Google announced how it’s bringing new generative AI advancements at the front and center of its advertising products and solutions — helping marketers make decisions, solve problems and enhance creativity.
“This is our moment as an industry to embrace a new era of marketing, to unlock the possibilities of AI, and to rise to increased privacy expectations,” says Google’s vice president and general manager of Ads Jerry Dischler. “If we get this right, we’ll not only build the way forward together, but preserve the open internet that billions of people rely on.”
Here are the major announcements:
1. Manage complexity through chat
For businesses, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to get up and running with a new campaign. WIth this, Google introduces a new, natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads, designed to jumpstart campaign creation and simplify Search ads by combining people’s expertise with Google AI.
Advertisers can simply add a preferred landing page from their website and Google AI will summarize the page. Then, it will generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images and other assets. They can review and easily edit these suggestions before deploying. They can also chat and ask Google AI for ideas, just like asking a colleague.
2. Boost creativity in Performance Max
Performance Max is one of the best examples of how AI-powered campaigns can drive growth for businesses. 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 later.
Google is bringing generative AI to Performance Max to make it even easier to create custom assets and scale them in a few clicks. Advertisers can just provide their website and Google AI will start learning to populate the campaign with text and other relevant assets. The tool will even suggest new images generated just for the brand, helping marketers stand out to customers across a wider range of inventory and formats.
This capability will also be available through the new conversational experience in Google Ads.
3. Deliver new ad experiences with generative AI
At I/O, Google announced new generative AI capabilities coming to Search. These new experiences will make Search smarter and simpler, and Search will continue to be a jumping-off point to the best of the web, including businesses. As the future of Search evolves, the future of advertising will evolve too — bringing more opportunities to grow businesses and showcase brands.
This new Search Generative Experience (SGE) can be found in Search Labs, a place to access Google Search experiments. At I/O, Google showed how ads will appear above and below this new experience. Now, over the coming months, Google will experiment with Search and Shopping ads that are directly integrated within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode. Moreover, the company will also experiment with new formats native to SGE that use generative AI to create relevant, high-quality ads that are customized to every step of the search journey.
4. An AI-powered and privacy-first future
Building user trust is vital to the long-term durability of the ad-supported internet. The company wants to help people navigate this moment with Google Ads products that are privacy-first and AI-powered. As third-party cookies are phased out of Chrome next year, Google ads teams are actively testing new privacy-preserving signals from the Privacy Sandbox to help advertisers continue to reach relevant customers and measure results.
These ads products are guided by Google’s AI Principles and designed to help businesses thrive. As always, Google will be experimenting first, testing and listening to feedback along the way.
Watch the Google Marketing Live keynote and digital post-show for more news and join the conversation at #GML2023.