POV: Google Marketing Live

Background

Google made a series of announcements at its annual Google Marketing Live event, including new opportunities for ads in YouTube Shorts, new layouts for Responsive Display Ads plus improved analytics and new ad testing options.

Details and Implications

To help advertisers tap into YouTube Shorts which has seen increased interest over the last year, and more than 30 billion daily views according to Google, Video Action campaigns and App campaigns are rolling out on YouTube Shorts worldwide.

Jerry Dischler, Vice President / General Manager, Google Ads, said in a blog post: “This is an exciting milestone for advertisers, and a key step on our road to developing a long-term YouTube Shorts monetization solution for our creators, which we'll share more about soon.”

Such is the power of video ads across the Google ecosystem that Google is also looking at how to integrate short video ads into Google Discover – Google’s interest-based organic content feed.

To bring commerce and media closer together it was also announced that from later this year brands will be able to connect product feeds into their Shorts promotions and will make them more shoppable with product links directly in-stream. And in the US only, Google is also introducing the ability to promote loyalty benefits to potential customers when they’re shopping across Google through an integration with Google Ads.

Automation was also a key element of the event, with Google announcing a series of updates to Performance Max Campaigns, which make it easier for marketers to run ads on any Google property, like YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and search. 

Updates to Performance Max Campaigns included: increased A/B testing; expanded campaign management support in Search Ads 360 and the Google Ads mobile app; the ability to optimise for in-store sales; maximizing impact with burst campaigns for a set time period to help meet in-store goals during seasonal events; providing more performance data on campaigns covering attribution, audience and auction insights and optimizing score and recommendations so you can see how to improve your campaign.

Whilst Google is giving brands and retailers new ways to leverage their first party data within its ecosystem to increase sales, it is also offering consumers more control over the data used to enhance their own ad experience. The Google My Ad Center, launching later this year, is designed to allow users to keep control of their privacy and online experience, with users being able to pick the types of ads they want to see more or less of, and control how their data informs ads they see across YouTube, Search and Discover.

Summary

This year’s Google Marketing Live had a focus on personalisation and privacy, increased ad opportunities and formats, and the increased use of first party data to enhance the effectiveness of advertising across the Google ecosystem. All the updates and enhancements will come on stream in different geographies at different speeds but together it was an event that was full of new opportunities for advertisers.

Further Reading:

Digiday | Social Media Today | Search Engine Journal | Google Ads & Commerce Blog