Google’s Newest Ads Innovations

Google just wrapped up its Google Marketing Live 2024! Have you watched it? If not, we will briefly share the key features and updates in digital advertising. Keep reading our brief summary. 

Table of Contents:

1. Google’s Ads Innovations from Google Marketing Live
2. Gemini 1.5 Pro
3. Project Astra   
4. New Experiences for Search Ads 
5. Enhancements in YouTube Short Ads  
6. Generative AI Tools 
7. Ads in Visual Search
8. Conversational Experience  
9. Performance Max Updates
10. Asset Generation
11. Creative Controls and Customization 
12. Brand Profile 
13. Virtual try-on
14. Short Ads
15. 3D Shopping Formats
16. Style-aligned Assets
17. Image to Video
18. Automated Product Highlights
19. Reporting and Controls
20. YouTube Shopping

Google’s Ads Innovations from Google Marketing Live

“You don’t need AI strategy, you need AI to run your strategy”. Google unveiled several AI enhancements during this year’s Google I/O conference and dramatically increased the efficiency of its AI models. This improvement translates to better performance and lower costs for using these models. Google’s infrastructure is built to support high-performance, secure, and reliable AI operations, ensuring you can trust their AI implementations to be efficient and safe.

Gemini 1.5 Pro

Google AI power ads that work for you. In April 2024, Gemini 1.5 Pro was available with a public preview via the Gemini API. At Google’s I/O developer conference on May 15, 2024, Google announced further improvements. The new AI model boasts advanced features, including native multi-modality (the ability to process text, images, and other data types together) and long-context understanding (managing larger chunks of information). These capabilities enable the development of more sophisticated and context-aware AI applications.

Project Astra

Project Astra is a new AI assistant designed to interact naturally with users. It perceives and processes sensory inputs like sight and sound, marking a significant step towards more human-like AI interactions. The solution will be available later this year for its Gemini users.

New Experiences for Search Ads

The technology helps users quickly understand the essence of a topic, resulting in higher-quality interactions and more satisfied users. AI-generated search summaries are brief responses created by artificial intelligence to address users’ questions quickly. For instance, if you search “How do I get wrinkles out of clothes?”, the AI will produce a summary answer and, with the latest update, also incorporate relevant ads within this summary.

Today, AI Overviews in search are available in the United States, and the feature will soon be available in more countries. “People who use AI Overviews actually use Search more and are more satisfied with their results”. 

Enhancements in YouTube Short Ads

As we know, YouTube is the first most-watched streaming platform, with 1 billion hours on CTV daily and 70 billion views daily on Shorts. No wonder we see so many innovations for YouTube.

Shorts can now include interactive elements like stickers to enhance engagement. This new feature can improve ad formats and ensure better performance and user interaction. Use YouTube Shorts to tell your brand’s story through short, captivating videos, potentially featuring real customers or employees. The solution will be available in the coming months. 

Generative AI Tools

New tools like Imagen 3 (text-to-image), MusicSandbox (music creation), and Veo (video generation) enable you to create high-quality content more easily, democratizing the creative process. Starting from May 14, eo is available to select creators in private preview in VideoFX by joining Google’s waitlist. In the future, Google will bring some of Veo’s capabilities to YouTube Shorts and other products. Starting from May 14, Imagen 3 is available to select creators in private preview in ImageFX and by joining Google’s waitlist. Imagen 3 will be coming soon to Vertex AI. 

Ads in Visual Search

In the coming months, Shopping ads will begin appearing at the top of visual search results when users utilize Google Lens or Circle to Search. You can now engage directly with visually inspired consumers through Shopping ads in Google Lens and Circle to Search results. This new ad experience in visual search allows you to showcase your products when they’re relevant to the photos and screenshots people search with.

Conversational Experience

Last year, Google announced the conversational experience in Google Ads to help advertisers build better search campaigns with less effort. You can get the ideal campaign set up from the start, complete with the right broad-match keywords and ad assets. According to Google, small business advertisers that use this technology are 63% more likely to publish search campaigns with good or excellent ad strength. Google Ads’ conversational experience was launched in the U.S. and U.K. in January. It will soon be globally available to all advertisers in English.

Performance Max Updates

Most retailers advertising with Google are already using Performance Max and experiencing excellent results. Beyond retail, advertisers who adopt Performance Max see an average increase of 27% in conversions or value at a similar CPA/ROAS.

“Advertisers who improve their PMAax Ad strength to excellent see 6% more conversions on average.” Performance Max is now enhanced with new features such as profit optimization (focusing on maximizing profit instead of just revenue) and loyalty promotions (highlighting exclusive offers for loyalty program members). Features will be available in the coming months for Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns. 

The profit data can be derived from either cart-level conversions or the cost of goods sold. According to Google, this new bidding strategy yields an average 15% increase in campaign profit. Users can seamlessly switch between profit and revenue goals without affecting performance. 

Asset Generation

The solution helps you generate assets in seconds. Google updated this technology. It has been purpose-built and trained across data of all ads, including your specific industry, to help you drive performance.

Creative Controls and Customization

New tools enable you to set brand-specific guidelines, ensuring that AI-generated content remains consistent with your brand identity. Performance Max users will soon have the ability to input various branding details to assist Google’s AI system in generating visual assets.

AI can rapidly generate high-quality images and videos from simple inputs, cutting the time and cost of producing creative assets. This new solution allows you to add generated objects, extend image backgrounds, and crop visuals to fit using text prompts. 

You will be able to highlight a section of an image you want to change and type in what you want to add, and the system will update that specific element for you. This will make it easier to refine your creative elements. Features will be available in the coming months. 

Let’s deep dive into new Shopping ads features that were presented at the conference and will be available in the next few months. 

Brand Profile

Now you can explore more visual formats for Google Business profiles in Search. Google’s new brand profiles will showcase information from Google’s Merchant Center and Shopping Graph, offering a more attention-grabbing overview of your business.

Virtual try-on

Here, you can see AI-generated body shape examples for shopping ads, which provide better context on how clothing items appear on different body types.

Short Ads

Now you can tag products in your video ad. Google has introduced new ad formats for Shorts to help brands capitalize on the growing popularity of short-form video content. Additionally, it is testing new ad formats to integrate with its AI-generated overviews, which are now available for selected search queries. 

3D Shopping Formats

In the next few months, potential customers will be able to view a 360-degree spin of your shoes directly from a Shopping ad. Just provide a few product images, and Google AI will generate a 3D spin of your footwear. Additionally, your Shopping ads will become more informative by automatically featuring key product information from your website and positive highlights from customer reviews.

Style-aligned Assets

It’s become easier to create visuals that perfectly match your unique brand style. Upload one image that represents your aesthetic, click “generate scene,” and pick from four totally on-brand options.

Image to Video

“Just give us one image, and in seconds, our cutting-edge image-to-video model will turn to create an eye-catching video.” This feature brings your products to life in ways that meet today’s modern shoppers. According to Google, 40%+ of shopping searches on Google mention a brand or retailer name.

Automated Product Highlights

Shopping ads will start highlighting key attributes from product descriptions or reviews.

What about expansions? Here, we are with YouTube Shopping.

Reporting and Controls

Here is another update. Google has launched an additional reporting and controls in PMax with introducing asset-level reporting. You will be able to see conversion metrics for each creative asset to help you understand what is resonating with your customers.

YouTube Shopping

Shopping is foundational to YouTube. In 2023, people watched 30 billion hours of shopping-related videos on YouTube, which grew 25% year over year. And now, the YouTube affiliate program is making it possible for people to shop while they watch. Creators can easily tag products in their videos, in their Shorts, and in live streams. YouTube teamed up with Shopify to expand the affiliate program to all Shopify Plus and Advanced merchants in the US.

Which innovations excite you the most? Put Google AI to work for your business! Contact VIDEN to learn more about how to boost your campaigns by utilizing new Google updates.