Google Marketing Live echoed a few familiar themes this year that included helpfulness, efficiency, machine learning, and privacy. This coincided with some of the newest ad formats that Google unveiled including Discovery Ads, Gallery Ads, and Bumper Ads. Continue reading to find out how your brand can benefit from these latest product innovations.
Discovery Ads
According to Prabhaker Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Ads at Google, 75% of consumers enjoy unexpected discoveries while shopping and 85% of online consumers take a product-related action within 24 hours. That’s where Discovery Ads comes in. They aim to “reach people when they want to find something new…” and they “ …deliver the best ad across each Google property to help you get found,” stated Raghavan during Google Marketing Live 2019.
What’s especially powerful about Discovery Ads is you can use various creative assets from other media so you don’t have to consistently create and recreate new assets. Keep in mind, though, that it’s important to keep refreshing your creatives because the machine learning algorithms are constantly trying to find the best option for you.
Actionable Steps You Can Take
- Associate potential In-Market audiences
- Use your winning creative assets from other medias
- Focus on the “power of intent” at the Audiences Insights tab to determine creative themes
- Use visually-rich images
- Refresh creatives inputs often to let the machine optimize better
Discovery Ads will be available globally by the end of the year.
Gallery Ads
According to Sissy Hsiao, VP of Product Management for Mobile App Advertising at Google, 75% of smartphone users expect immediate information when searching on their phone. (Google Marketing Live 2019) To provide users with more context, Gallery Ads will be added to the SERP. Gallery Ads are essentially a scrollable image gallery with text on the SERP. You can upload four to eight images, 70 character taglines, and up to three headlines.
As Google stated in their blog, “By combining search intent with a more interactive visual format, Gallery Ads make it easier for you to communicate what your brand has to offer.”
Actionable Steps You Can Take
- Use winning ad texts from existing campaigns as descriptions of the images
- Get started with all the best sellers and the ones that performed well on mobile. Ensure their is consistency between images in the ad unit and landing pages
During our Google Marketing Live coverage, Udayan Bose, CEO at NetElixir, stated that using winning ads and ensuring brand consistency between images, the ad unit, and landing page is of the utmost importance. He stated that if you change the images and the ad unit but not the landing page, you’re immediately disrupting the entire user experience, which is something that needs to be focused on so your brand is consistent for users interacting with your brand.
Bumper Ads
YouTube has 2 billion signed-in users per day, according to Nicky Rettke, Director of Product Management for YouTube Ads at Google. (Google Marketing Live) With so many users on YouTube daily, Google introduced Bumper Machine which creates six-second video ads using machine learning at no additional cost.
All an advertiser needs to do is share a 90-second video and Google will create up to four variations that are each six-seconds long. An advertiser has the freedom to add their own music and can include brand-related features such as logos. This helps resolve the issue of not having the resources to create video, making it especially accessible to brands that want to get started with video advertising.
“This is a very clear, practical [way] of Google using machine learning to spit out those six-second ads very quickly. With different six-second units, Google tests different combinations to come up with the most optimal combination. This is a huge testing experimentation,” said Bose.
Actionable Steps You Can Take
- Use this to test multiple Bumper Ads against one 30-second TrueView Ad
- Use ad sequencing across multiple Bumper Ads created by the machine learning driven tool to improve brand lift metric
You can find more about Bumper Ads through Google’s blog.
If you missed Google Marketing Live, you can download our checklist on the 10 announcements from this year’s event. Stay up-to-date on what’s going on with Modern Search by reading our definitive best practices on audience, automation, creative excellence, and measurement.
