Google Marketing Live took place over the past few days and for the first time, the event was live-streamed on YouTube. The conference explores upcoming and current developments to Google’s advertising platforms. It includes workshops, Q & A’s and presentations by some of Google’s major clients, showing advertisers and brands alike how new developments and ways of thinking can have impacts on your business.
This year Google wants to help marketer drive growth and data management through more integrated and diversified ad campaigns. For customers, this will mean ads that are far more engaging and relevant to the consumer’s journey, create end-to-end campaigns. This means some significant new developments to existing ads, as well as new ways of creating advertisements and tracking their impacts on conversions.
Google wants to make data tracking and advertising across all of its platforms easier. There were three key announcements and related software made at the conference;
- Discover Campaigns
- Bumper Machine and Video Creative
- Integrated Search and Shopping Functions (deep links, gallery ads, showcase shopping)
Discover Campaigns
Discover campaigns are a new way of advertising on Google’s feed-style Discover and other properties. Google’s thinking behind this is simple – people are open to looking at new things and ideas when scrolling feeds and Discover pages, why not target them with ads? Discover Campaigns will be integrated through Discover, Maps, Play Store, Gmail and YouTube, opening up many new opportunities to advertisers. There are some key elements of Discover Campaigns that Google is emphasising for them to be successful; quality, relevancy and integration. Google stressed in their keynote that the quality of the brand assets used in the campaigns should be as high as possible – though they can be existing assets, awesome! This may seem obvious, but it’s worth remembering that when scrolling through Discover consumers are on the search for new and visually rich information and products, therefore the poor quality will be easily detected. This is also important for relevancy; as the Discover feed is mostly new information and tailored content provided by Google there is a level of trust on the part of the consumer. Google doesn’t want to turn away consumers from Discover and other platforms due to irrelevant and low-quality advertising. Discover campaigns is in Beta and will be available to most users towards the end of 2019. If you would like to experience the Discovery Campaigns Beta, simply contact Google. To see how easy Google have made Discover Campaigns and how they can help your business, head to our in-depth piece here.
Bumper Machine and Video Creative
Google made a significant push for marketers to engage in more video creative at this years GML. They unveiled Bumper Machine to a standing ovation and showcased how video creative can drive conversions and ROI with presentations from growing enterprises. YouTube advertising has previously been viewed as prohibitive to smaller businesses as it commonly requires a video development team and a hefty budget. Bumper Machine wants to change that, based on the positive consumer response to bumper ads, Google made it simple to develop current campaigns into video campaigns for YouTube. Google wants you to use your existing, high-quality assets to quickly and easily create 6-second narratives – complementing your existing YouTube advertising or as your very first foray into YouTube. Trending brands Shinola and Techstyle both discussed how video creative and YouTube is becoming a more substantial part of their marketing strategy YOY. Google is taking steps to remove the prohibitive stigmas surrounding video creative, hoping to make it a more complete end-to-end experience for advertisers. Bumper machine ads and video creative, in general, are going to be pushed by Google across the key platforms of YouTube, Gmail and Discover. Read more here.
Integrated Search and Shopping Campaigns
For as long as we can remember Google has been the only destination to answer all of our queries, but we have seen it develop into a place to shop, research or just find a nearby pizza spot. Google continues to develop Search and the result is much more relevant and useful advertising – great for consumer conversions and better user experience overall. The next step is greater integration between searches, platforms and how users are interacting with the ads. Google announced Gallery ads and enhanced Showcase Shopping alongside deep links for ads too. Gallery ads offer a whole new way for brands to interact with search queries and will mean more rich and relevant creative for customers. Showcase Shopping has been expanded to other Google properties and offers more integration of relevant information for advertisers. Deep links will allow ads to open associated apps on users phones, delivering a better user experience, enhanced measurement and closing the loop on mobile conversions. Have a look here for more information on Google’s enhanced search.
We don’t want to overwhelm you, but this is only day 1 of the GML 2019 conference, exciting huh? Check back here in a couple of days for more blogs on day 2!
