Google Marketing Live 2019
May 16, 2019
Here is a keynote summary of Google Marketing Live 2019.
Google’s Marketing Live Ads Innovation was 2 hours of new upgrades for Google and its properties. Google is working hard to create cohesion across its various platforms and you can see it in what they chose to focus on in their presentation.
They are hitting mobile hard by boosting tracking capabilities and ad options. They also are pushing hard for YouTube to be better integrated into users’ lives, so ad capabilities and the importance of YouTube is growing.
Shopping is also getting an overhaul to compete with Amazon, and local businesses are getting better visibility. Google also detailed their recent and upcoming changes to user privacy which for now seems to be a heavier reliance on Google’s data and machine learning over data which advertisers can collect directly.
Here’s a summary of key points:
- 2 New Ad Types: Discovery and Gallery ads offer rich media across multiple channels
- Shopping Overhaul: New way to buy products and showcase ads getting improved
- Maximize Conversion Value Bidding: Use your own information to help improve automatic bidding
- Mobile Improvements: Deep linking in ads and Firebase improvements for better conversion tracking
- YouTube Improvements: Bumper ads are king and Bumper Machine
- Audience Targeting: Custom Affinity and Custom Intent Audiences become one!
- Local Campaigns: Huge increase to local ads inventory including featured products, related searches, pins, and more
- Media Buying: Purchase media across digital and traditional platforms in one place
- Traveling just got easier: Consolidated travel services into one place on Google
Discovery and Gallery Ads
Discovery ads are Google’s foray into monetizing the Discover section of Google by creating image carousels that show across multiple platforms. They will display in the YouTube home feed, Gmail promotions and Social tabs, and the Discover section of Google. The idea behind this is that you will hit customers based on their interests in multiple areas of their daily Google usage using high-quality creative content.
Gallery Ads are similar to Discovery Ads, but will be on the Search Network. They offer similar high-quality creative image carousels, but will appear in search results. Users can swipe through the images or click into them to see the images in a feed. They will have a headline (you provide Google with 3 and they will rotate them out), 70-character taglines for each image, and 4-8 images.
Shopping Ads
The biggest addition is Google’s new shopping homepage, which gives users the ability to purchase products via traditional shopping ads by finding a local store offering the product users are looking for, or directly through Google. This last option will be Google’s own shopping network where stores can sell their inventory on Google shopping and users never have to navigate off Google onto a site to make the purchase. This will come with a Google Guarantee, so advertisers will need to get their stores approved with Google.
We don’t know what this process will look like, but it will most likely require the normal Google Guarantee setup at a minimum. Google will also pull in reviews for the products, and link relevant YouTube review videos for users to watch to help them make their purchase decisions, in-line with Google’s efforts to bring YouTube into their advertising network. The new shopping network will be available on Google Assistant, Search, Images, and YouTube.
Google has seen good results with Showcase Shopping ads and as a result, are expanding the service. They will now be eligible to run on Google Images, YouTube, and the Discover section of Google. The idea is to hit users in places where they are looking for inspiration and new ideas. Great for brands that focus heavily on their aesthetic or promoting lifestyle products.
The last major innovation is the ability to run shopping campaigns with Retail Partners. Retailers will be able to allocate a portion of their advertising budget to their supply partners’ shopping ads while suppliers can tell their retail partners what products or categories they want them to run.
Maximize Conversion Value
Google is revamping their Maximize Conversion Value bidding strategy. This will use user-provided information to make better bidding decisions. You will be able to choose the specific conversion actions that you want to optimize bids for at the campaign level and even create sets of conversion actions that can be shared across campaigns.
Adding on to that, you will be able to create conversion value rules for when you know different conversions have different values to your business. Google can then optimize bids based on those values. You can also assign those values to people in certain audiences.
Finally, Google will be able to factor in seasonality in its automatic bidding to change depending on on-or-off seasons. You’ll be able to define your on-season so Google knows that data in that season should not affect how it bids during the rest of the year.
Mobile
Google is pushing mobile usage and advertising heavily this year so many of their other product offerings and improvements are centered around mobile. One of those features is Deep Linking will now be available on Google Ads. This will help link ads to sections of apps for better user experience on Mobile.
To go along with better usage of deep linking in apps, Android and Firebase are getting better conversion tracking options which is HUGE for advertisers for apps. Firebase integration will become a must for app advertisers as we will be able to gather much better data on our campaigns.
Video Ads
Google’s efforts to integrate YouTube even more to the rest of Google’s offerings means more improvements in video advertising.
Google data shows that 6-second bumper ads are the most effective for brand lift and recall, but are expensive and difficult to make so they are making them a little easier.
To do this, they have created Bumper Machine which can take any 90 second or less YouTube video and turn it into a 6-second bumper ad. Bumper Machine will analyze the video and create several 6-second videos for you to choose from for your ad. There will be some “light editing” options, but the idea is that it will do almost all the heavy lifting so you don’t need to make additional 6-second videos.
Custom Audiences
As for targeting, Custom Affinity and Custom Intent audiences are combining to become Custom Audiences.
This should simplify and offer better custom targeting options for advertisers. The Audience Expansion tool will also get improvements to help you find people similar to the custom audiences you are using. This will make their audiences more similar to how Facebook uses their audiences for targeting.
Since Google is cracking down on privacy, advertisers will be more dependent on Google’s data over data that they can collect on their own, so these targeting tools will become increasingly important.
Local Advertising
Another major announcement, one that will impact small businesses greater than anything else they announced, is that Local Campaign inventory is expanding.
Local ads will be able to show users what they can expect to find when they navigate to their store with things like featured product lines. When users search for places in maps, they will see relevant promoted searches in their search suggestions.
For example, if a user searches for “dog parks”, they may later get suggested searches for “pet stores”. Google maps will feature promoted pins more broadly, similar to Waze, which will display along a user’s route that they can add as detours when they are planning a route or navigating. They currently only appear if users are searching in maps or exploring an area in maps.
Google is also making it easy to purchase Audio, Network TV, and Connected TV inventory all in one place. That means advertisers will be able to purchase inventory on Spotify, CSB and Smart TVs all in one place. The Display and Video 360 platform will be getting an overhaul to offer better media buying across digital and traditional media platforms.
Finally, Google is consolidating all of their travel offerings into one place. This is great for users who are trying to plan out a trip as it will retain your travel search for you come back to at any time in your planning process.
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