Google has become part of our everyday lives, from Search (“Google it”) to YouTube and beyond. Every year, they host Google Marketing Live to announce their newest innovations for all things marketing, both paid and unpaid. They also recently had their I/O conference which focus more on the technical side of things. This year, I/O was very focused on AI with lots of new AI features announced for Google Workspace and Search, and they took their ChatGPT competitor, Bard, off of a waitlist and made it available publicly.

Based on what was announced at I/O, it was assumed that Marketing Live would also feature AI heavily, and that is indeed the case.

Here are all the major announcements from Marketing Live in one place, plus a brief layman’s description of each:

Product Studio – aka AI for product imagery

Just have product images on a white background, or have a background you dislike? Well, now you can use Product Studio to easily create more dynamic product images for your store and ads without having to host another photoshoot or go through extensive image edits.

This will be available within Merchant Center Next within the coming months.

Ads within the new Search Generative Experience (aka AI Search)

During the I/O conference, Google announced their Search Generative Experience (aka regular Google search infused with AI generated answers). This new AI Search experience is only available in Beta (we’ve already signed up for the waitlist to try it out!). Now, at Google Marketing Live, they announced how ads will fit into this new AI Search experience.

They are experimenting with Search and Shopping ads within the AI snapshot they provide and within conversational mode if you continue to ask the AI further questions after your initial query.

At this time, there is no way to specifically opt in or out for these new placements within your campaigns, and it is a bit unclear how much data you will receive on how things performed in regular search vs AI search.

Search Ad creation using Google AI

A conversational AI experience is being rolled out for Search Ad creation. This experience will ask you questions along the way to create better assets and you can also ask it for help with effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, and other assets.

The best part here is that you can still edit the responses or choose to skip it entirely if you feel it isn’t giving you the best output.

Google has already had some of these types of suggestions in the Recommendations tab, but now it will be available throughout the creation process if you want to use it.

Performance Max Ad creation using Google AI

Similar to the Search Ad creation using Google AI, Performance Max campaigns will also have this new option which will include AI image generation (since Performance Max includes display ads).

The image creation aspect is great for those brands that have limited image resources and/or don’t have a designer to be creating new versions of images to be tested over time.

We’re excited to test the image creation out for clients and see how well it works!

Merchant Center Next

This is a simplified version of the current version of Merchant Center (where you can upload your ecommerce products for both free and paid Google listings). There will still be more advanced options if you need them, but the idea here is to make it a bit more accessible for the smaller ecommerce businesses that don’t have a whole tech or marketing team.

It will be able to automatically populate your product details just from doing a scan of your website. The interface also does seem a bit more user-friendly than the current Merchant Center.

This will be rolling out to users throughout 2023, so if you already have a Merchant Center account, be on the lookout for an email about getting access to the new version.

2 New YouTube Ad Campaign Types – Video Views and Demand Gen

Can’t leave out YouTube! After all, it is the number # search engine behind only Google itself.

This part is the least focused on AI of all the announcements…

Video View Campaigns – this is aimed to maximize your views (pretty well named haha). Unlike other types of campaigns, you don’t have to choose 1 type of format and you will be able to run in-stream, in-feed, and on Shorts to maximize your budget.It will also only run on Google-owned properties (so no in-stream on random websites on the Display Network).

Demand Gen Gampaigns – this will leverage AI to help engage and drive action with consumers. As with Video Views, these will show only on Google-owned properties including the Discover Feed and Gmail. You will also be able to create Lookalike segments to target within this campaign based on any of your own email lists and YouTube users on your channel.

These both seem like interesting formats to test based on your goals. Generally, we don’t see a ton of direct action from YouTube ads (unless it’s a free sign-up/download), so time will tell if Demand Gen actually improves this.

7 new Ads Features

A handful of tactical ads features were also announced. We won’t bore you with the nitty gritty here, but we’ll list them/what they do

• Brand restrictions for Broad match search – basically preventing you from wasting budget on your brand search terms in any campaign that isn’t designated to be for those terms
• Google AI in Smart Bidding – bidding strategies will now have a deeper integration of large language models to better understand the searcher’s intent (and match it to your ads)
• Top Search Categories – you’ll be able to review the top categories of searches you are showing up for in your Search campaigns at the ad level to help you figure out where you might need to optimize your ad copy, or help you figure out how you might want to segment your campaigns to speak more specifically to certain categories with your ads
• Campaign Prefills – these will be Google-generated suggestions for budgets and assets based on any previous campaigns, your website, and AI predictions
• Updates to Ads Creative Studio – if you use this tool to create assets, you’ll now be able to directly export straight into Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads
• Asset Insights – this will allow for deeper insights on assets being used so you can better understand what is and isn’t working. We always love more data, so we’re excited to see what this feature looks like!
• Improved Search Terms on Insights Page – this include more search term categories, the ability to sort by custom date ranges, and historical insights. Again, the more data the better, so we’re happy to see Google giving more options there.

If you’ve played around with AI Chat and AI tools in any capacity, you know that the clearer and more refined your input is, the better the output will be. I assume the same will be for these new tools. If you don’t give it robust or detailed enough information, it might get things wrong or provide a weaker ad/image/copy/result. These should be considered as tools to help streamline processes and make them more efficient, but they can’t replace actual strategy and still need optimal human input to get the results you want. Don’t just put in some information and assume the AI will get it right 100% of the time – things still need to be monitored and adjusted!

If you’ve been trying to ignore AI tools, well, now might be the time to start embracing them. They aren’t going away any time soon, and do truly have some fantastic use cases within business and marketing to make your life a bit easier and more efficient. Learning how to use them properly will be your key to success in the long term.

Now let us know, what new features are you most excited for? And how are you feeling about AI creeping into more and more aspects of business?