Three Emerging AI Capabilities Within Google Ads
Google’s annual marketing event held in May was jam-packed with new AI-driven capabilities and products. Although receiving lukewarm reception from the crowd, the new capabilities shared will create opportunities and challenges for marketers, making the need for thoughtful guidance something that should not be overlooked. Here are three upcoming additions to the Google Ads platform, and what marketers must keep in mind.
Performance Max and creative controls
Within the Performance Max asset UI, advertisers will soon have the capability to share creative information like color codes, font styles, and reference images for Google AI to leverage and create custom creatives for use in the campaign type. But, this new streamlined approach to whipping up multiple creative versions will need to come with careful consideration. As an advertiser, it’ll be paramount to review all creative assets generated to ensure what is crafted meets all of the brand’s guidelines. Additionally, a whole new component of a campaign build may be sourcing media to upload to the creative generation tool as part of this update. This will give marketers the opportunity to more easily enhance ad quality, but won’t come without the need for thoughtful attention.
Visual search in Google Ads shopping
Soon, consumers will be able to snap a photo of a product in the wild using Google Lens and upload the image as a Google search, connecting to shopping listings in real time. This feature will open new doors for shopping ad optimizations. Traditionally, shopping ads match to queries utilizing product info like titles and descriptions. With the main search component in visual search being an image, advertisers should expect product images to become a major aspect of query matching. While the technical details powering the feature are not entirely known, advertisers should be ready to understand what characteristics may make your product listing the best option for an image search. Additionally, if the image entered is your product, ensuring your brand is the first in listings may become a whole new sect of branded search.
AI Dynamic Ad experience
The Dynamic Ad experience unveiled by Google is a new opportunity to secure valuable customer interactions and guide consumers to a conversion. The example provided by Google showcased how a user looking for a shipping container could use the AI Dynamic Ad experience to upload photos of the items they needed stored and Google would provide what the best storage options would be based on the input information. One of the more awe-inspiring product launches of the live event, the AI Dynamic Ad experience was also one of the least detailed, but like any of the new product launches, marketers can expect quality inputs, as well as guidance, to be necessary for creating a seamless customer experience.
This new product will most likely utilize an advertiser’s web page to create the engaging content within the dynamic experience. Like the other new AI capabilities, advertisers will likely have the opportunity to add inputs to guide the experience for customers. Of course, careful auditing will be key, and advertisers must monitor the dynamic experience to ensure accurate representations of their products. In the demo, the product prominently featured the headline “Generated content may be inaccurate, please check responses on the Extra Storage Space website,” so it is possible that unaligned components may creep their way into the Dynamic Ad experience.
What this means for marketers
With all of the new AI-driven additions to Google Ads, marketers must keep a pulse on the most effective ways to interact with, and ultimately, optimize their campaigns with these new features. Maintaining oversight will be key as AI-generated content has the possibility to be misaligned with brand tone and guidelines. Each of these new products has the potential to accelerate productivity and creativity, as well as enhance customer experience, but will need a marketer’s discerning eye to perform effectively.
