across the Youtube & Display networks. Top-of-funnel marketing shouldn’t be ignored but we’re yet to see it work on Google the way it does across social channels which appear to give a better return.
- A lot of businesses struggle to keep up with the asset production needed and don’t quite think their TOF strategy through and simply show BOF ads.
However, Google made some interesting announcements that may swing the odds back in PMAX’s favour dubbing PMAX & Search their “Power Pair”.
2. Gen AI Assets
Give Google AI your brand guidelines, colours, and fonts and it can create more on-brand ads for your customers.
You’ll also be able to take product shots from your merchant centre feed and use their AI-powered image editing tools to place them in contexts and scenes using lifestyle imagery. The demo made the tool look simple enough to use and we can’t wait to give it a try.
Now I don’t mean to brag (well I do) but Push already has a feature in our own Dial 360 tool that identifies your winning ad across ALL platforms and uses AI to generate new assets.
Google are catching up and introducing asset level reporting to PMAX and the ability to press a “Generate More” button to create new iterations of assets within the platforms.
3. Profit Optimisation Goals
Google’s AI plans to use your basket-level conversion data and cost of goods sold in the Merchant Center to prioritise ad placements that help drive higher profits for your business.
4. Conversational AI Search Results
You may have already seen the memes of some terrible AI search results Google’s been producing but it’s not going anywhere and it’s only going to get smarter over time.
There was a time when we wondered what would happen to search ads if our behaviour as a society shifted from asking Google to asking AI.
Google have made clear that ads will be present in their AI overviews which does present opportunities to reach customers across a wealth of new search queries.
5. Google Lens & Circle To Search
I’m certainly guilty of taking pictures of strangers' jackets and using Google Lens to find out where I can buy them. Circle to search allows users to simply make a circle shape around any object in a photo and search for it and the simplicity of it makes me think it will grow in popularity over time.
Shopping ads will now be present in those results presenting a new opportunity to reach consumers.
6. Demand Gen
It’s still early days for demand gen. The trouble with campaigns like these is it’s TOF and businesses are still trying to make sense of the gaps between their platform, GA4 and third-party attribution tool data (fyi we recommend Fospha).
However new features coming to demand gen include:
- The ability to animate your assets
- Pinning video assets to control where they show
- Reducing the lookalike audience size requirement from 1000 to 100.
7. Benchmark Data
Google Analytics 4 is introducing a feature that will let you compare your performance to similar businesses. I can imagine this may come in handy in situations where you’ve spent months trying to convince a CFO you need to invest and update your 10-year-old website because your site speed & conversion rate are tanking performance.
8. New Customer Acquisition Data from GA4
Some may already be familiar with the new customer acquisition goals that currently use Google Ads signals to distinguish between existing and new audiences.
Soon Google Analytics data will be pulled in to improve this - we’ve seen using this work well for remarketing so we’re excited to see how it impacts this goal.
Final thoughts
As AI rapidly evolves, there's no doubt it will continue transforming the marketing landscape. Google has made a bold move by going all-in on AI across their products and ad platforms. While some of these new AI-powered features still need to prove their true value, others like AI asset creation and profit optimisation could be game-changers.
One thing's for certain - marketers who embrace AI early will have a significant competitive edge. The AI marketing revolution is here, and Google is paving the way whether we're ready or not.
Those who adapt quickly and leverage AI's capabilities will be the ones thriving and driving performance in this new era of marketing.
Images from Google Marketing Live 2024: Your roundup of announcements
