Unsurprisingly, AI took center stage in the various announcements made today at Google Marketing Live 2024.
The updates also focused on creative, data and giving consumers what they want directly in search results. Now is the time to pay more attention to your impression scores.
Here’s a roundup 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
You can now create high-quality creative assets for high-performance campaigns quickly and at scale.
With generative AI, you can create ads much faster, leverage branded ads, advanced image editing, and automatically present product feeds in AI-generated creatives
New reporting functionality has also been introduced for YouTube and creative assets.
Google launches immersive, AI-powered shopping ads
For Shopping Ads advertisers, there are video and virtual ad types.
Retailers can integrate short product videos into ads, shoppers can use virtual try-ons to see how tops fit different body types, and film 3D shows.
Allow consumers to (virtually) engage with your advertising and products before they land on your site.
Advances in Google’s visual storytelling for YouTube, Discover and Gmail
You can now engage your potential customers with vertical videos, stickers, and auto-generated animated image ads.
These video ads are now available through demand gen campaigns to the 3 billion users across YouTube, Discover and Gmail.
More variety for your demand gen campaigns.
Google begins testing ads in AI overviews
Your relevant search and shopping ads appear in “sponsored” sections in AI-generated summary boxes on the SERP.
You don’t need to do anything – existing search, PMax and shopping campaigns are allowed.
How to ensure that it is not eligible for funding is currently unknown.
Google’s first-party data unification Ads Data Manager available to everyone
Centralize and activate your first-party 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), as well as audience insights and targeting.
Google offers retailers new brand profiles and AI branding tools
New tools have been released to help you better showcase your brands and create visual content.
You can create a brand profile to highlight important merchant information in search, with branded images, videos, customer reviews, offers, and more.
Product Studio now includes brand targeting features that let you use uploaded images as inspiration for your AI-generated ad and create videos from a single product photo.
Google is testing AI-powered ads for complex purchases
Google is testing giving consumers an interactive experience when getting their search results.
AI is used to provide tailored advice and recommendations based on the user’s needs and context.
The goal is to improve the user experience on the SERP and provide a consumer ready to convert when they reach the brand’s landing page.
But how does this impact search traffic on brand pages? We will see.
Why it matters to us. Many updates this year have focused on reducing the effort required for consumers to click through the site. So it will be interesting to see what impact this has on traffic. However, some long-awaited features have been introduced (such as reporting) that allow brands to better express their creativity.