AI is a hot topic in almost every area – including search marketing after last week’s Google Marketing Live 2023 event. Our team had the opportunity to listen to industry-leading experts and gain valuable insights into new Google products. These are our top 3 takeaways from our time at Google.
1. Generative AI will support marketers in establishing better customer connections.
The consumer shopping journey has become increasingly complex. To provide the most relevant experience for its users; Google is leveraging generative AI to help automate the relevancy factor for all participating Google advertisers.
Google unveiled some notable products, including a conversational experience set to launch in July 2023. This experience will ultimately guide users in campaign creation by recommending impactful keywords, ad copy and images. Google also announced that it will soon introduce generative AI in search experiments, which will integrate sponsored ads into the conversation.
As a marketing consultancy always looking for new ways to connect our clients to their audiences, we’re more than ready to test this new experience.
2. Product Studio will play a big role in creating compelling creative content.
Being in front of the right audience at the right time isn’t always a guaranteed win. Campaigns need compelling creative that resonates with targeted users. With the rise of YouTube Shorts and the growing demand for consumable content, no one can refute the power video has in advertising. Google addressed this by adding video view campaigns and demand gen campaigns to include all the popular YouTube formats and placements, including Discovery and Gmail.
Also, Product Studio – a new product set to launch later this year – will enable publishers to showcase their products using creative backgrounds tailored to different seasons or other themes. While we’re excited about the efficiency these tools can bring to marketers, we agree with Google’s perspective that “great creative is the only remaining unfair competitive advantage.”
3. Google is helping marketers make informed decisions on privacy.
As Chrome deprecates third-party cookies, Google is focused on data insights and consumer privacy. As marketers, we’re always striking a balance between privacy and gaining valuable customer insights.
There are answers. Google solutions such as the Google Ads insights page, GA4 and conversion modeling now offer new privacy-safe possibilities for marketers. During the event, Google reiterated that first-party consented data is the foundation of marketing success and that streamlining data across all channels is very important. This is Google’s effort to make things easier for marketers by bringing everything together through Google Ads.
So what do we do with all this?
AI is (and will continue to be) at the core of Google. How will Ervin & Smith approach these new changes and product enhancements? By doing what we always do – taking calculated risks and testing each new Google product. In addition, we’ll be knocking out these four action items as recommended by Google leaders to best fuel AI efforts – (1) Establish sitewide tagging with the Google tag; (2) Set up enhanced conversions; (3) Assign values to your conversions; (4) Upgrade to GA4 for deeper insights.
If you’re interested in talking more about what’s new with Google or about how AI and data can improve your marketing efforts, drop us a note.
