Final Thoughts on Google Marketing Live

Google Marketing Live kicked off yesterday with a keynote speech, during which several changes and additions to Google Ads were unveiled.

The majority of the talk focused on video ad upgrades, automation, and a glimpse of future technologies.

The issue is that Google's list of changes appears to be becoming longer by the year, making it more difficult to determine what is truly important.

That's why I built the helpful summary to assist you to figure out what changes or preparations you need to make.

Here’s everything marketers and advertisers need to know from Google Marketing Live May 2022.

As I just mentioned, there were lots of small features, developments, betas, and tools tossed about in this year’s event, but they can be grouped into four core categories:

Google Shopping updates - May 2022

This year, there was a lot of talk about "inspiration," "ideas," "immersive," and "intuitive" when it came to the Google Shopping experience.

I'll leave it at that, but here are the key shopping improvements that matter to e-commerce firms.

Checkout on Merchant: Shoppers will soon be able to checkout directly from a listing, which will bring them to the checkout page on the advertiser’s site. This is starting with Shopify and Walmart and will expand to other partners and retailers in the future.

Immersive Shopping Experience: For apparel, there will be a “powerful, swipeable, visual feed” rolling out just in time for the holiday season. Organic results and Shopping ads using rich images and descriptions will be blended in the SERP and users can also swipe up on an ad to see more product detail.

3D AR Shopping Experience: We will also soon be able to view 3D models of products right in Search results.

Product Improvement Recommendations: This tab within Google Ads will allow retailers to not just optimize their campaigns, but their individual products. It will detect and diagnose issues with your products like missing information, insufficient bidding, and more.

Video Ads Updates - May 2022

More Ads In YouTube Shorts: Video action campaigns and App campaigns are now rolling out on YouTube Shorts worldwide. Later this year, product feeds will start showing up on YouTube Shorts, making video ads more shoppable.

Video Ads In Google Discover: Google is exploring ways to bring short video ads to Discover, which would fit in seamlessly with organic content.

Display & Video 360 Connected TV Campaigns: Soon you’ll be able to utilize Display & Video 360 to create connected TV campaigns to reach affinity, in-market, and demographic audiences across YouTube and other ad-supported connected TV apps.

Reporting updates - May 2022

Conversion modeling updates: Improvements in conversion modeling include supporting more browsers, enhanced conversions integrations with HubSpot, Tealium, and other platforms, on-device conversion measurement, and a lead funnel report to see how your qualified and converted leads are performing.

Simplified tagging: One Google tag will replace the Global Site Tag for all Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts. Manage tags centrally without additional code.

GA4 new Home experience: Google Analytics 4, which is set to replace Universal Analytics next year, will soon have a new Home dashboard that automatically uncovers insights and predictions based on where your audience members are in their journey.

Advancements In Automation Updates - May 2022

Performance Max Campaigns: A series of updates to Performance Max campaigns are rolling out throughout the remainder of the year. They include:

YouTube video creation in 60 seconds
A/B testing
Expanded campaign management support in Search Ads 360 and the Google Ads mobile app
Ability to optimize for in-store sales
New performance data such as attribution, audience and auction insights
Optimization score and recommendations

Updates To Insights Page: Google is rolling out three new reports to the Insights Page over the coming months. They include:

Attribution Insights: See how your ads work together across Google surfaces.
Budget Insights: Find new opportunities for budget optimization.
Audience Insights: See show how your customer segments are driving campaign performance.

Improvements To Responsive Search Ads:

Google is rolling out automatically created assets to responsive search ads later this year, which is designed to improve ad relevance.
This feature generates assets automatically based on content from landing pages and existing ad units.
Should you choose to opt-in, Google Ads will display the best performing combination of provided assets and automatically created assets.

Mobile-First Layouts For Responsive Display Ads: All-new, mobile-first layouts will allow you to showcase your brand on full-screen vertical ad inventory. In addition, Google is introducing scrollable ads and videos based on your product feed.

All New Asset Library: A new account-level Asset Library can be used to store all your digital creative assets. Soon you’ll have the option to create video ads using YouTube-optimized templates.

Expansion Of Optimization Score: Google Ads’ Optimization Score is expanding to cover every campaign type for advertisers around the world.

So what are my thoughts on Google Marketing Live event?

So this major changes and updates are related to the e-commerce sector majorly.

The weird part is now google product feeds will appear on YouTube shorts. So, it's obvious that YouTube will push hard on Shorts.

Another thing that is a bit weird to me is "Google Checkout" now you can add to cart directly from the SERP

I can list several eComm/eTail partners have their flavor of integration for this today, the reach of Google will speed up consumers familiarity and adoption.

The key thing to remember about the Shopify app for Google Shopping is that it DOES make syncing to GMC easy… as your product data currently resides. It does NOT make any sort of feed optimizations simplistic. Really important distinction.

The important thing is "Performance Max campaigns", released last year, are Google’s latest pride and joy.

I’ll let you decide if Performance Max is right for you or not, but as a reminder, this campaign type allows you to advertise across all of Google’s properties with a single campaign.

And G is making Performance Max stronger with automation and giving chance to play around with it.

Basically now we are going to see more struggle on organic side due to all facilities people can easily pay money to get money from google.

All SEOs have to buckle up their strategy to beat paid marketing :)

Hope this helps you to summarise what happened in GML 2022.

Resources

https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/display-video-360/

https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/6213232

https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/6071542

https://blog.google/products/marketingplatform/360/dv360-google-audience-ctv

https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/performance-max/

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/12158560

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10256472

Final Thoughts on Google Marketing Live - May 2022