Artificial intelligence was the main ingredient in everything presented yesterday during Google’s Marketing Live event on Tuesday.
Although it has been operating in the background of Google’s ad products for many years, Google put AI at the forefront of its latest offerings, aiding decision making, creativity and increasing ROI with features such as Smart Bidding and fully AI-powered products like Performance Max and Google Product Studio.
Global testing of generative AI in Performance Max will begin later this year. This feature revamps workflow to make it easier for advertisers to create and curate assets. Starting with their website, brands will be able to create and refine assets, remove ones they don’t like and preview ads before deployment. To make it easier to increase revenue from both new and existing customers, Google says it’s also enhancing its new customer acquisition campaign goal and introducing a re-engagement goal for Performance Max campaigns.
According to Google’s internal data, advertisers who use Performance Max achieve, on average, over 18% more conversions at a similar cost per action, which is up from 13% roughly a year earlier. Adding at least one video of each orientation to a Performance Max campaign delivers 20% more conversations in YouTube compared to horizontal video alone, a re-iterating process the company hopes AI will simplify for advertisers.
Other news coming out of the event includes a generative AI enhancement added to the company’s existing Automatically Created Assets tool. The feature draws from an advertiser’s landing page and previous ads to make assets more relevant to customer searches. It is currently in an open global English beta test and will expand to other languages later this year.
In addition, a closed beta test in the U.S. will start soon for a chatbot within in Google Ads, which is designed to make it easier to build search ads through a natural-language conversation that helps with the creation of assets to drive better performance.
On average, Google’s internal data shows that early adopters of auto-created assets for headlines and descriptions in search ad have 2% more conversions at a similar cost per conversion among groups with responsive search ads.
Two new experiments are taking place in search labs right now that are exploring having search and shopping ads directly integrated within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode, as well as new formats native to the Search Generative Experience (SGE) that use generative AI to customize ads for every step of a consumer’s search journey.
Outside of search, the Google Product Studio is a new solution that uses generative AI to create unique, tailored product imagery. Its features include Scene Generation, a test-to-image model for creating new lifestyle product imagery from basic product photos. Advertisers prompt the tool with a brief description of the scene they want to generate lifestyle scenes without the cost and time of photoshoots. There are also background removal and resolution improvement features. Product Studio will be available in the U.S. later this year, with other markets to follow.
