Google announces product features across ads & commerce

At the India edition of Marketing Live, Google announced a suite of features across Ads and Commerce, designed to enable business growth and align with new consumer behaviours.

With the surge of video watch time, the increased reliance on Search, and the growth in online shopping, brands and businesses can meet customers where they are today, Google designed the newly announced product features to unlock growth and navigate today’s rapidly shifting advertising landscape.

Video action campaigns and App campaigns will automatically scale to YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts now averages over 30 Bn daily views — four times as many as a year ago — and Google wants to help marketers reach people immersed in this short-form content.

Later this year, marketers will be able to connect product feed to campaigns and make video ads on YouTube Shorts more shoppable. Google has been experimenting with ads in YouTube Shorts since last year, and now gradually rolling that out to all advertisers around the world. This is an exciting milestone for advertisers, and a key step towards developing a long-term YouTube Shorts monetization solution for creators.

Also Read: Google launches intuitive ad placements for Search, YouTube Shorts & more

Performance Max campaigns are an effective tool for meeting customers where they are on Google channels. Advertisers who use Performance Max campaigns in their accounts see a 13% increase in total incremental conversions at a comparable cost per action. Google has announced six upcoming updates:

• More tools for experimentation, to see how Performance Max is driving incremental conversions
• Expanded campaign management support in Search Ads 360 and the Google Ads mobile app
• Support for store sales goals to optimize for in-store sales, in addition to store visits and local actions
• Maximize impact with burst campaigns for a set time period to help meet in-store goals during seasonal events
• New insights and explanations, including attribution, audience, and auction insights to know what’s driving performance
• Optimization score and recommendations to improve the campaign

The insights page uses machine learning to identify new pockets of consumer demand and provide personalized trend data. Only Google can surface these types of insights, based on the billions of searches and the millions of signals Google analyzes for every ad auction. Today, Google is introducing three new reports that will roll out over the coming months:

• Attribution insights show how ads work together across Google surfaces — like Search, Display, and YouTube — to drive conversions
• Budget insights find new opportunities for budget optimization and show how spend is pacing against budget goals
• Audience insights for first-party data show how customer segments, like those created with Customer Match, are driving campaign performance

Google is also launching My Ad Center later this year to keep users in control of their privacy and online experience. People will be able to pick the types of ads they want to see more or less of, and control how their data informs ads they see across YouTube, Search and Discover.