Top 10 Updates from Google Marketing Live 2019

Google Marketing Live opened up its main keynote with an abundance of product updates & new releases that will help marketers increase the performance of their campaigns. The word of the day was “Machine Learning,” with almost all of the updates involve machine learning to help automate these solutions, as well as use fewer consumer data touch-points to locate the users in a privacy forward way.

Here are the most important updates from Google Marketing Live.

1. Discovery Ads: Native-format ads intended to reach consumers when they’re open to discovering new brands or products. These image + text ad units use audience targeting and appear in the YouTube home feed, Gmail’s social and promotion tabs, and introduce new ad placements in the Google Discover news feed.

2. Gallery Ads: These ad units will introduce photos into the Google search results page, allowing brands to put single and carousel images into their search ads. This has shown in beta tests to increase CTR by 25%.

3. Deep Linking: Deep linking has been an oft requested feature for years, and it is finally coming to search, display and shopping ads for mobile app brands, By linking data through Firebase & Google Analytics, it will be easy to define in-app events, as well as send users directly to a specific part of the app. In early tests, this has shown to increase conversion rates by 100%, and increasing mobile conversions by 40%.

4. Smart Bidding Updates: Smart Bidding has helped many advertisers drive better performance, while automating a lot of what most advertisers have done manually over the past few decades. A new bidding option called “Maximize Conversion Value” is being released to optimize what matters to most brands — revenue. In addition, many brands have rich datasets that are not always accessible in the Google Ads platform and there are now three ways to help guide the smart bidding algorithms to increase performance.

5. Choose conversions you want to optimize at the campaign level

6. Store visits optimizations

7. Conversion action sets that can be shared across campaigns

8. Conversion Value Rules: You can set rules based on who people are and what products they are using. Conversion reporting will reflect those rules, and smart bidding can be used to set optimal bids in each auction.

9. Bumper Machine: YouTube released 6 second Bumper Ads to great fanfare, but many advertisers have not had the resources to edit their existing longer-form content to adapt to this shorter medium. The Bumper Machine uses machine learning to cut down current YouTube videos that are 90 seconds or shorter to algorithmically create three to four variations of a 6 second ad. In addition, there will be a light editing tool as well to make sure that you can fully edit the video for some final touches before setting live.

10. Seasonality Adjustments: Often times when brands have sales, they can expect to see increased conversion rates over very specific days. By giving Google data around the timeframe and the expected lifts, it can take this information into account via machine learning to adjust smart bids in real time.

11. Audience Expansion Tool: Google is now giving the option to expand audiences automatically via a simple to use slider tool right in the targeting section. In early tests, advertisers have seen up to a 50% boost in conversions by broadening their target audience.

12. Ability to Buy Directly on Google Properties: Similar to what Instagram just released a few weeks ago, Google will roll out, in its new shopping hub at www.google.com/shopping, the ability to buy directly from retailers, but also a way to buy directly through a Google checkout, using already saved Google profile information for ease. These purchases would also have a Google Guarantee as well, giving consumers peace of mind when making their purchases.

13. Audio and TV Inventory: Later this year, in Display and Video 360, audio ads, as well as national and local TV ads will be able to bought directly in platform. This will allow buyers to buy both linear and connected TV and audio all in one platform with the major players in their respective spaces (AMC, NBC, Spotify, etc).

Google continues to innovate and create products that keep both their consumers in mind, but while also increasing the capabilities of advertisers to work smarter, not harder.