Google Marketing Live 2024

Google Marketing Live 2024 (GML) took place last week, bringing with it a whole host of upcoming feature announcements within Google’s advertising platforms. And KINESSO UK&I were on the ground to report on all the key developments announced.

To nobody’s surprise, AI was very much front and centre of the announcements made. Most of the updates showcased how Google plans for AI to continue to evolve the search experience for both users and advertisers, ensuring users can instantly access all the information that they need to satisfy their query as efficiently as possible, while giving advertisers access to deeper creative controls and data levers to help drive performance.

With 30+ features and updates announced, it can be easy to get lost in the detail of everything presented at the showcase. To make this easier, we’ve rounded up our top 5 ‘need to knows’ from the event which stood out to us:

1. Performance Max asset creation and enhanced reporting capabilities 
This will be a common theme in this round up, but our first major update begins with Performance Max (pMax). Google showcased new features and upgrades to the pMax platform designed to improve the quality of AI-generated assets and speeding up the process of producing these assets substantially. Multiple high quality asset variations will be available at the click of a button, including new AI creative features such as image-to-video transformations.

This could be especially powerful when combined with the announcement of asset-level performance within pMax, a feature that the industry has been keen to see implemented since the launch of pMax campaigns. This will finally give advertisers the ability to see directly which image or video assets within their wider asset groups are driving performance. Advertisers will then have the option to create similar variations of their best-performers at the click of a button.

There’s a noteworthy caveat here: As with any AI feature, the outputs from this process are only ever as strong as the inputs. While the Google examples of images generated from text prompts do appear impressive, it is not a like-for-like substitute for highly-experienced Design experts overlaying strategic insights. AI will likely instead prove to be a key ally for experimentation from those original creatives, fuelling a data-driven approach to enable extra testing variations from the original output.

2. Profit optimisation goals in pMax
I promise we’ll move on from pMax soon, but this is set to be a big one for our eCommerce clients!

At KINESSO UK&I we’ve been extensively testing various campaign goals and structures across pMax since its launch - evolving our best practices. Among these tests, we’ve advocated for retailers to pursue campaign setup and optimisation based on their product’s profit margins over total revenue, where this made sense against business goals.

Google’s announcement that they are directly incorporating “gross profit optimisation” as an AI bidding goal with pMax campaigns (and Standard Shopping) is an exciting development. We’re looking forward to experimenting further with this new functionality vs the results we see through our current process of optimising to profit. Within the keynote presentation, Google predicted a 15% uplift in campaign profit through incorporating this goal, and we’re eager to get hands-on with the feature to validate this.

3. Ads within AI Overviews
Also announced was the upcoming launch of ads to appear within AI Overviews – the AI generated search responses for complex queries.

If your ad or product is deemed to be relevant to the search query given, and works within the context of the AI response being provided, then you will soon have the potential to appear as a ‘sponsored’ search or product listing ad within the AI response itself. This is a big step as it is effectively Google’s first major move towards monetizing AI responses within the SERP.

While monetization of the AI results within the SERP has been long expected, advertisers had questioned whether the depth and accuracy of AI responses alone might fuel an increase in Zero-Click Searches (i.e a user has received the answer they were looking for without the need to visit another site).

The ability to appear within these responses, matched as a solution that the AI response has deemed as highly relevant to the user, could reassure advertisers that they will maintain visibility on relevant long-tail queries, or potentially even open up ads on new search queries that were previously deemed too complex to appear against (as long as the information brought in from the AI response itself is also relevant in these cases!).

We’ll be keeping a close eye on data points for engagement rates on these new placements vs traditional SERP placements: Will featuring within an AI response give a user more confidence that your product/service is going to match their needs, or could it impact the trust the user places in the AI response when monetisation is introduced? Time will tell.

4. Expansions to visual ads formats will enhance the reach of Demand Gen campaigns
Alongside pMax, Demand Gen was a hot topic throughout the two day GML event, and Google had a host of updates to announce for this campaign type within their keynote.

Newly announced Image-To-Video capabilities alongside new ‘Stickers’ overlays for YouTube shorts open up the access and interactivity of these asset types, while including an option for a user to swipe from a short directly into a branded YouTube page gives high-intent users an easy option to follow up on their interest after seeing the short-form content.

A natural step would be to create audience listings of users who have taken this step on the back of being initially engaged through short-form content, potentially giving advertisers another method of re-engaging with these users further down the funnel.

5. Brand guidelines
Google will soon be releasing a feature for advertisers to input brand fonts, colours and tones into their ad accounts, which will be factored into all AI asset creatives.

This is a big advantage for advertisers who have perhaps been sceptical of the brand safety side of AI assets up to now. This feature will help to ensure that AI generated assets not only tick all necessary brand boxes, but flow seamlessly into the on-site experience that a user can expect.

Brand safety is always a key consideration for advertisers, as well as KINESSO UK&I, and has always high on the agenda within discussions around “automation”. To see further focus in this area was pleasing and should help to encourage advertisers to lean into the new AI creative processes above.

Final Thoughts
Overall, GML delivered on the expectation of giving a peek at the future of AI within Google ad platforms, with some exciting innovations to come which we’re eager to put to the test. The event also served as a reminder that, while the advancements in AI have been moving at incredible speed and will continue to do so, it is still not a marketer in it’s own right.

Google Ads VP & General Manager, Vidhya Srinivasan, summed this up well within the keynote, stating: “AI doesn’t have taste, it doesn’t have ingenuity, and then when it comes to advertising, it just does not have [a marketer’s] creativity, strategic insights and expertise... But AI can help, and will help.”