Unsurprisingly, AI took center stage during the various announcements made today at Google Marketing Live 2024.
Updates also focused on creative, data, and giving consumers what they want right from search results. Now is the time to pay more attention to your impression levels.
Here’s a summary of everything you need to know about Google Marketing Live, with links to our full coverage of every major announcement.
The Google PMax upgrade enables mass production of creative AI assets
Now you can produce high-quality creative for Performance Max campaigns quickly and at scale.
Generative AI allows you to create ads much faster, create brand-specific ads, advanced image editing and automatic display of product feeds in AI-generated ads
New reporting features have also been rolled out for YouTube and creative assets.
Google introduces immersive, AI-powered Shopping ads
Video and virtual ad types are available to Shopping Ads advertisers.
Retailers can integrate short product videos into ads, virtual try-ons allow customers to see how tops fit different body types, and 3D show spins.
Make sure consumers can interact (virtually) with your creative and products before landing on your page.
Advances in Google visual storytelling for YouTube, Discover, and Gmail
You can now target your potential customers with vertical videos, stickers and auto-generated animated image ads.
These video ads are now available to the 3 billion users on YouTube, Discover and Gmail through Demand Gen campaigns.
More variety for your Demand Gen campaigns.
Google starts testing ads in AI overviews
Your relevant Search and Shopping ads will appear in ‘sponsored’ sections in AI-generated summary boxes on the SERP.
No action required: existing Search, PMax, and Shopping campaigns are eligible.
How to make it ineligible – that is unknown as of yet.
Google’s own data unification Ads Data Manager is available to everyone
Centralize and activate your own data for more effective AI-powered campaigns with Google’s Data Manager Tool, now available to everyone.
Use it for data integration (consolidates disparate first-party data sources into a unified analytics hub) and audience insights and targeting.
Google is giving sellers new brand profiles and AI branding tools
New tools have been released to better showcase your brands and create visual content.
You can create a brand profile to highlight important seller information on Search, with brand images, videos, customer reviews, offers, and more.
Product Studio now includes brand alignment features that let you use uploaded images to inspire your AI-generated ads and the ability to create videos from a single product photo.
Google is testing AI-powered ads for complex purchases
Google is testing to provide consumers with an interactive experience when receiving their search results.
AI will be used to provide tailored advice and recommendations based on user needs and context.
The goal is to improve the user experience on the SERP and provide a consumer who is ready to convert when they reach the brand’s landing page.
But what will this do to drive traffic to brand sites? Time will tell.
Why we care. Many updates this year were aimed at making it less effort for a consumer to click through the site. So it will be interesting to see where that leads for traffic generation. However, several long-awaited functionalities have been introduced (such as reporting) and that allow brands to better demonstrate their creativity.