What you need to know from Google Marketing Live 2022
Google’s annual Marketing Live event took place recently, with the company revealing many updates to their ad products. The broad themes from this year were related to automation, YouTube Shorts, and Performance Max ( a relatively new goal-based campaign type that supports performance advertisers with enhanced tools). It’s apparent that Google is making some considerable moves to increase its platform’s visual, video, and AI-driven ad formats.
This article shares some of the key takeaways from Google Marketing Live 2022 for advertisers and marketers.
YouTube Shorts ads
Suppose you are currently running app or video action campaigns. In that case, you will benefit from your ads automatically scaling to size for YouTube shorts, Google’s product that is designed to compete with TikTok.
Remember that Shorts are limited to one minute in length, so it is very important to tighten up the messaging and creativity to maximize those 60 seconds. The feature will be available to advertisers globally, so look out for the results in order to optimize your campaigns accordingly.
Performance Max updates
Google is taking steps to open up its advanced automated campaign type, Performance Max, to more advertisers. The improvements include:
- In-store goals
- Burst campaigns to support seasonal foot traffic
- ‘Experiment tools’ for testing potential lift
- Additional insights
- Provision for Search 360 and the Google Ads app
- Optimization score recommendations
Checkout on Merchant
Google is streamlining the checkout process for your customers.
By streamlining, Google means that your website customers no longer need to browse multiple pages to complete the checkout process. This will be replaced by sending them directly to your existing merchant buy-flow– straight from the product listing. Google stated that Merchants would “own the customer” as the transaction occurs directly from within their buy-flow.
E-commerce website owners will need to take measures as the move could see some shops’ average order value (AOV) drop. This is because customers do not need to browse the website and look through your products, as the process will be streamlined from the product listing, and the customer will be sent directly to purchase.
The scheme is currently in a closed pilot phase, and Google is looking to expand and make it more broadly available in the near future.
Swipable shopping ads within search
Another move that may create waves within e-commerce is the introduction of a prominent and large new ad display to combine organic shopping results with shopping ads to enhance and visualize the shopping experience. At the moment, this new product launch is limited to apparel brands and later will be made available through both Search and Performance Max campaigns.
Insights page updates
Google will release three new reports that will be available from the Insights Page; these will include:
- Attribution Insights: to examine how your ads work together across Google surfaces.
- Budget Insights: to identify new opportunities to optimize your budget.
- Audience Insights: to analyze what customer segments are delivering campaign results.
Responsive Search Ads enhancements
Google will release automatically created assets for responsive search ads designed to boost ad relevance.
This new automated feature will generate assets from the content of your landing pages and current ad units.
Once opted in, Google Ads will automatically feature the best performing combination of your available assets and the automatically created assets.
Conclusion
In line with the global business theme of resiliency, Google released a series of advertising features that the company says are built for the “resilience for the future of marketing.”
Some of these released items, such as ‘Checkout on Merchant’ and swipeable shopping ads, may considerably impact advertisers. On the other hand, there are less significant features that may not directly impact advertisers; here, we refer to the enhanced Performance Max experiment tools and YouTube Shorts, even though it is essential to keep on top of Google’s updates.
Google’s announcements offer new and improved digital marketing tools for businesses, which are becoming increasingly complicated for some advertisers. Even though this can present a great opportunity, making the most of these new features presents another challenge for businesses everywhere.
If you have any questions about Google and how to get the best results from their products and services, please feel free to contact our expert team at info@relevantaudience.com for more information.
