Have you heard that Google Marketing Live has returned in person? Google came back full force with its exciting live stream featuring advertisers and an audience full of energy. For those who missed it, there is no need to wait. You can watch the recording on-demand or save time by diving into our highlights recap!
Performance Max Campaigns Are Growing
By now, you’ve probably heard about Performance Max Campaigns practically a million times.
But Performance Max campaigns are evolving more this year. Google rolled out new beta features to help us make better optimization decisions. While complementing existing campaign types, the Experiment Tools that do not require a product feed will fully launch this year to help measure incremental performance improvements. Moreover, we will soon be able to see Explanations on the Insights page as well as the Recommendations for Optimizations Score on targeting, budgets, and asset groups based on the campaign goals.
This will ultimately give us more transparency surrounding the algorithms behind the automation.
Improving Shopping Experience & Feeds
“Immersive” and “intuitive” were mentioned multiple times in Google’s presentation of the shopping experience.
The updates offer compelling opportunities for eCommerce businesses. Starting with Shopify and Walmart, and soon expanding to others, shoppers will be able to checkout directly from a Shopping ad. For apparel, there will be a swipeable visual feed rolling out in the holiday season where users can see rich images and descriptions blended in the SERP and will be able to swipe up on an ad to see more product detail. In addition to this, the backend product feed experience is also getting a new perk where the feeds will soon be available on Youtube Shorts and Search turning them into actual digital storefronts.
Reporting & Google Analytics 4 Updates
The Insights page in Google Ads continues to improve. Without having to go to Google Analytics, the Insights section will soon have Multi-touch attribution that lets us understand conversion paths. In addition to the budget feature giving optimizations based on pacing, it will now use the first-party data providing the best-performing segments and signals for Google’s machine learning to make optimizations even better.
Speaking of a privacy-safe world, Privacy Sandbox is still making progress with Topics API and Enhanced Conversion initiatives to have relevant targeting while respecting privacy and tracking conversions in a cookieless world. Additionally, Google Analytics 4 is coming out with simplified tagging where we can manage tags as one Google Tag replacing the Global Site Tag for all Google Ads and Analytics accounts. It was also reported that GA4 will soon have a new home dashboard that automatically shows insights and predictions based on where your audience members are in their user journey.
The Potential of Video
This is going to be the year that advertisers can go “all-in on video”, and take advantage of the growing audience as online video watch time has increased by 34% per day.
YouTube Shorts, Google’s competitive offering despite the rise of TikTok, has a growing audience of over 30 billion views a day, making it a ripe arena for advertisements. This new addition to Google’s Video Action Campaign will aid advertisers in getting one step closer to their audience through increasingly effective short-form video content. You will also be able to add videos to Discovery to the feed, allowing advertisers to engage with their audience in a new way.
The potential of video is only going to grow this upcoming year. Connected TV is another growing opportunity for advertisers and Google is rolling out Google Audiences for Display & Video 360 later this year. This will allow advertisers to run ads on CTV platforms such as Hulu, Peacock, YouTube, and other ad-supported platforms. Later this year, CTV campaigns will have the same ability to target existing Affinity, In-Market, and Demographic audiences with the same success as digital ad types.
As Google continues to actively roll out many exciting features, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any questions on the latest and greatest updates.
Arianna Grossfeld, Sally Park, and Warren Chayalak; Paid Search Coordinators