Jessica Larholm – Nordic Digital Director
“There’s really only one wrong move when it comes to these early days of AI and that’s not making any move at all” said Sean Downey, President Americas & Global Partners at Google. The announcements at Google Marketing Live this year certainly emphasized this statement, showcasing a new era of ads with AI in focus. The event highlighted how AI is revolutionizing media creativity and measurement. Here are our key takeaways:
Google presented two new search ads formats: ads in visual search and ads in AI overviews. The former means that when customers go to use google lens or ‘circle to search’, shopping ads will appear at the top of the visual search results. The latter ad format is in testing stages in the US and has not rolled out in the EMEA market yet, so we will unfortunately have to wait. However this means that ads from AI-powered Search and Performance Max campaigns can now appear in the “Sponsored” section of AI Overviews, providing consumers with more opportunities to discover and engage with your products and services. This is something we are really excited about once it reaches our market.
Another interesting announcement from Google was “Power Pair”. This is a combination of search and performance max campaigns that are set to deliver the strongest conversion performance and ROI across all of Google. When comparing this to our own technology, ad-machina*, you already have access to all those features that at the moment are in Beta in Google Ads. The big benefit of ad-machina compared to the new features of Google ads with Gen-AI is that ad-machina does it on scale, while in Google Ads, you have to go asset by asset.
*ad-machina is a comprehensive solution that automates and optimizes your Search and Performance Max campaigns, helping you achieve your marketing goals more efficiently and profitably.
On the topic of Performance Max, Google has now made it possible to gain more insights into the performance of campaigns and areas of opportunity with better reporting and controls. We will now for example be able to see the conversion metrics for each creative asset to help understand what resonates with customers.
As for Demand Gen, you can now run Demand Gen Campaigns from Google Marketing Platform. With emphasis on optimizing performance at scale, Google announced the roll out of Demand Gen to DV360 and SA360.
Another exciting launch with AI in focus is the new Product Studio. Now, we will be able to create videos and product visuals in seconds with the help of Google AI. The Product Studio will be able to generate videos out of static images that also match brand style. This will be an easier way for us to grab a consumer’s attention with just a click of a button.
Lastly, one of the interesting announcements was Google Ads Data Manager. As first-party data becomes increasingly crucial, this new feature simplifies data utilization by allowing seamless connections with partners such as Salesforce, BigQuery, and Google Cloud Storage, enabling solutions like enhanced conversions and Customer Match.
The event really showed how AI-truly, truly is the future of Google Ads. This we all knew of course, but to see the new upcoming products live was very inspiring and motivating for our entire team. Our job will inevitably get easier, and we will be able to give our clients a new level of value. Our tedious tasks will get less time consuming, and we can focus on what´s really important to our clients – driving results & insights.
