Google Marketing Live 2019 – NEWS & INSIGHTS
Written by: Joscelyn Bowley, PS&M's Digital Director
Imagine you’re in the market to buy a new home. You’ve been eyeing different styles and you spend the afternoon daydreaming your life based on the various websites you have visited. What about furniture? How will your personality match your new home’s style? Now imagine you’re doing a walkthrough of a model home. While touring, you open your phone to search furniture collections, and in real time, view how they would match the style inside your potential new home. With advancements in machine learning, Google is making this possibility a reality.
Gallery Ads
Trillions of searches happen every year and half of those searches are on mobile. As consumers move to smaller screens their expectations grow for higher quality. In fact, 75% of smartphone users also expect immediate information. Gallery Ads, coming later this year, are the most visual ad experience in your search feed yet. Gallery Ads will appear at the top of your search results and may look familiar to carousel ads but are better. You can seamlessly scroll through high-quality images with captions on each image giving you added relevant information. This provides more information with fewer taps to tell a more holistic brand story. In beta testing Gallery Ads had 25% higher user interactions in search.
Machine Learning & Discovery Ads
The future of search is highly visual. 76% of users say they enjoy new discoveries while shopping and 85% will take an action after that discovery (click to visit a site, read reviews, etc.). Machine learning and neural networks document queries from billions of connections, people, and searches from around the world using large vectors to add up neural matching. Simply put, Google has been making advancements to reduce friction by using images to process and obtain underlying information beyond just the image itself. By using Google Lens the user can search within an image to find products within the image to shop and gather information.
Two-thirds of search queries are part of a multi-day task and one-eighth of those queries repeat every month. By using neural matching, Google stitches together concepts, themes, and sub-topics from the knowledge graph that collects these trillions of searches to create Topic Layers. The Discovery Feed surfaces the users next steps based on these Topic Layers. This eliminates the need to write new queries in search or with voice; thus turning nebulous thoughts and needs in your mind with as little friction as possible. The goal is to guide users in the next step of their discovery journey and make the world’s information universally accessible and useful.
Bumper Machine & Audience Expansion
Machine Learning is taking your video ads to a whole new level. Bumper Machine generates directly in Google Ads to extend your mobile-first creative. Simply upload a video link (up to 90 seconds) and Google “auto- magically” uses machine learning to pick out the most interesting or powerful elements to make a cohesive message in 3 to 4 versions of a 6-second bumper ad for you to choose from. It’s fast, easy to use, and free! 90% of YouTube viewers say they discover new brands and products on YouTube and 55% of Google searchers will go to YouTube before making purchase decisions. Paired with new improvements to custom audience tools, beta users saw 50% more conversions. The new audience expansion tool allows you to increase or decrease audience reach with more granularity to help expand reach and drive more conversions at the same average cost per acquisition (CPA).
Closing Thoughts
The future is bright and visual for ads! Consider these best practices that you can use with new Google features coming this year when planning your next campaign –
1. Where is your audience spending time? (Custom intent audiences)
2. Leverage machine learning. (Bumper machine & audience expansion tool)
3. Foster a ‘Test & Learn’ culture within your internal teams. (Ads data hub & Google Analytics)
