This year’s Google Marketing Live 2024 event delivered a host of cutting-edge updates and tools to enhance marketing strategies and drive business growth. As expected, artificial intelligence (AI) was in the spotlight as the key focus for Google’s new features.
As intelligent as this technology is, the Google team emphasised again the importance of human guidance and intervention as the competitive edge. AI needs your strategic insights, your creativity and expertise to thrive. These will always be a marketer's advantage.
In discussing cookie depreciation, a key point that emerged repeatedly was the critical importance of high-quality data for effectively leveraging AI. With the phasing out of third-party cookies, businesses face challenges in collecting the rich data needed to train and maintain AI systems. This shift underscores the necessity for companies to find alternative methods of gathering and leveraging first-party data.
To summarise, "good AI requires good data," and as the landscape of data collection evolves, so must the strategies to ensure AI systems remain robust, reliable and learn effectively.
In all, the event covered a mammoth 30 AI-driven products and you can see the full coverage here. Some of those announcements were brand new, but much of the content centred around AI features and developments that are already out there. Here’s our summary of some of the things that caught our eye from this years’ event:
Search and Performance Max power pairing
Not a new concept by any means but Google took time to reinforce again the message that pairing Broad match and Smart Bidding with Performance Max is the ultimate AI unlock for reach and performance. This remains a priority for advertisers this year and as you’ll see in the next few updates, there’s continued investment in developing Pmax capabilities and reporting.
For more on unlocking your Performance Max potential with AI, see our blog - Performance Max and AI: The perfect marketing match.
Gross profit optimisation option for Performance Max
Performance Max campaigns can now optimise towards profit. This enhances the ability of Smart Bidding with Google claiming that advertisers can expect to see a 15% uplift in profit compared to revenue-based bidding. Google also encourages this feature to be tested side by side with conversion value bidding, using AI to drive all the testing.
Enhanced reporting for Performance Max
Google unveiled some exciting features to help us further see into the Performance Max box. Soon advertisers will be able to see improved placement reporting for YouTube and asset level reporting allowing us to see the metrics behind Performance Max creatives.
Google further highlighted the benefits of creative excellence within Performance Max stating that shifting your ad strength to ‘Excellent’ will drive more conversions. It’s proven that ‘Excellent’ rated creative drives an average 6% conversion uplift.
AI-powered shopping ads
Retail advertisers can integrate product ‘shorts’ into ads. Also introduced was ‘3D spins’ and ‘virtual try ons’ to drive higher engagement with ads. These features are set to better convey product offerings to consumers all within the ad itself.
Ads Data Manager
Google also talked about how they're automating and simplifying ways to improve data and set-up. Ads Data Manager is aiming to improve these workflows and support advertisers to make better use of first-party data. This feature will allow advertisers to import consented first-party data directly seamlessly into Google Ads, allowing you to utilise your first-party data more easily within your campaigns.
This automation will help smaller advertisers, who don't always have the in-house expertise, to ensure they have the quality of data they’ll need to succeed.
Google also showcased Croud’s work with global marketplace Fruugo. Read more here about how we implemented new privacy & conversion measurement solutions and increased captured conversions by 36% to enhance AI bidding and performance.
Partnership Ads
Google teased new Partner Ads powered by BrandConnect allowing advertisers to promote videos made by creators using co-branded format and back tag content already generated by YouTube content creators. Advertisers can then use Partner Ads to enrich campaigns by creating an audience based on a creator’s video.
Meridian MMM
This will be coming later this year, available to all advertisers and free to use, however, much insight on requirements or outputs is yet to be shared. Hoping there’ll be more details to follow on this soon.
Circle to search
Google talked again about circle to search. It will be interesting to see how this gets adopted on smartphones, making lens searches faster and more accessible. Being able to layer-on text and voice questions about the circled content using AI has the potential to really shift the way we find information when triggered by image and video content.
With so many new features and updates from Google there's a lot to explore and experiment with. By staying up to date and adapting to these new tools, you can ensure your marketing strategies remain relevant and impactful in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.
As we touched upon earlier, advancements in AI are bringing exciting change to our strategies, but it's essential to remember that AI itself is not a marketer, and your expert guidance is the competitive edge.
If you have any questions on the features mentioned in this article, or need help on how to work with AI in harmony - we’re here to help.
