Google Marketing Live 2022: A Recap

Google Marketing Live is a gathering of the world’s top marketing and аd experts. At this year’s event, Google announced numerous innovations to its Ads network. Here is a recap of everything new that was announced:

Reimagining Video Ads across Google and YouTube

As videos become more popular and accessible, Google announced some exciting new features: Video action campaigns and App campaigns are slowly rolling out in YouTube Shorts globally. Since YouTube Shorts is an uninterrupted scrollable feature, video ads are also a seamless part of it which in turn gives more exposure to your products, especially after product feeds connected to your campaigns, will also start showing up later this year.

Video Ads in Discover 

The Discover tab in the Google App is a great source of inspiration for many users. This year Google is aiming to integrate video ads into Google’s feeds. Like YouTube Shorts, this feature is also believed to offer a more personalized engaging ad experience.

TV ads to reach a larger audience

Advertisers around the world will soon be able to make use of connected TV campaigns to access affinity, in-market, and demographic audiences on YouTube and most other ad-supported connected TV apps thanks to Display & Video 360.

Driving business results with automation

Performance Max is a goal-based campaign format that enables performance marketers to use a single campaign to leverage all of their Google Ads inventory. Performance Max campaigns were launched to all advertisers at the end of last year, and now we are getting some updates on them, rolling out worldwide:

1. A/B testing is to launch globally later this year – in order to monitor how Performance Max is driving incremental conversions
2. Floodlight conversion bidding in Search Ads 360 is beginning to roll out. Expanded campaign management support in Search Ads 360 and the Google Ads mobile app is also available already.
3. The ability to optimize for in-store sales and start using burst campaigns to help meet in-store goals.
4. Measuring the impact of each campaign is vital to advertisers. Therefore, new insights and explanations that provide better information on what’s key to driving the performance are also part of this year’s new features.
5. Optimization score and recommendations that will help you fine-tune each advertising campaign’s performance are also an addition to this year’s improvements, launching later this summer.

Updates to the Insights Page

The Insights page is a personal assistant to every marketeer – it helps you keep up with market trends and understand your campaign’s performance. The team at Google has decided to freshen up this page with three new reports that are rolling out gradually this year:

• Attribution Insights – find out how your ads work together across all Google surfaces
• Budget Insights – some new opportunities for budget optimization have been introduced
• Audience Insights – you can check out how your customer segments are driving the campaign performance

New Features in Responsive Search Ads and Responsive Display Ads

Automation turns out to be one of the themes of this year’s Google Marketing Live event. Google is rolling out automatically created assets to responsive search ads. If you choose to use this feature, which will initially be available in English only, it will create ads for you based on the content from your landing pages and existing ad campaigns. 

As for responsive display ads – you will now be able to showcase your brand on mobile-first full-screen layouts. To top that off, Google is also going to introduce scrollable ads and videos based on your product feed.

Account-level Asset Library

You can now store and manage your digital creative assets in the new account-level Asset Library. You will also be able to create video ads with YouTube-optimized templates in the near future.

Optimization Score is Expanding

…to every campaign type in Google Ads.

Improvements to Lead Form Extensions and CRM Integrations

• Over 2,500 questions to choose from for your lead form extensions (in English only currently)
• Zapier is in the process of being integrated into Google Ads
• New lead funnel reporting

Building resilience for the future of marketing

• Later this year, Google aims to introduce lift testing. You will be able to run Conversion Lift tests and Search lift tests, respectively to measure incremental conversions based on users and geography and to measure the impact that your YouTube campaign has on organic searches.  
• The global site tag will become Google Tag. A single tag will be used for both Google Ads and Google Analytics, and no additional code will be required to combine tags.
• Testing of internet-based advertising and remarketing updates in google Ads and Display & Video 360 will begin later this year.
• Something new that will be launched by the end of the year is My Ad Center where people will be able to adjust their preferences in terms of the types of ads they want to see, and how their data is used.

Source: Google Ads Help

Image by Google Ads & Commerce Blog