The much awaited Google Marketing Live 2019 happened last month in May. With 2 days of back to back seminars covering different topics for marketers and developers, it was a treat to watch LIVE online by thousands of people all across the globe. In the house there were around 5000 people in San Francisco. There were many new announcements and updates that definitely were good enough for the marketers! Here are some key takeaways from the 2 days event.
Gmail smart reply is now used by many users out of 130 billion Gmail users worldwide. Almost 10% of Gmail users that reply to email each week use smart reply. They said that “Google understands intent so you can anticipate intent” for Google ads.
75% of users expect immediate information when they are searching on their phone. With this researched data, Google has launched Gallery Ads – a new ad format that helps you show your offering with compelling images and text. With these ads, users can swipe through visual ads that sit on the top of the ad result on mobile. When people can swipe the images with description beneath images, the headline on the top remains steady.
The gallery ads can include 4 to 8 images with 70 characters ad descriptions for all the images and up to 3 headlines for different Call-to-action (That’s seriously amazing!!). Google says that such ads can increase 25% more interaction with the ads – that can be swipes of clicks.
Google Ads will have Deep Linking capabilities in the coming months. You will be able to track both mobile web links and mobile app link from Google ads web tracking with deep linking enabled. It will support both, Universal links on iOS and App links on android. The early test of Deep Link ads shows 2X conversion rates.
Next, Google announced smart bidding option called Maximize conversion value. Google has introduced 3 new ways to guide smart bidding models. First, you will be able to choose conversion actions from the campaign level. Smart bidding can also be used for store visit conversion for search campaigns.
With Seasonality adjustments, now you can select the date and duration to get a better conversion rate. The smart bidding models can automatically adjust bids during that season period.
Google Ads introduced 6 seconds bumper ads in 2018 and it is getting quite popular since then. These ads have 107% higher ad recall and 134% higher purchase intent. Google is launching Bumper Machine later this year. This will generate 6 seconds video ads directly into Google ads. This can become possible by using any existing YouTube video under 90 seconds. After the span of few minutes, Bumper machine will produce 3 to 4 different 6 second ads that you can also edit before used it! This is all going to become possible with machine learning.
To find the customer in the easiest way, Google Ads is introducing Custom affinity and Custom intent audience – that both are known as Custom Audiences. Well, I am already using Custom affinity and believe me, it is just awesome!
Along with Custom audiences, Google ads is also introducing Audience expansion tool. This tool will help you to understand the impact of your ad on reach. The early test of this tool has shown 50% more conversion. Both Custom audience and Audience expansion will be also available for YouTube and Discovery ads later this year.
Google has made 3 new shopping announcements keeping the retailers in the mind. The first is, Google Shopping experience for users. They can choose a product from thousands of option and then decide to buy either online or in the nearby store. User can also buy from that retailer online from Google. It will start from the very new Google Shopping home page and end at using Google Express with Google Shopping to receive your product at your home! This is already in action in France and will be rolled out in the USA soon. Yet not sure about India. Later this year, people will be able to buy from Google voice search. Users will also be able to buy the product that they are seeing in a video on YouTube while the video continues playing. To use this, retailers need to signup at www.google.com/retail/shoppingactions.
Second is the introduction of Showcase shopping ads. It was introduced last year on Google search ads and it has seen 80% new users traffic on websites. Looking at the success, now this ad will be available on other Google platforms like Google images, YouTube and Discover on Google search.
Third is, Shopping campaigns with partners. Retailers will now have option to select option for Shopping campaign with partners. Brands can have option to select product or product groups to select with partners.
I personally feel Discovery Ads is a real value addition for marketers. Watch this video to understand it in detail.
Here are some tips for Google Discovery Campaigns:
- Use inspirational images that clearly showcase your products
- Provide as many high-quality images as possible
- Upload square and landscape images
- Re-use assets from other successful marketing campaigns
- Don’t include CTA text in uploaded images
- Encourage people to engage with offers and promotions in ad description
Talking again about the bumper ads, you must understand the requirement to create awesome video ads. So here are some pro tips to create engaging YouTube video ads:
- Attract attention from the start
- Brand naturally and with purpose
- Connect through emotion and storytelling
- Direct the viewer what to do next
Finally, I loved the announcement of App deep linking and measurement. It is for mobile advertising that helps in a single campaign for both web and app. This is very important because it enables you to get traffic that you are driving to your ads and send it into app deep link automatically when the user has your app installed in the mobile. This will generate better result and better user retention as well. So when a user downloads your app, it sends a very strong signal to Google about the user’s preference. The saved preferences of the user inside the app – like payment information, shipping details, loyalty membership – makes it so easy for the user to get the quick checkout from the app. Google is doing enhancement to the machine learning models for better app deep linking applications.
Well, that is a lot of information for you I am sure! Digital Marketing agencies in India or any Digital Marketing expert in India is going to find some time to get acquainted with these new updates. Though there were few more updates and announcements as well, but, these are the important points that I thought you should know!
