How Google’s New Features and Controls Might Boost Your AI-Powered Campaigns

Today at DMEXCO, Google revealed how it’s putting its most powerful AI to work for advertisers with a variety of new features and controls.

A collection of new tools revealed at the annual digital marketing conference held in Cologne aims to give advertisers more control and better monitoring of their campaign lifecycles in Google Ads.

Speaking to the UK press ahead of the event in Germany, Debbie Weinstein, vice-president of Google and managing director of Google UKI, situated this announcement within the context of what she called Google’s ‘Gemini era’ – a time when generative AI is taking the tech company through its third platform shift (the first being the internet and the second the shift to mobile), “but in many ways the most profound,” she added. 

In that context, Debbie mentioned how Google is using this shift to further its goal “to organise the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful[...] It has been the thing that drives us forward and is behind all the innovation that we're doing.” 

When it comes to how the company relates to its advertisers, Brendon Kraham, vice-president of search and commerce for Global Ads Solutions said, “Our north star, from a product strategy perspective, is to connect advertisers – basically all of our partners – with consumers that are looking for their products and services. And again, AI will help supercharge that efficacy."

Brendon went on to reveal that greater than 80% of Google’s search customers are using some form of automation already. “We've both been deploying it in our products and our customers have been using it for a really long time. And it's the generative side that is really moving the ball forward and further.” 

The features and controls Google is announcing with that goal in mind are as follows:

A new ‘conversational experience’ for search campaigns, powered by Gemini, will leverage gen-AI tech to automatically generate headlines, images and other content. Currently in English, this will expand to German, French and Spanish languages in coming months.

Secondly, Google Ads is making AI-powered image editing available across more campaign types beyond Performance Max, adding enhancement of image assets to Search, Demand Gen, App and Display campaign types too. Six new languages are also being added to this feature: German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian.

Image generation and enhancement is making significant progress for advertisers, who will now be able to upload up to five reference images along with prompts, allowing AI to generate new brand-aligned visuals.

Starting next month, the full general availability of brand guidelines for Performance Max will allow advertisers to define and upload specific brand elements like fonts, colours and logos, ensuring consistency across ad formats.

Creative preferences for Demand Gen campaigns are being made available to all advertisers, enabling video assets to be pinned to specific formats and surfaces.

When it comes to reporting, Google is also expanding what it offers advertisers. New asset coverage reporting will provide recommendations to improve underperforming assets, such as suggestions to add headlines or images. 

A combined view of insights and explanations will streamline campaign management, providing tailored recommendations to improve campaign performance.

And for the first time, impression share reporting is coming to Performance Max, offering insights into the prominence of text and Shopping ads in search results.

Media management is also getting more granular. A beta launch of campaign-level negative keywords in Performance Max will roll out by the end of 2024, giving advertisers more control over AI-powered campaigns. Omnichannel bidding is also coming to Demand Gen campaigns soon. Coming as beta in the next few months, this feature will help maximise both online and in-store conversions.

Finally, October will see support for Demand Gen campaigns in Display & Video 360 launching offering more flexibility and reach to advertisers’ workflows.

Putting these tools in the hands of advertisers of all sizes is a key consideration for Google. When asked  by LBB how these tools can be put to use by advertisers with large marketing infrastructures, Brendon said, “If you have deep levels of expertise, then of course, we want to provide you the tools and systems to do that. And if you're looking for more simplified and automated ways of doing that, we want to do that as well. We serve customers around the world, the biggest to the smallest in every market. So then our products and services are built for that purpose. 

“We are opinionated in our belief that AI will be helpful whether you're big or small,” he added. “And often we do see that there is opportunity left on the table if you are not leveraging AI based solutions. I think there are plenty of examples we talk about when people adopt P Max [Performance Max] that they see, depending on the different verticals, 27% increase in conversions. What that says is that with your existing construct – the way you set up a campaign – you are missing profitable conversions[...] To me, [that] speaks to the fact that there is more business value to be realised.

“So again, we will meet customers where they are,” he concluded, “but we will also be opinionated in the fact that both the predictive and the generative are going to be very effective in helping you deliver the bottom line that you care about within the business.”