After the conclusion of Google I/O 2023, the stage was set for Google Marketing Live 2023, which brought a global hybrid experience to brands and advertisers. In-person viewing events were organized across different locations worldwide, allowing participants to convene locally, while virtual attendees from all corners of the globe tuned in to watch the livestream.
The immersive event serves as a catalyst for empowering marketers with the latest tools, strategies, and best practices – covering a wide range of topics from generative AI to new campaign goals. Attendees (including Tinuiti’s own expert team) scored a front row seat to valuable marketing insights across Google’s expansive advertising ecosystem.
AI Takes Center Stage at #GML2023
It goes without saying that AI capabilities took the center stage at Google Marketing Live 2023 with a variety of notable product announcements including:
- Conversational AI Campaign Creation: Exciting developments are taking place in the realm of campaign creation, with a shift towards leveraging conversational AI. This advancement offers advertisers a potent tool to enhance their audience engagement and foster more effective communication.
- AI-Powered Asset Targeting: Google Ads introduces AI-powered assets, supported by the existing AI-powered campaigns, that precisely target search queries, empowering advertisers to deliver more relevant and personalized content to their target audience.
- AI-Generated Images with Google Product Studio: Through Google Product Studio, advertisers gain access to AI-generated images, revolutionizing the way they visually represent their products and drive engagement.
These advancements highlight Google’s commitment to harnessing the potential of AI and delivering innovative solutions to enhance advertisers’ marketing efforts.
However, aside from AI, what are some of the other announcements that stood out?
This week, we spoke with our internal experts at Tinuiti to find out what they deemed as the most valuable takeaways at #GML2023. Let’s dive in!
Google Performance Max: 6 Standout Upgrades for Marketers
Google Performance Max campaigns are goal-based, automated campaigns that enable advertisers to promote across all Google networks from the same campaign. Google announced Performance Max campaigns in October 2020 as “a new way to buy Google ads across all our inventory.”
Performance Max—or PMax, for short—is designed as a complement to your existing keyword-based Search, Shopping and fully-automated campaigns, building on learnings from the latter “to deliver a comprehensive solution that works for all advertisers across a wider range of marketing objectives.”
Per the updates shared during GML 2023, the latest features within Performance Max that we are most excited about include:
- New customer acquisition with high value optimization goal in Google Ads
- Access to re-engagement goal for improved retention
- Test and learn opportunities with custom experiments
- Improved insights to better understand performance
- New features within the Ads Creative Studio
- Generative AI to create text assets and images
“These changes create additional ways to leverage Performance Max and make it an even more flexible marketing tool, capable of optimizing towards impactful business objectives. These updates also further solidify the need for advertisers to have robust first-party data / Customer Match infrastructure and execution capabilities.”
– Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti
1. New Customer Acquisition with High Value Optimization Goals in Google Ads
What is it? The existing New Customer Acquisition (NCA) works by using first-party data lists to analyze users’ characteristics and then implements the power of AI to predict and find new high value users. This new iteration will allow advertisers to specifically target users who are predicted to have high lifetime values.
How will it benefit marketers? NCA allows marketers to optimize for the highest value new customers, in addition to maximizing their bottom line sales. Overall, this feature (along with many others released at GML 2023) provide marketers with new ways to leverage Performance Max to execute specific business outcomes.
According to Google, NCA leverages data from a variety of sources include customer lists, global site tags and auto detection to:
- Grow overall revenue but optimize for conversions from new customers because new customers bring long term revenue to the business.
- Grow market share with a dedicated budget for customer acquisition either maximizing the number of new customer conversions with a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) or maximizing the revenue from new customers to also meet near term return of investment (ROI).
“As we look to leverage an audience-first approach to Performance Max, advanced functionality as it relates to NCA is an exciting addition. This will allow us to not only focus on new customers, but focus on new customers who can drive the highest value”.
– Evan Kirkpatrick, VP, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti
2. Access to Re-Engagement Goal for Improved Retention
What is it? Google’s re-engagement goal allows marketers to optimize their campaigns to reach customers at every decision-making point in their lifecycle journey. In addition to new customer acquisition, marketers can use re-engagement goals to optimize for other lifecycle stages, like retention and re-engagement of churned customers.
How will it benefit marketers? Google’s re-engagement goal allows marketers to bid more effectively to re-engage lapsed customers, report conversions from lapsed customers directly in the Google Ads UI.
“I’m most excited about the potential for customer reactivation and lifetime extension. Our job as marketers is not over when the customer comes in the door. As the saying goes, it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get a new one.”
– Aaron Levy, VP, Paid Search at Tinuiti
3. Test and Learn Opportunities With Custom Experiments
What is it? Performance Max Custom Experiments will let you test changes within your Performance Max campaign. This feature helps you A/B test different features, settings, and campaigns to drive improvement. For example, you can test if using a value based bidding strategy for your campaign drives more results for your business.
How will it benefit marketers? When you test different campaign settings, you reach more customers and drive better results quickly and efficiently for your business. You can also use experiments to help you measure the incremental lift of using Performance Max campaigns.
“This will provide an improved way to measure the efficacy of your current Performance Max structures as well as potential improved strategies overall.”
– Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti
4. Improved Insights to Better Understand Performance
What is it? According to Google, new insights will highlight additional data on your assets to help marketers better understand their campaign performance. You’ll also get easy-to-apply recommendations on how to improve your assets.
Additionally, search term insights will now include historic insights and insights for custom date ranges. You’ll also be able to download your Search term insights and access them in the Google Ads API. You’ll be able to see all your Search term categories now, instead of having some listed as uncategorized.
How will it benefit marketers? Google’s improved insights will provide information on which assets are or are not resonating with a given audience, provide potential suggestions on better creative, and will call out any missing asset types.
“The more data we can get from the black box, the better. These changes should help inform advertisers how optimize their PMax campaigns for maximum effect” – Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti
“We’re cautiously excited about this one. Performance Max has a ton of potential as a research testing ground. Ultimately, the more insights we can get access to, the more we can use that data to amplify additional marketing efforts.” – Aaron Levy, VP, Paid Search at Tinuiti
5. New Features Within the Ads Creative Studio
What is it? Ads Creative Studio is a creative management platform designed for creative teams to build ads, manage creative assets, and share them with media teams. Ads Creative Studio can improve collaboration and transparency between your creative and media teams and help you create effective ads with more efficiency and scale.
How will it benefit marketers? Thanks to the preview and export feature, marketers will be able to see best practices and specifications to ensure that creative is set up for success ahead of deployment. New insights in Ads Creative Studio will also provide information about trends within Search. This supplementary tool will give marketers exploratory access to the latest and greatest Search data to help plan and develop future creative.
6. Generative AI To Create Compelling Text Assets and Images
What is it? With the revamped asset creation flow in Performance Max campaigns, marketers can harness the power of Google AI to curate and generate high-quality text and image assets.
According to Google, this Generative AI feature can easily create compelling creative assets to be implemented in Performance Max campaigns.
Here’s a closer look on how it works:
How will it benefit marketers? Setting up Performance Max campaigns can feel overwhelming due to the necessary content and imagery. The inclusion of a helpful feature that provides assistance and even generates new creative is a valuable addition, guaranteed to save advertisers precious time and resources. Adding a diverse range of assets and keeping them fresh over time can help improve results by maximizing the eligibility to serve on a full range of ad inventory.
“AI Generating Performance Max is an exciting new feature that can boost our creativity and give us new opportunities to develop effective PMax campaigns. Based on our findings, brands that include the suggested 20 image ads and 5 videos per asset category see a +10% boost in conversions. So this functionality can be useful for brands that are having trouble reaching the recommended levels.”
– Courtney O’Donnell, Senior Director, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti
“Visual creative has long been a neglected part of the SEM ecosystem; this new tool will enable advertisers to test far more iterations of creative while greatly reducing the burden on creative teams.”
– Aaron Levy, VP, Paid Search at Tinuiti
Google Ads Campaign Types: Introducing Video Views and Demand Generation
7. Video View Campaigns
What is it? Video View Campaigns are designed to maximize views. According to Google, a study revealed that advertisers using Video View Campaigns experienced an average of 40% more views at comparable costs compared to in-stream skippable CPV campaigns.
How will it benefit marketers? These campaigns leverage a range of formats, including skippable in-stream ads, in-feed ads, and Shorts ads, to optimize budget allocation and achieve optimal results. Video Views can also combine 3 formats in a single campaign for a single goal.
8. Demand Generation Campaigns
What is it? Demand Generation campaigns leverage AI to engage and drive action with consumers. These campaigns work across a variety of placements including YouTube in-feed, YouTube Shorts, YouTube in-stream, Discovery Feed and Gmail.
How will it benefit marketers? At Tinuiti, we are eagerly awaiting more info on Demand Generation campaigns, but it seems like this feature has great potential to help advertisers more readily access the mid and upper funnel inventory that Google has to offer.
“We’re interested to see if this will be similar to Performance Max in that it will be used in addition to existing campaign types not instead of. Or, will it replace much of how we buy YouTube today?”
– Courtney O’Donnell, Senior Director, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti
We expect more details will be shared on this specific campaign type at Cannes 2023.
“As we continue to see the evolution of AI driven campaigns across various inventory types, having an audience-first approach and strong creative to match are going to be keys for success in driving action from the consumers.”
– Brian Binder, Senior Director, Programmatic at Tinuiti
New features in Display & Video 360
9. Engage your first-party audience in Display & Video 360 using PAIR
What is it? Thanks to Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation (PAIR) advertisers and publishers can leverage privacy-conscious technology to merge first-party data to target audiences who have interacted with both an advertiser’s website and a publisher’s platform.
How will it benefit marketers? According to Google, advertisers can leverage this tool to better connect with their known audiences through Display & Video 360, while avoiding tracking individuals across the web. This also helps advertisers show relevant ads to some of their highest-intent audiences and improve performance, while meeting people’s privacy expectations.
10. Optimized targeting in Display & Video 360 gives marketers the power to convert new audiences
What is it? Optimized targeting uses AI signals to help marketers engage with new audiences that are likely to convert.
How will it benefit marketers? According to Google, advertisers who use optimized targeting on Google Display ads see, on average, a 50% increase in conversions at a comparable ROI. As the countdown to cookie depreciation continues, the significance of exploring and testing new solutions becomes even more crucial. At Tinuiti, we are excited that Privacy Sandbox signals will soon surface in DV360.
11. Conversion lift provides new visibility
What is it? Google will be expanding “Conversion Lift” to enable holistic measurement across Search, Display and Video.
How will it benefit marketers? Integrating Conversion Lift measurement into GDA and Display and Video 360 will give marketers visibility into the incremental impact of campaigns and enable optimization towards business outcomes vs. proxy metrics (i.e. Last Click).
12. Additional insights from connected TV (CTV) unify reporting
What is it? Google Audiences will soon scale across CTV via DV360 enabling marketers to deliver media to centralized addressable audiences across TV, YouTube/Video and Display. Cross-device conversion measurement is also coming soon for CTV campaigns.
How will it benefit marketers? The new Digital & TV Report in Display & Video 360 allows marketers to measure the overall reach and efficiency of CTV campaigns alongside traditional TV buys, further unifying reporting and optimization across TV screens. With cross-device conversion measurement, marketers will better understand if people take action (make a purchase) on a mobile, tablet, or laptop after seeing ads on a smart TV device.
“Google has certainly not been a first mover in the CTV space but they are now bringing the true magic of programmatic to the biggest screen in the house, the television; enabling marketers to scale 1P and 3P audiences across devices and screens, durably and privacy-safe, beyond cookie depreciation. Combined with the massive scale of YouTube (and YouTubeTV), Google is quickly becoming a streaming powerhouse.”
– Geoffrey Litwer, Vice President, Display Media at Tinuiti
Additional Noteworthy GML 2023 Announcements
13. Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) Integration With Search, Shopping
What is it? Google is currently conducting experiments to seamlessly integrate Search and Shopping ads directly into the AI snapshot and conversational mode. SGE has the opportunity to create customized ad experiences (across Search and Shopping) that align with the user journey.
While Google has not disclosed specific metrics like CTR for these SGE (Search, Shopping, and Google Express) ads due to their experimental nature, they offer immense potential. It’s important to note that since this feature is still in its early stages, there is currently no option to opt in or out of ads appearing in SGE.
How will it benefit marketers? Google’s AI integration with Search and Shopping provides marketers with an opportunity to drive more engagement and visibility of their ads. The new Search Generative Experience (SGE) can be found in Search Labs, a new program to access early experiments in Search. Ads that show up as a part of this experiment will be from existing Google Ads campaigns.
Want to give generative AI in Search a try? Tap the “Labs” icon in the Google app or Chrome desktop to express your interest, and visit labs.google.com/search to learn more.
“SGE represents the long awaited manifestation of conversational search and ads on Google’s results page. It will be interesting to see the ways in which this impacts how we buy Google Ads”
– Josh Brisco, Group Vice President, Acquisition Media at Tinuiti
14. Product Studio Leverages AI To Create High-Quality Images
What is it? Product Studio is a new suite of free, AI-powered tools available within Merchant Center Next and the Google & YouTube app on Shopify that helps save marketers time and resources – while helping enhance and create high-quality product images.
How will it benefit marketers? According to Google, these tools can help marketers generate scenes, increase image resolution, and edit backgrounds. Recent data indicates, fresh images may attract more customers when you scale them across various marketing channels.
“This was one of the more eye-catching updates of the day and speaks to the importance of leveraging new creative within Google’s suite of ad types. It will be interesting to see how this solution works at scale but it definitely has the potential to open the door to far more creative testing, especially around seasonal campaigns, promotions, and new releases”.
– Evan Kirkpatrick, VP, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti
15. Google Merchant Center Next Streamlines User Experience
What is it? The Merchant Center Next platform gives Google advertisers an opportunity to manage how their products appear across Google, and provides valuable insights about the business, products, and market.
How will it benefit marketers? Google’s latest iteration of Merchant Center offers a more streamlined and user-friendly experience, particularly for newcomers to the channel.
Notably, the update enables direct product imports from a client’s website, simplifying the process for marketers. Google is also doubling down on Product Merchandising, enhancing the visibility of crucial information such as product pricing, competitiveness, and other relevant data. This update promises to empower advertisers with improved functionality and valuable insights.
“Similar to other feature announcements over the past couple of years – as it pertains to Merchant Center, this change will make it easier for smaller advertisers to get up and running on Shopping. Allowing products to be automatically populated from a merchant’s website is the most notable change, but one that is unlikely to move the needle for larger advertisers. Sophisticated merchants will want to ensure they are still leveraging product feeds to optimize and improve the data for their program, rather than simply relying on the data from the website.”
– Evan Kirkpatrick, VP, Shoppable Media at Tinuiti
Have questions about any of the announcements you read above? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you.