Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 17 - Google Marketing Live 2024

Google Marketing Live 2024. If you didn't watch the event on Tuesday, May 21st, what did you miss?

As it turns out, not a whole lot. There were, of course, announcements about Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns, about AI, about new video features, about AI. Oh, and did I mention AI? That was predictable.

So instead of the usual roundup, which is really easy for you to find anywhere on the internet, I'm going to start by sharing five things Google didn't say at Google Marketing Live that actually tells us a lot about what's going to happen this year, and then the three things I think you should be focusing on.

I'm also excited to share perspectives of some fellow ex-Googlers and experts later on in this episode, so stay tuned.

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 17, Google Marketing Live Recap and Analysis.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you. Let's get into it.

The first thing I noticed is how there was a lot of emphasis on visual search and AI search and nothing at all about keywords. And that makes sense. We've all been predicting the death of keywords for a while.

Like, how can a keyword-based campaign show on an ad for an image search, right? What would the search term report even show? Or how can a keyword-based campaign show an ad on a search for, “where can I find comfortable shoes for summer that are still stylish and provide arch support and not in black?” You know, that's what more and more searches are getting like. They're getting longer. They're getting conversational.

Google proclaimed that the Power Pair (their words, not mine) is Search + Performance Max. And while that does make a good sales narrative to get businesses to adopt Performance Max, it doesn't leave much more room for keywords in this world.

I've talked on recent episodes about how match types have really changed, which fundamentally changes the way keywords work now in 2024. And it's very clear that if you haven't started testing PMax yet, you absolutely should. It is the obvious way forward in this multimodal environment.

Speaking of PMax, we saw that we're going to be able to place Shopping ads and Search ads in AI Overviews. And the GML documentation specifically says, “Your ads from existing AI-powered Search and Performance Max campaigns will have the opportunity to appear within the AI Overview.”

Now, you notice what's not mentioned there? Shopping campaigns.

I've reached out to Google's Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, for a comment on this. I haven't heard back yet, as I'm sure she's having an absolutely crazy busy week. But I took this as the first sign that Standard Shopping may not b elong for this world. That's my prediction. Let's see what happens.

OK, something else that was also very clear: there were a bunch of announcements from this year that were also announced last year, for cool things like Virtual Try-On or Conversational AI when you're creating Search campaigns. But they weren't new.

Now, some of these things have actually launched, like the Conversational AI. In my opinion, it's really unimpressive. You're better off just using Gemini if you're looking for generative AI help with your keywords and your ads.

But still, this stuff was announced again this year. And what I'm reading into that is that layoffs have definitely affected morale at Google. I hear that from my friends and former colleagues who still work there. Maybe that's what's to blame for these really slow rollouts?

But yeah, I'm sure even among the 30+ things that were announced at this GML, they're not all going to be implemented by the next GML, at least not widely.

Now, one thing that was interesting among a 90-minute event that was not terribly interesting was the amount of stuff Google announced coming for social media and marketplace ad dollars. You know, TikTok Shop, Amazon, Meta, Pinterest, these are all big competitors to Google. And Google really emphasized this Google Lens search and Circle to Search.

If you haven't done that before, the idea is you can just circle something on your phone and it'll search for that. So if you see a product you really like, say, in an Instagram post, you can just circle the sunglasses or the purse or the shirt, and then Google will search for that product, show you results, and you can go buy it.

And who gets credit for that? Of course, Google does. Not Meta or wherever you actually saw the product. So, in my opinion, that was more of a business model innovation than a product innovation, and I think that was one of the most exciting things for Google and for advertisers to come out of GML.

Not necessarily one of the most exciting things for Google's competitors, but as we'll hear from fellow ex-Googler Solange Abraham in a little bit, there were some things that were announced that were very much Google just playing catch up to those competitors.

Now the last thing I have to mention - though it was not surprising, it was disappointing - how B2B and lead generation were completely left out of Google Marketing Live. Tons of Shopping announcements and retail announcements and ecommerce announcements, but nothing, not even a case study or example for those lead generation or B2B advertisers.

And also nothing for travel advertisers, who I know make up a huge portion of Google's ad revenue.

Now, it's worth pointing out that many of the features that were announced, of course, would be applicable for lead gen advertisers or B2B advertisers: different audiences, different placements, lookalikes, insights. But the fact that of the, I don't know, five or six different real-life examples they used, none of them were for a lead gen or B2B company? That was disappointing, and I know that a lot of business owners out there really felt that.

So those were some of the things that Google didn't say that I think tell us a lot about where their head's at and where product development is going with Google Ads. I want to shift gears now to share three key themes based on what Google did say, and my recommendations for what you should be focusing on.

First is something I talk about a lot, and that is creative. Whether it was generative AI being able to create images using your branding or products, or whether it was this increased emphasis on visual search results, imagery, especially video, too, but imagery was front and center. So if you're the kind of advertiser who has only run search text ads before, you have not dipped your toe into the image or video world, 2024 is the time to start doing that.

Next, of course, is AI and specifically AI Overviews, what used to be called SGE, the search generative experience. So advertisers are pleased to know that we can put Search and Shopping ads into those AI Overviews. More details on that are hazy for now, but that is coming. 

And the feature that I know you wanted: more Recommendations are coming to your Google Ads interface under the category of AI Essentials. Should you follow those recommendations? Maybe, maybe not, it remains to be seen what they are, but what I recommend for you is to make sure your data is in order. Your website is optimized in a way that Google can understand. If you have a Merchant Center feed, that it's not just the default that's pulled in from Shopify and that it's been optimized as well. Those first-party audiences, bringing your own customer data into Google Ads. These are the kinds of things that you're going to need to be able to drive outsized results for your business.

Because when everyone has access to the same AI bidding algorithms and everyone has access to the same AI targeting algorithms, what's going to set you apart? That creative, which I mentioned earlier, and then the data that only you have, that well-optimized website that only you have.

And the third thing that was interesting was the fact that Google talked a lot at this event about transparency and control, a few times mentioning giving more control to advertisers. I didn't actually see that control part play out in the announcements, but transparency, yes. A lot of different announcements of new features that are giving us more insights into what those automated campaigns are doing.

For example, in Performance Max, there are more detailed reports and insights coming about who you're showing ads to, where those ads are showing, and how they're performing.

With Demand Gen Lookalike audiences, I've seen a lot of people saying they're really excited about how now it only needs a seed list of 100 people. I’m not terribly excited about that part of the announcement, the part I like is that you're now going to get insights into the Lookalike audience itself. So not your seed list of 100 people, but the lookalike that's generated, you'll be able to see what in-market audiences they're on and what affinities they're on and demographics and locations, and I think that's great. You used to be able to do this for Similar Audiences before they were deprecated, so I'm excited you can do that for Demand Gen coming soon.

Profit optimization bidding. Another thing that people are saying, “Oh, it's so exciting, bidding for profit!” In my opinion, it's not really that exciting because you still need to feed your gross margin data into Google Merchant Center. So not revolutionary, but a nice feature? Absolutely.

So to wrap it up, what are the three key themes that I saw coming out of this event that Google did talk about?

The importance of creative and especially visual creative, getting your house in order to take advantage of all the new AI features and AI search results, and then looking into the various transparency and control features that are available to you

 And what you need to do about it is making sure you're testing new creative, that your house is in order to give AI the data it needs, and on the transparency and control front, if you haven't yet started testing PMax, now's the time to do so.

I know it doesn't work well for everyone. I know it's hard to do with lead gen, and I know it's hard to do with small budgets. That being said, there was a lot of writing on the wall here that some of your campaign types and your campaign features you're using today are going to go away. Start testing PMax now. Try to work with the system to figure out how to get it to work for your business.

Now I'm excited to introduce some of my guest experts for today. This is an excerpt from a conversation we had yesterday with my Inside Google Ads course members. That was an hour-long conversation exclusively for my members. You can join at learn.jyll.ca that's J Y L L.ca.

First up is fellow ex-Googler Solange Abraham. She was based out of the Dublin office at Google and left a few months ago. Here's what she had to say about GML.

To me, the event very much felt like they were playing catch-up with the competition. When we look at things like the engaged audiences that you mentioned, Jyll, these are things that TikTok and Meta are killing at the minute when it comes to setting up ads over there.

Look, if we bring it over to the video end, making collaborations between creators and brands easier, this is something that we’ve seen with Meta already where you can already collaborate on posts that enter on both people’s profiles and feeds and things like this.

So it seemed to me like a lot of these features that they were almost using to polish up their products are built from this pressure of the competition around them, and I think that’s why it left a lot of us underwhelmed because we’ve seen all of this before.

One of the things I really loved is the focus on the customer experience, the end experience, and I think that’s why some of the advertisers are a little salty because the focus does seem to be with the end customer in their journey and their experience.

Thank you, Solange. If you'd like to connect with her, you can look her up on LinkedIn, Solange Abraham, and the link is in the episode description.

Next, I'd like to introduce another fellow ex-Googler, Mathew Growden, also known as Growdy. We actually worked together at the Google Toronto office, and he left Google in the fall. Here's what he had to say.

I think the devil was in the details yesterday. It did feel almost like a bit of a non-event. It did feel like it was a wash, rinse, repeat.

You’re right, there was a lot of talk of control and transparency, and whether or not there is control or transparency is yet to be seen.

They did a lot of hand waving over AI features that don’t seem to exist. Yet. A lot of, “And this is what it might look like” if you moved really quickly and did it in a video that we edited for perfection.

Philipp [Schindler, Chief Business Officer at Google] did actually do a great job of reinforcing a lot of the general core tenets of very Google-specific things, like the fact that Search continues to grow at 15%, right? That there’s new queries every day. That visual search is now very prominent, which I don’t think they had ever disclosed previously. There was some good reinforcement of core data points at the beginner, but then the rest was a bit of a non-event for me.

If you'd like to hear more of Growdy’s perspective, you can find him on LinkedIn, Mathew Growden.

And last but not least, we have Tod Maffin, host of the Today in Digital Marketing podcast. It is the only podcast I listen to every single day, and I actually subscribe to the newsletter as well, which I highly recommend you do if you work in this industry. I've included the link for that in the episode description. Let's hear what Tod had to say.

The problem with these events is that when you create this kind of buzz around it, you are expected to deliver something revolutionary, and instead what Google delivered was evolutionary.

I think what we could have subtitled this whole thing is, “The Next 10%” because yeah, of course we got some better branding, we got some better ads, we got some better - we got a brand kit, which is great.

Will it actually honour our brand kit things, or will it just say, “You know what? I know your brand colour is blue, but our data says that orange is better for you.” I think that’s more likely, frankly, than anything.

I was disappointed not for what they announced, but for the fact that they just simply took it and went to the next 10%.

To hear more from Tod, be sure to subscribe to the Today in Digital Marketing newsletter, podcast, or both.

Thanks for joining me for this special edition episode of Inside Google Ads, all about Google Marketing Live 2024.

Next week, join me for episode 18, where I'll answer: “What is a good ROAS in Google Ads?” plus a new Insider Challenge for you to solve.

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.

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