Google Marketing Live Keynote – The New Era of AI Advertising?
The 11th Google Marketing Live event marked a significant shift towards AI integration across Google’s platforms, unveiling Project Astra and various AI-powered advancements designed to enhance user and advertiser experiences. Here are some of Varn’s key takeaways from the event:
AI Overview
Project Astra is an innovative AI agent capable of real-time interaction by seeing, hearing, and reacting. AI will now support all 15 main Google products, reflecting the evolving ways people search and interact online.
Notably, 15% of Google searches are brand new, a trend that has remained consistent for over a decade. To keep pace with changing search behaviours, Google has enhanced its search capabilities. The introduction of AI Overviews last year improved search quality and user engagement, with users increasingly opting for longer search queries. Google now integrates multiple queries into a single result page, offering a more comprehensive search experience.
Alongside this, the use of image search has surged, with 12 billion visual searches monthly, a quarter of which have commercial intent. Features like Circle to Search and Google Lens displaying shopping ads in search results highlight the growing importance of visual search.
Dynamic Ad Experience
AI has significantly improved Broad Match keywords by 10% for advertisers using smart bidding models. The “Power Pair” of Search ads and Performance Max continues to drive success, delivering 27% more conversions at similar costs for advertisers.
AI-powered creatives have been enhanced for Performance Max and Discovery campaigns, offering new capabilities:
- Tailor assets to brand guidelines.
- Generate more high-performing assets.
- Create new images from references and enhance existing ones.
- Animate uploaded images.
These AI-generated assets are free to use across various channels, even outside Google.
Performance Max will also gain new reporting functionalities, including asset-level performance breakdowns and YouTube campaign exclusions.
YouTube Ads
Speaking of YouTube and YouTube Ads – We will now see AI integration to enhance targeting and engagement across this channel. The required size for lookalike audiences has been reduced from 1000 to just 100, allowing even smaller businesses to target effectively across YouTube.
YouTube Shorts have exploded in popularity, with over 70 billion daily views. New features have been added to capitalise on this marketing potential, including:
- Product stickers linking to websites.
- Swipe left on ads to visit websites without leaving YouTube.
- Paid partnership content by creators can now be pushed as an ad.
In April alone, 30 billion hours of shopping-related content were consumed on YouTube. Products can be tagged in videos, shorts, and livestreams.
Shopify+ users in the USA can now link their products directly to YouTube, tracking performance seamlessly.
Shopping Ads
A new Profit Optimisation bidding strategy will boost products that are generating higher gross profit, showing a 15% increase in profit during testing.
Shopping ads will feature:
- Loyalty promotions highlighting member prices.
- 360-degree product views, starting with footwear.
- Key attributes from product descriptions and even product reviews will be included in the ads.
- Clothing ads showing items on various model sizes.
Users can now add multiple shopping options from various searches to a cart for a swift checkout if linked to Google Pay.
Data and Measurement
The new Google Ads Data Manager will streamline first-party data collection, formatting, and usage within Ads, enhancing connectivity with CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Shopify.
AI-generated reports and impact assessments are also coming to Google Ads which will provide specific metrics and improvement suggestions, including an “AI Essential” segment of recommendations.
A lot of great AI integrations are coming this year which should hopefully increase the efficiency and ease of marketers being able to create ads, sell products and report effectively. This is all great news if you are an ecommerce or product led business. Unfortunately, for the B2B or lead generation advertisers out there, the marketing live keynote did little to mar the growing frustrations of rising costs, low quality leads, and reducing control that these advertisers seem to be facing.
If you would like to chat with any of the team at Varn about the Google Marketing Live Keynote, then do not hesitate to get in touch.