Author: Laura Davies, Head of Paid Search
Since 2013, Google Marketing Live has taken place across the world annually, bringing agencies and business leaders together to share their latest innovations and deliver insights on everything digital marketing can do to drive growth to businesses.
When it first started out, the focus was “the shift to mobile”, but this year the big question was “the new era of AI”, a clear indication of how fast this industry moves with every technological advancement. The big questions at the event being “what can AI do for me?” and “How can I implement AI as fast as possible?”
Setting the scene perfectly, Google Marketing Live began with showing how human curiosity is limitless. Backed up by the fact that 15% of total search queries on Google are brand-new searches every day. What’s even more fascinating is that his figure has remained the same for more than a decade. How individuals satisfy their curiosity is always evolving, but luckily paid search is evolving with it.
It’s been more than 10 years since Google started seriously investing in AI, knowing that the tech would change the face of how we search for things online. They broke down how search is evolving with 4 different key trends that people are adopting, which we’re sharing with you today:
Trend 1
Commonly known as the ‘exactly what I want’ search, this is where shoppers ask Google the exact sort of thing they’re after. For example, ‘how to find men’s running shoes for beginners with high arches.”
The complex search made easy, which includes multiple questions that Google can cover in one. This could be something like ‘what is a good option for a day with the kids and what are the food options nearby?’
You could call this searching beyond words, and it’s where a shopper could take a picture of an item of clothing they like and be able to search for it using Google Lens to find the item online.
When some of us are searching for inspiration, it’s common to search beyond answers with the intention of exploring a topic. If you’ve ever searched for something like ‘rainy day activities’, the results are collated based on a concept rather than a query.
In light of these trends, Google is rolling out a number of new products in-line with their ambitious AI roadmap, here’s a breakdown of some of the ones we think matter to you.
This was initially announced in 2023, but showed up again this year. The Power Pair is the idea of combining both Search and Performance Max into your Paid Search strategy, with the aim of delivering the strongest performance in conversions, and return on investment across Google.
Since its announcement in 2023, testing has shown businesses who implemented the Power Pair see a 27% increase in conversions. As we run both Search and Performance Max campaigns for those who we think need it, we think it’s essential to get your ads on both networks, maximising visibility on the results page.
This is a new goal within Performance Max and Shopping campaigns which can maximise your profit across your Google Ads accounts. Early tests have shown a 15% increase in campaign profit when compared to revenue-only bidding. The key thing to remember here is that you still need engaging and exciting creatives to fuel your campaigns.
If there’s one thing Visualsoft is fully behind, it’s making campaigns disruptively creative. There are a number of assets and marketing channels that really require stand-out creative work to get ahead of your competitors, as this will be the first touchpoint between potential customers and your business.
Google explained this as providing a “mini brief” to Google Ads in order to create imagery which matches a client's brand guidelines. Allowing you to input your brand’s colours and font into Google Ads and create your own assets to implement into Performance Max.
As we’ve already mentioned, creativity is the key here, and making it meaningful and resonant with your brand through your brand guidelines is an essential step towards reaching more shoppers and becoming more recognisable on the results page.
These include reporting and exclusions for YouTube, with asset-level reporting finally on its way. We will soon be able to see performance metrics for each individual creative asset, this will allow us to see what customers are not only engaging with but also what assets are performing well for the account.
This has been a long time coming and we are really excited to be able to gain these additional insights into what is and isn’t performing well for Performance Max campaigns. As we keep saying, creative is incredibly important, and your campaign performance is sometimes only as good as your creative, so we need to know what is working and what needs to be amended.
People are concerned about how to protect their privacy online whilst shopping. However, growing your business means you need a sound strategy when it comes to data - especially when this comes to collecting First Party Data, which drives better results for your business.
Google went on to announce that Google Ads data manager was going to be available to everyone, this allows you to see all your sources of First Party Data into one place. Alongside this Google is rolling out measurement diagnostics directly within Google Ads. It was explained that measurement diagnostics is like the check engine light in your car. This will let you know where you are missing data and opportunities to improve on campaign performance, as well as telling you exactly how to fix this.
We have been saying this for a long time now, that the more data you can give to your campaigns the better. If you limit the data, Google's algorithms will have less to work with which can limit performance.
As a platform provider as well this allows us to gain access to large amounts of data for our clients and we always recommend adding this data into the Google Ads accounts to aid performance - the most important data of course being your First Party Data.
It’s safe to say that there were a lot of useful insights that came out of the day. AI is set to transform how shoppers search for products online, and it’s best off getting ahead while you can. Here are some steps Google think every business should be taking to get ready for it:
Have a solid foundation of first-party data and engaging creative.
Take a test, learn and scale approach to AI-powered campaigns.
Finally, Google recommends breaking down silos and shifting mindsets towards AI as this can have a real positive impact on your business.
Some really interesting new products and features were announced this year, and we at Visualsoft are looking forward to them becoming available for our clients' accounts so we can test these in the near future.