How the Google Marketing Live 2023 announcements can impact advertisers

Episode Description

From new generative AI features for Google Ads, Performance Max, and Product Studio, to simplifying campaign creation, and enhancing ad relevance, there were some big announcements at Google Marketing Live 2023.

This time I’ll be joined by a panel of PPC experts: Navah Hopkins, Cory Henke, and Mike Ryan. And we’re going to be sharing our reactions and insights about what those announcements would mean to advertisers and businesses.

In this episode, we’re going to:

- Look back at all the GML 2023 updates

- Help you figure out the adjustments you can make to grow your business and

- Answer your questions

Episode Takeaways

Leverage AI for Enhanced Ad Creation: Utilize AI-driven tools introduced at GML 2023 to improve the creativity and effectiveness of ad campaigns. Experiment with AI-generated visuals and ad copy to see how they can increase engagement and conversions.

Optimize Audience Targeting with AI: Implement enhanced conversion techniques and customer match features to refine audience targeting. Use AI to analyze customer data and behavior, ensuring ads reach the most relevant users.

Evaluate AI Impact on User Engagement: Monitor how AI integration affects user responsiveness to ads. Test different AI-generated content formats to determine what resonates best with your audience and leads to higher conversion rates.

Adapt Marketing Strategies to AI Advancements: Stay informed about the latest AI developments and their implications for PPC marketing. Adjust your strategies to incorporate AI in a way that aligns with your business goals and enhances your marketing efforts.

Maintain Strategic Control Over Campaigns: While embracing AI for efficiency, ensure you retain strategic oversight to maintain brand integrity and meet specific marketing objectives. Balance the use of AI tools with human insight and creativity.

Train Teams on AI Capabilities and Limitations: Educate your marketing team on the potential and limitations of AI within PPC campaigns. Focus on developing skills that complement AI capabilities, such as data analysis and creative strategy.

Monitor Legal and Ethical Considerations: Keep abreast of legal and privacy concerns related to AI in advertising. Ensure your use of AI complies with regulations and respects user privacy.

Episode Transcript

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a live episode of PPC Town Hall. It’s been a while since we’ve done these live, but yesterday, Google had their GML event, Google Marketing Live, at their Mountain View headquarters. And we thought we shouldn’t let any time pass, and we should really go and talk about all the stuff they announced.

And this is a live session, so I also invite everyone to participate in the chat and tell us what you were thinking about Google’s announcements, what you want us to talk more about on YouTube. Use the chat so we can see those as they come in. We’ll pop them up on the screen and you can help steer the conversation.

So let’s get rolling with another episode of PPC Town Hall.

All right. All right. I want to bring in my guests here today. So we have a few more than usual because, you know, with Google announcing so many things, we needed to bring in experts on all the different areas. So we got Mike Ryan from Smarter eCommerce, also known as SMAC. We have Cory Henke from Variable Media.

And Navah Hopkins from Optimizr and I’m also from Optimizr. So everyone, welcome to the today’s session. Thanks

MIKE RYAN: for having us.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. So I figure we we start with the areas of expertise that you each have. Good way to introduce you all to the people watching today. But Mike, why don’t we start with you?

Tell us what you do, what your expertise is and like, what’s your key takeaway from Google Marketing Live?

MIKE RYAN: Thanks, Fred. Yeah. So I’m head of e commerce insights at smart e commerce. And basically I work on custom data projects for our clients. I work on market insights, keeping up to date with trends and developments. And a lot of exciting stuff. But what jumped out to me at GML was, I don’t know, I thought it was just a very interesting experience because this was sort of the fruit of this whole code red situation that we became familiar with, where Google is kind of a little.

Stress to see that Microsoft was moving heavily into an AI direction. And there were these rumors about search getting disrupted and stuff like that. And yet it’s also this moment of like, yeah, now you’ve caught this fish. What are you going to do with it? Because also Google has been waiting for ages to have some of these kinds of capabilities.

So it was a chance for them to really showcase what they’re doing. And overall I was positively impressed. I do have some question marks.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: All right. I think we all do. So Cory, let’s go to you next. Tell us what you do and your main takeaway from yesterday.

CORY HENKE: Sure. Being more on the video side, I think when it comes to You know, Google ads I was very impressed, you know, with what they talked about.

I don’t think that they dove a lot into some of the new placements like in feed specifically, but it was nice to see some of the advancements in shorts specific to you know, e commerce and the way that these short ads might look in the future. I think what surprised me was, you know, that 20 percent of conversions you know, in YouTube Or you get a 20 percent conversion lift when you have multiple orientations of the video.

So landscape vertical and you know, horizontal, and that I think is new for YouTube, but maybe not for some of the also the other social networks. And so that was that was really insightful because we see the same thing with our accounts. And then You know, I think 50 billion, you know, views from shorts, you can tell vertical is important.

And so what we’re doing now is really comparing and contrasting the user experiences, as well as the results from some of these you know, new, new ad placements, as well as, you know, the different sizes. But yeah, in terms of the event, when it comes to YouTube you can see that they are now putting it at the forefront and for a guy like me that made that, you know, his specialty.

It’s really cool to see.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, nice. You’re in the right place. Finally, right? Blowing some of the numbers they shared about YouTube and shorts, 50 billion daily views. And then you’re right. The other really interesting thing was how impactful it is to have your video content in the different formats. It seems like that would be an obvious thing and an easy thing to do, but given how much it can drive lift, yeah, it’s a no brainer.

And hopefully AI will help do it better, right? So Nava, on to you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you took away from yesterday.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Hello, everybody. Navahfrom, from Optmyzr. I have enjoyed being at the crossroads of PPC management and software for quite some time now happily working within Optmyzr.

And one of the things that I found really interesting about GML So it was essentially an event of two stories on the one side there were a lot of really interesting innovations and things that felt like Google was saying, hey, we hear you. In fact, I actually think I heard we heard you. We’ve heard your feedback.

We hear you more times than I heard AI, which was actually very interesting. But on the other side, it sounded a little bit like we’re only going to focus on e commerce. We’re only going to focus on these big brands. We’re not going to actually tell the stories of agencies and SMBs. So even though in watching the products and looking at some of the, the really, really cool technology that’s now available with the conversational campaign creation, looking at the design studio pieces just a lot of the cool, Quality of life fixes that they’ve brought to bear that that are very much SMP oriented and even enabling agencies to serve even better across the aisle with SEO friends.

It seems like they missed the mark in terms of communicating exactly how that that plays a role. So that was one of the things that’s very surprising to me is that even though they, Launched all these amazing tools that were really, really impressive and really, really useful. It seemed like they keep focusing on the the enterprise level.

And one of the areas where that was the most felt was actually in the data driven attribution conversation in kind of the enhancements with customer match. It, that feels like one of the coolest announcements of the whole GML that we’re now in this privacy first era. Really going to get to dig our hands into those compliant audiences, but in terms of the mechanics of how they play out, I’m not confident that most SMBs will be able to take advantage of them.

So I’m really excited to talk about that with this wonderful panel.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, very interesting announcements with customer match and Privacy first first party data. And that’s still, I think, kind of a question mark for a lot of people. Do you think people still feel like you give more data to Google?

Google is going to nefariously use it to its own benefit. I feel that’s a struggle that they Still have and that makes it very challenging for them to to have us as advertisers really feed the machines the data It needs to do a better job for us. So it’s a bit of a catch 22 I think for google. Go ahead nava.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Well, I think one of the things that was interesting and I really am curious to hear Everyone’s take on this is how much they were pushing their integrations that to me felt more like They were paying homage and kind of helping channel partners and as opposed to this is truly. necessarily what’s exciting and interesting.

So, I mean, Cory and Mike definitely want to hear, hear your takes on that, but that, that was, it felt more like a sales tool than it felt like we’re meeting a specific need.

CORY HENKE: Cory, I, I, I definitely agree. I think they have to, you know, play a little bit more with their partners. I think when I look at buying media in 2017 versus now, we’ve only seen, I think, you know, Google take a lot.

From like you know, some of these other platforms. And I think that’s one big one is playing with your partners better. But yeah, I saw that same, I think sort of sentiment where they were trying to say like, Hey, you know, in just a lot of different variety of sources. You know, and use them, you know, within Google ads and we’re willing to play nice, but yeah, I think to Fred’s point earlier about you know, privacy, you know, I think they used to hold all the cards, having Google analytics, Google ads, and then everything under alphabet.

And now what I see is that like, they really need the engagement from their platforms where they’ve struggled with, but in my opinion, running on YouTube, I see it a little bit more with like the viewability as well as a subscriber. So I think they will shift. And we’re seeing some of that, like we did yesterday.

I

MIKE RYAN: think it’s a fair take. I think when you compare kind of the, the way that Microsoft’s conduct and their reputation have changed over time, they they really have become, they’ve gotten a reputation as being kind of cool and kind of easy to work with and partner with. And you see that with their search engine where they were open sourcing their algorithm and working with Ecosia and Spark.

Go and stuff like this. And you see this with open AI integrations are going to be a huge story for open AI. You see this with Shopify has really created this vibrant ecosystem and it starts to get alienating if you’re not. Playing that kind of friendlier game that some of these other, you know, these are not all necessarily comparable stories, but I think there’s a common theme, which is that playing friends, making friends can work out.

And I hope that Google is learning from that. Yeah,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: and that’s why they keep saying like, we heard you, we’re listening to you, and I think it’s a bit of a shift too, right? So as you’re all saying, Microsoft has been a bit of the innovator with their open AI investment and how they were the first to bring chat experience into search.

But let’s maybe take a look here at, so what Google showed yesterday was really the first time they showed ads. Inside the new search experience inside the generative chat experience, because what we had seen before was that okay, chat becomes part of the search results pages, and you still have ads at the top.

You still have ads throughout, but there is no ads within the chat itself. Now, yesterday. They, they were doing this example where somebody was going to go on a vacation to Maui and then they were looking for backpacks for their kids who are going to be alone on the trip and boom. Now you got sponsored results inside the chat experience.

And so, you know, they’re playing a bit of catch up for the first time. So that does shift things a little bit right now. But go ahead.

NAVAH HOPKINS: I, I’m curious what everyone’s thoughts are on this of, is this the voice search that we were all promised? Because that’s what I’m hearing a lot from my SEO friends, is this feels like the voice search optimization piece and what we all imagined voice search was going to be.

And to be frank, I’m excited about the e commerce. Solutions, but I’m, I’m more excited about local service ads eventually being integrated into this so additional services like lead gen ads being, being integrated into this, but yeah, I’m really curious Mike and Cory, what, what you think.

CORY HENKE: I, I’d love for I’d love for YouTube to, or sorry, for Google to take a page out of you know, Amazon’s playbook and and include some video in here.

Right. Like when we look at the, the search you know, phrase of hiking backpacks for kids. It’s like you know, I’d love to see a video of that, you know, in here too, you know, somewhere, but ultimately, you know, that’s going to be my response to this, but I think it’s still amazing. And what they did after this was also very cool.

MIKE RYAN: I’m going to say, I’d love to see them not take a page out of Amazon’s book because I feel like Amazon has. Slowly, but surely destroyed their SERP and like where it’s really hard to find the products that you were searching for. It’s a very overwhelming ad experience and a bit spammy on Amazon these days.

And I think the, the big promise of this, these, this chat experience is this extremely high relevance in terms of like, you The type of queries that that search just couldn’t serve before and they need to walk a fine line here where, you know, it would actually be the perfect kind of a of a place for like these surfaces type experiences like free clicks and so on where it’s really done algorithmically and the relevance is fine.

First and foremost they’re going to have to definitely walk that line between relevance and the fact that these are paid ads, which might be less relevant. So,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: yeah, and I a hundred percent agree on the relevance component, Amazon, you go looking for a very specific thing. And then that thing is never even on the page because it’s all sponsored ads from competitors and cheap knockoffs that are probably low quality.

So it’s a horrendous consumer experience. And once people pick up on that, you know, they, they’re going to go to a different place to search. I think to your point, Nava, but. Is this the voice search that we’ve been promised for so long? And that’s where we get into the modalities of search, right? So, the, you’re still typing here, but you could also have a voice experience.

It’s just, it’s more conversational. We don’t have to be trained as humans in terms of how should we formulate what Or a limited search query because you know what advertisers you can only have keywords that have at most 10 words in the keyword So that was the restriction, right? Like if you wanted to get the best ad results, you have to know how to formulate that But now we get to converse like humans and the ai gets to understand what you meant by that and gets to show you results But those results are still on the search results page whether they’d be on a mobile or a desktop device That’s very much what we’re used to from Google.

And I think that’s sort of the happy medium is I get to formulate very easily what I’m looking for, but I still get selection and choice from Google. And it’s not just one result because that was always the difficult thing. If you go to your Alexa and you say, I want to buy a backpack. Well, you know, which backpack is going to surface as the first one in a voice response, because you’re probably not going to say, okay, Alexa, go on and tell me about the second backpack, right?

That’s just not natural. So I think we are getting to this like nice hybrid modality. And ultimately what it means in my mind is search is getting better and more people will do search. As a result of that, there’s going to be more interactions and more potential touch points for all of us. And for Cory, sure, video is going to come into this, right?

I mean, video makes total sense in this just a matter of time. So, so, but it also means we, as advertisers, we’re going to have to you. Have more images, more creative components to, to, to answer these questions.

NAVAH HOPKINS: I don’t know that that’s a really nice dovetail into what we were talking about before the recording started on the the automated creative and whether we love it or hate it.

And I, I think it’s going to make life super easy. Because now you don’t need to have a design resource. I think that’s one of the most common shortages is we don’t have a design resource. And so brands that have been complaining that, like, I can’t use PMAX because I don’t have The creative, well, that’s one of the announcements that probably should make life easier and better.

What I’ll be interested to see is how many brands still hide behind the I have certain brand standards, I’m not allowed to use stock images, I’m not allowed to do whatever. We’ll see what the adoption is.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly. And these are the Wild West, right? So we all have to figure out. And even legally, some of these images may have copyright implications.

If I say generate me a background in the style of Disney Pixar. Am I violating their copyright? Like nobody knows because there’s no precedent on that. But now, I mean, so what you brought up here is product studio. I think that’s what Google showed yesterday. So you can take a product image. You can say, remove the background and now put that image on a beach or in a jungle.

Or, and so instead of having to do a multi thousand dollar photo shoot. You know, you take 30 seconds, you tell the AI what you want and it does it for you. Mike, I’d especially like to hear from you being so heavy on the retail side. Like what do you think about this?

MIKE RYAN: Yeah, well, like Navahsaid, assets are a bottleneck for PMAX and that’s not only for SMBs we see that with the retailers of.

Of many sizes, actually, and it is a challenge. And I think this is a super cool feature. I just have, I do have some, some question marks about how, how this is going to, like, I feel like there’s these two elements here. There’s kind of could and should, like when you’re a graphic designer when you’re, when you’re working with a graphic designer, photographer, however They’ve got these competencies that you don’t have.

And it’s like, well, I couldn’t do that. But, and now, now I can, but the next question is kind of, should I? Because, you know, it depends who is the user of this feature? Is it somebody who has a competence? Like now they’ve got this tool that spits out these, these variants. You saw those four images.

How do you choose the right one of those? Is it? going to be down to testing? Is it going to be down to taste? I think, I hope we prioritize tests over taste. But this is still this, this open ended part of it is you, you need the ideas to go into there. I don’t, I think it’s a little overblown to say that the future of search marketing or, or online marketing management is like, Prompt engineering.

I don’t really agree with that. But I, I think it’s still like you, you need to have some CRO competence or still an eye for design to, to make the decisions in the end that you need someone. It’s like not really prompt, prompt engineer. You need somebody, I, this word is a little buzzword curation, but you need someone who it’s like a conversion, a CRO minded.

Curator to actually decide what’s going to go into play here. That’s, that’s one of the things I’m wondering about.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, that makes sense. And I’d like to hear from Cory next. So Cory, go ahead. I mean, you’re very much on the visual side with all YouTube and video. So how do you see this impacting your space?

CORY HENKE: I think this is going to be a great tool. I mean, we buy, you know, so much PMAX and, you know, shopping for our clients and, you know, to have this for some of our smaller brands is just going to be huge. One of the unique things that we do is analytics. So a lot of like deep analysis. So I think variation testing, you know, just took another leap.

I think if these assets come in like, you know, high quality, right, we could potentially use them for, you know, other channels. But I think this is one of the biggest advancements and there was an example of them using, you know, these type of assets in a short video by just scrolling up and down, you know, these product images.

And I thought, what a great way to get into another placement, you know, with something that is automatic. You know, it’s not going to be the same as going out and get something produced or, you know, UGC or something like that, but a great way to just like insert yourself into another placement with something you’ve already made.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Right. Well, I think if you take all of this to the extreme, we don’t even have to curate. We don’t even have to test because you could literally get to a place where the generative AI on the fly knows what the search term was, who the user is, what time of day, what they might care about. And so just like Google has been very One to one when it comes to search query mapping to the perfect ad at the perfect time You can imagine a world where it just creates the ad for that person in that moment And then next it even generates something on the landing page that’s hyper relevant to that person And that’s where you then get into like privacy and the even if it’s privacy compliant I mean, is it now becoming creepy?

Is it now turning people away? And so sort of finding that balance, right? One

NAVAH HOPKINS: thing I, before we move too far into privacy versus creative, I think it’s important to take a step back and remember that pretty much every ad platform, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, I believe LinkedIn has. to a certain degree as well stock photo integrations, that brands have been enabling this for years.

And you as an advertiser today could go into your, your native UI ad channel and get Shutterfly images for free because you’re paying to advertise on the platform and they, they eat that, that cost for you. So I don’t necessarily know that we’re going to hit cloud. Copyright issues. I think they, the, they’re going to put protections in the AI for, for what’s available for advertisers to protect that.

But it is important to know that there’s not, this is not brand new territory. Stock images have been a core part of the ad channels for a very long time. And I think that’s where a lot of the friction came through. I PPC chat that stock photos were going to be part of the campaigns. The pragmatist in me doesn’t care that it’s stock photos.

The pragmatist in me cares about what Cory said. It’s new placements that you are not going to get otherwise, that will make you money. So if you can get access to cheaper images or free images.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And there I think if you think about stock photos, that’s well determined how much royalty that photographer gets.

They actively choose to be part of the stock photography platform. The problem here becomes much more the Andy Warhol case that recently happened. Right. So Andy Warhol is making paintings based off of photographs. It was a specifically one of prints right. That’s variation of it. But now if I go and say like, make me an image and make me a background in the style of Andy Warhol, like he has a copyright on that visual style.

And that’s where it starts to get into like, These people didn’t specifically allow this to happen, their style to be copied. And I’ll make this very personal, right? So, I mean, I write a lot of Google ad scripts and you can go to GPT nowadays and you can say, write me an ad script that gives me like a keyword report in the spreadsheet.

Well, how large language models learn is they look at all of the examples that are out there. And I’m probably one of the five, six people who’s written a lot of scripts. So the reason it knows how to do this. It’s probably 20 percent my contribution to it, but I get no credit for that. And so I think we are going to start seeing legal cases.

And again, luckily the bigger companies like Google are going to be the ones that figured this out for us, but I don’t think it’s so clear cut as stock photography, unfortunately. So anyway, that’s my take on that. Mike, Mike, I think you want to say something.

MIKE RYAN: I mean, if we want to move forward on the privacy thing, I, I just, I think it’s a very interesting point.

Also cause you know, I’m in the, I’m in the EU and so my privacy radar is always going off because of that. But

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: I mean, let’s talk to you for a second then. Right. So on the, again, on the visual and creative side

CORY HENKE: I, I think you guys both have, you know, like, like your cases. You know, like Fred, I hear you, Nava, I hear you, you know, Mike in the EU, you know, like I hear you.

But I just I think it’s the wild, wild west again and it continues to be that way. So from my perspective, I’m going to use the tools that are given. I just think for us at our agency, it comes down to analysis. And if you give us more variables. You know, more placements we’re going to figure out what works for our brands, but that’s

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: a good point.

Yeah. Let, let Google suffer the penalties that copyright law comes to that. Hey, but we have a great question here from a DT. So does anyone feel that hybrid voice AI search will make the users less responsive to ads saying that this is maybe feeling a little bit more upper funnel and contextual rather than down the funnel?

Mike, I’ll let you start on this one.

MIKE RYAN: I’m not sure that I would characterize this as higher funnel and not that down funnel. I think that there’s a variety of placements that can be served with with, with AI. Yeah. We’re talking about these these kinds of splashy image creatives right now, but this could also.

Impact your rather lower funnel shopping ads. This could impact, I think it just impacts the full funnel from my perspective. And about conversion rates, I’m pretty optimistic about conversion rates. I just think if that relevance is given, then this looks really promising. I think we can probably expect these.

To do pretty well. You know, then the question in my mind will be what kind of unit costs, how does this price compared to other kinds of ads or what is going to happen to the CPC environment going forward, but sort of another topic.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, so putting this on screen again, but this is a bit of the. down funnel experience where it’s, it’s a chat.

Now, I do think there’s a valid point here that if the consumer, if the user becomes very focused on that chat portion of the search experience, do they start tuning out the ads that we’ve historically run? Towards the top of the page that could very well be right that you get tunnel vision and the, the old stuff matters less.

NAVAH HOPKINS: So I think there’s something to the conversion rate versus conversion value question. And the more that. We build in conversion values. I think the easier time we’ll have with conversion rate. There are tools, Optmyzr, Google, many, many ways to get conversion value into your accounts. But one of the things that I think everyone needs to pay attention to is how central they are to performance max bidding.

That they’re looking at now lifetime value. Well, then also from a conversion rate standpoint, the fact that they’re really leaning into tell us which conversion actions you value the most and we’ll focus there. So when we think about is this conversational contextual search and result experience to upper funnel, well, There’s a long, illustrious history of building in micro conversions that maybe we value a little bit less to help the account learn and grow.

So I don’t think we’re going to see necessarily a decrease in conversion rates. I think we’re going to see an increased importance in actually valuing our conversions and designating primary and secondary conversions and actually being strategic about what we’re telling Google to track.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, and ultimately, I mean, who CTR is like Bottom line, right?

For me, if Google generates, it doubles the number of interactions that happen on its search engine, but they don’t convert at the same rate, but I still get incremental conversions that are profitable. Great. I don’t care about conversion rate. Hey, Mike, this, I’m going to give this question to you here, but about compliance.

And then maybe getting into the privacy. Do you foresee that AI will be applicable? And I think the question is, is it going to be applicable to all industries or there’s certain industries where this is just simply going to be more tricky because of regulations?

MIKE RYAN: I mean, I think that this compliance lives at different levels.

Like it lives at the placement level. What type of ads you’re able to serve at all. It lives probably at. You know, a targeting level. And I would say that the technology will still certainly have applications. Like, you know, for example, if you want to use product studio to create a lifestyle image of something in, I don’t know, yeah, pharmacies may be a weird use case for lifestyle image, but maybe not.

You still, you know, you want to have nice looking images. I don’t think there’s. there’s that’s in any way going to be precluded from using AI there. I think there’s probably going to be some, some limitations here. And again, I think a lot of it is already in place at the placement level. And I

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: think when you said before, too, like in this case, curation actually does matter.

So if you’re in the restricted category, Even if Google gives you the option, you can’t just turn it on by default. You’ll have to review everything that it’s generating to approve it to become part of the base. So yeah, but yeah, like everything in PPC, it always depends. Hey Cory, this same person was asking a little bit about the conversion lift that was seen with the various sizes of ads.

Do you know if that included PMAX and what Google was talking about?

CORY HENKE: I believe that it does. And I, and I’ll speak for our own agency, you know, in our experience is that whenever we run video in PMAX, the majority of the time we do see better performance. We get even, I think, better performance when we include horizontal, vertical, and you know, square.

So I believe that it does translate. I just think it’s different when you apply it to YouTube due to the bid type and how much more, you know, variables you can optimize skippable versus non skippable running on the display network versus YouTube using in feed to capture more search. And then you get into the targeting where you want to run on specific placements.

And so I believe that that lift can be beneficial for certain advertisers in certain ways on YouTube, different than PMAX, but in PMAX, yeah, the more video, the more placements, like the more opportunities you give Google to find your core customer, I think it works well for you.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Okay. So let’s talk about some other topics.

So Google basically broke down their talk yesterday, as far as I was hearing it. The three C’s of artificial intelligence. The first one was customer connection. The second one was creative and the third one was confidence. So let’s maybe talk a little bit about customer connection. They’re making the point that it’s becoming ever more challenging to find your customer as the journeys become more complex, have more touch points, take longer.

They said consumers are becoming product detectives. They no longer just buy. They go and buy. Research the heck out of everything. How has that impacted all of you?

CORY HENKE: I think the, the first thing that I would say is that if generative, you know, like AI and some of these results, you know, turn out to be very well and they become a clear competitor with what is currently out there, I think people will search differently.

I think this creates more top funnel searches versus, Hey, I immediately need this, right? And if that explodes, I think there’s a huge opportunity you know, for, you know, more customer interaction, more thing to know about a specific customer because they’re willing to give you more information about a trip or ask you more for questions, more ask you.

Things to, to Google that they would never ask, you know, before, cause they thought it was just the search engine. But now since it’s so much more, I think you might get a different user experience.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. What’s interesting too, is that in the chat sort of experience, the context is preserved. So as you jump from one thought to the next, it now knows that, Oh yeah, you’re going on a trip with your children.

So if you’re asking about restaurants, it’s sort of baked in that you might want a more child friendly restaurant. And to some degree we’ve had that in the history. That Google has in, in terms of search queries, but it takes, it seems like chat is taking that all to a new level. And so, yeah, I’m really excited as well about the opportunities that opens up.

Now, from the advertiser perspective, there’s really nothing new in terms of targeting to these things. We’re still targeting audiences. We’re still targeting keywords on YouTube. You could target placements. Any, any thoughts on would you do anything different or was there anything audience related that you saw yesterday that you would jump on, Nava?

NAVAH HOPKINS: So I, I have to chime in because one of the things I was genuinely the most excited about was enhanced conversions, building audiences, because that honestly with customer match has been the biggest roadblock for SMBs to be able to use customer match because let’s face it, If you need to find a thousand people who’ve done your thing, it’s gonna be really, really hard.

But if you have enhanced conversions and start building that, that list it’s basically giving us back similar audiences off of converters. It’s just, you now have that, that email list off of your, your offline conversions that you can, in theory, also pull in from, from other sources, which is great.

That is going to help build that connection. And one of the videos that was really, or sentiments that was really interesting was this idea that our customers want privacy, but also personalization. And I think the more that we can feed data back into the system, the easier time we’ll have with that contextualization.

But I also think there’s a certain degree of, as we’re pulling these levers, The more control we exert over the specifics, the harder time we will have with thresholding, as in, will we have enough people to actually let our budgets do the thing and target the thing? So I think that’s going to be the biggest challenge.

It’s not that we don’t have the audiences at our fingertips. It’s not that we don’t have the creative at our fingertips. It’s not that we don’t have all these amazing tools. It’s that we as humans tend to really like to focus in on a very specific group and control every single little thing about it.

And the more that we do that, the more that we’re going to hamper. The ability for us to reach the people that we need to reach. So I think one of the lessons I’m taking and one of the things I’m gonna be looking to test in in each two of this year is in relinquishing some degrees of control around.

The specifics of targeting, do we end up getting better results and the machine is working great, or do we still need to exert those controls and just eat the fact that control is counter to the AI’s full potential and we in the need to protect our business bottom line have to have to eat that cost, but it.

We’ll only know that through testing.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And that’s where I think there’s a shift from control to confidence that Google’s sort of wanting us to go through, right? So give up that complete control over things, but then they need to build systems that give us back the confidence that their decisioning process is correct.

And so we saw a number of announcements related to PMAX, which were awesome. So better insights into asset performance as well as better and downloadable API accessible Search terms reports with different date ranges. With the

NAVAH HOPKINS: search volume also. That was interesting. And the search trends going in also.

So there, there was a lot.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Exactly.

Mike, what about you?

MIKE RYAN: Yeah. So, well, boy, there’s a lot to pick up on here. I mean, just rewinding quick to that, to that idea of like product detectives. Interesting phrase. And I just want to just call it like, I think it’s important to consider if these are willing detectives or not, or are they suffering from paradox of choice and, you know, it’s your website’s job to help them make that job that decision faster and in advertising should support generative AI should support so.

Yeah, I think, I think that’s, that’s something to consider. I also, this paradox between privacy and personalization that Navahspoke about there’s, well, there’s so much to say there. But I’m really excited about some of the, like this, like on this topic of confidence, because that is really the connect thing to me is pretty clear.

The, the creatives, this is pretty clear. And, but. Actually, we’re in this brave new world. You called it earlier, Fred, I think the wild west, and we’re going to need to find confidence in this because actually before this call, Fred, I don’t know if you want to comment on this again, but we were debating how impressive some of this stuff is.

And some people have the opinion that this was not that impressive what came forward. But the fact is. They’ve been moving at breakneck speed. This has been a very fast development cycle and they’re already marketing this stuff and starting to try to bring it to market. And I don’t know to what extent some of this is like kind of conceptual or is it, is that actually technology that works or is this, are these kind of like mock ups and marketing material?

So confidence is the huge thing that needs to be solved here. And stuff like that search term reporting can help. Just, sorry, one more thing. This privacy versus personalization thing, because let’s take the search term reports. We know in the past that they were limited due to privacy concern. Now we know that ads are going to be tailored on the fly to queries.

And the question is, do you, as an advertiser, have a right to see the ads you have served? You didn’t have a right to see the search terms. Now, if an ad has been tailored to reflect a search term that might have personal information in it or where the volume is too low, suddenly the ad itself becomes like a privacy liability.

So, I don’t know. This was kind of a rambling. But my head is exploding with stuff here.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Well, I mean, that’s, it’s kind of interesting how much we had to pull teeth to get even just the asset reports and the combination report for responsive search ads. It’s exactly that point. And I’m, I’m wondering, will we even get to have audience targeting in the future?

And I think some of the solutions that they’ve come up with are an answer to let us keep it. Because I, I don’t disagree with you. I think we’re probably. Entering an era where all the details on ads, all the details on, on keywords is probably going to be a little bit tougher placements. I feel like we can probably still get away with because placements is a wider spectrum, but audiences is probably going to be one of the last few things that we get to own.

Provide that our sources of truth are the ones informing it. And that’s, it was kind of interesting to see that they were taking a note out of Facebook’s book of the 2. 5 to 10 percent of Exact lookalike versus broad. And it’s interesting because Facebook, on the Facebook side, people are seeing better performance as they’re going into broader lookalike audiences, as opposed to the more specific ones.

So it’ll be interesting to see if we Search marketers lean a little bit heavier into the specific as we think that’s what’s necessary. But the answer is go broad and trust. It’s really hard because sometimes we get really burned really badly and it’s, I don’t know how, how Google fixes that.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: So my mind wasn’t blown yesterday. But I might also be the wrong audience. And so here’s what I mean by that. So if you’ve played with generative AI and you understand a little bit about how the technology works and what alternative solutions are out there, I don’t think Google showed anything that was legitimately new.

Now, credit where credit is due. Google basically invented generative, even though open AI Gets all the credit for it. They invented the transformer, which is the basis for OpenAI’s technology. And then the other thing people forget is that AI has been baked so deeply into Google solutions for more than 20 years.

So when quality score, think about quality score, that was a predictive. System that was based on machine learning. And there’s all this statistical AI that Google uses to do bid management to figure out what search term might be a good match to a keyword that you had. Right? And that’s all. It’s fairly boring.

It’s highly mathematical. So you put a nice buzzword on it, AI, and all of a sudden people think it’s exciting. But then generative comes along as this whole new form of AI, which is not about finding patterns and data. It’s about generating patterns. A string of words that someone might read and think like that’s pretty well written.

That’s communicating a message now. Is that message correct?

MIKE RYAN: Yeah,

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: maybe but that’s not the main point of large language models, right? So I think that’s where we didn’t see anything that google was like, okay. Well, we’ve made that safer. We’ve made that better but they’ll get there right google’s a very conservative company when it comes to To these efforts now, I think what was good yesterday was that we were having the conversation as marketers who are not technologists Like what is possible?

Because at the end of the day like all this cool technology, it’s out there You can do it today, but you probably have to have a development team. You have to know how to work with apis You know, I made a little video of my avatar with my fake voice in front of a fake background You know saying something about gml Well, I had to use four tools to do this, right?

It’s cool. It’s fun, but I’m not going to do this at scale. If I’m, if I have a, you know, a large company I’m advertising. And so that’s where it’s, it is exciting to see Google at the very least taking some of the existing technology and baking it into the platforms that we use on a day to day basis to do the work we need to do.

And that’s, I guess that’s my paradox of like, my mind wasn’t blown, but I’m still excited about the GML event.

MIKE RYAN: Yeah. I mean, I would maybe. Play like devil’s advocate a little bit. If we take a look at the what’s it called the product? Well, yeah, the, where you can generate these creative assets for products and stuff like that product studio.

I don’t know, maybe, maybe it’s hard to say what’s we’re going to have to really play around and get hands on with these, but if you would be just jumping into a mid journey and prompting your way through this you’d, you’d have your work cut out for you to get a usable result really fast, I think.

And like. I’m wondering if they’re doing some heavy lifting behind the scenes already so that you don’t have to worry, like, because you could get some pretty weird results. And if they’re already, like, kind of doing some heavy lifting behind the scenes so that you’re going to Know, get, get results that look like a, a reasonable product, promotional image off the bat.

I don’t know. I think, and I agree with you that good.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: My, I, I agree with you because the examples they showed, they were so perfect that I was like, eh, you know, it, it just feels a little off and almost felt more stock imagery than actually generative, where you’re right, it does generate some weird stuff sometimes.

And that’s where it’s like, until we see this in production, until we can play with it, we’re just not going to know it’s like a bunch of nice screenshots that the intern put together, or is this actually like a new layer? And so let’s talk about Microsoft for a second. Right? So Microsoft’s implementation of chat GPT, I think is really cool because it actually gives, gives references to why is it saying this is the answer.

And now I can see, Oh, well that is based on Wikipedia. So I’m probably going to trust that. Whereas this other thing that it’s saying. It’s based off of Joe’s blog. I don’t know who Joe is. So maybe I don’t trust that as much. But until, and that’s like the black box has to open up, right? You have to understand what is that AI doing and what filters is Google giving us?

Because if we’re, if we’re just guessing like, We could be guessing wrong. We could have a hundred examples in a row of a beautifully generated image, but no issues. And so we assume that Google has this amazing technology on the backend that does that for us, but it was just by random chance. And the hundred and first time we do this, our ad looks horrendous.

And now we get into like brand quality issues. And so I think Google is just going to have to open the books a little bit more and say like, what’s really happening.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Well, it’s interesting that. A lot of the, the announcements that were put to confidence were things like brand level negatives exclusions, things like that.

And I, I have a feeling that if we’re going to predict what’s next, what is Google going to do next is probably going to be exclusions or negatives for the generative image creation. That you can actually say, I do not want this sort of thing or create this, but not this without us having to specify it.

Because you’re a hundred percent right. If. creative is bad, then the creative is bad. But one thing that, that actually stands out to me quite a bit and just thinking about the, the flow of the day is how much it was e commerce focused versus say B2B and, and I mean, there were enterprise level folks in the case studies, but I’m really interested in what folks think about the, the, the B2B pieces, the lead gen pieces that maybe are for larger scale companies or for SMBs, because a lot of the, the, the tools and their utility, it’s a, it’s a no brainer.

It’s super easy to think about for e commerce and a lot of the things that Google does is super easy to think about for e commerce. For, for everything else, there’s, there’s a little bit more of a journey to get to value. And I’ll be really interested, interested to see what does the, the AI creation process look like for, say, a law firm?

What does it look like for a software company? What does it look like for an insurance, a health insurance company? These are all questions where. Depending on search volume, depending on editorial limitations to even be able to advertise. I think that would, in terms of building confidence, that’s where it would go a long way to show examples of that and use cases of that to get kind of everyone else bought in, not just e commerce or DTC.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah, but then it raises the question for me, to what degree do we now need to use this expensive generative AI technology? Versus just having like nice templated stock images and, you know.

NAVAH HOPKINS: Well, if we’re not given the choice, like I think this, this kind of is giving a hint of, will we get a choice in the future?

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: All right. So let’s do some final takeaways. I know there’s a lot more that we haven’t unpacked. They had a lot of announcements. Each of you tell me a favorite thing that you heard yesterday or. We’re the one thing that you’re going to take away from yesterday to your teams. And basically Google said, like, this is the summer of AI.

This is the summer where you have to spend some time instead of sitting on the beach, spend some time thinking about AI, how it impacts your business, your workflows, your advertising campaigns. Because if you don’t do that, You’re not battling against AI. You’re battling against other advertisers who are going to take this summer to figure it out.

So all of you, what are you taking back to your teams to make sure that they are well positioned to be leaders in this wave of AI and PPC? I

CORY HENKE: can go first. I think the biggest thing that I take back to my teams is we just became a lot more creative. You know, I think all these tools allow us to change our jobs in ways that, you know, we didn’t think that they would change.

Like, I never thought that I should be thinking about square, you know, or vertical when it comes to YouTube until, you know, just a year ago or a year and a half ago. But I mean, even today, when we think about like shopping and, you know, P max and being able to take, you know, product images, turn them into a vertical video and be able to run them into a short.

And at the same time, that’s going to feed into the same campaign. That’s also running search or potentially display ads on a website. I still think that, you know, our industry is great in terms of being such a, an advancement in advertising and a disruptor, you know, for so many, like you know, legacy, traditional media is that, you know, You know, actually enjoyed yesterday, you know, Fred, you know, it was fun for me because I think they they really showcase things that they hadn’t in some of the more recent, you know, previous GMLs that I thought were a little underwhelming and also, you know, we got more than a couple of slides for YouTube, so I’m going to be happy.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Did you get to go to the grand Stefani concert? Is that why you’re so happy about this event?

CORY HENKE: Don’t tell anybody, Fred, you weren’t supposed to bring that up. I’m just kidding. I wish.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Mike, what about you?

MIKE RYAN: Thanks, Fred. Yeah. I don’t think that what we saw yesterday merits the need to like really re skill or something like that.

As I said, I don’t think that we all need to become prompt engineers overnight or something. But I do think that we need to take a fresh look at our mindset and how to put this. Like, AI is not at the point that it’s going to come and do your job for you or replace you overnight or something like that.

It’s not there yet. I hope it doesn’t quite get there, but point being though, like, you know, we already have said this before with ChatGPT. It has, it knows the entire internet, but guess what? The entire internet is already on your mobile phone in your pocket right now. And not everyone is using that, the potential of that at all.

Years later, people are just using their mobile to doom scroll and look at cat videos or whatever. When in fact you have this incredible productivity tool here and that’s the case now as well. This is I think it is a landmark moment in Google ads. I think it is definitely. Kind of this inflection point, it’s, it’s going to change, but this is not going to magically make us more productive.

We need to take advantage of the tools. We need to test them. We need to be open minded. We need to actually use them to be more productive. It’s not going to just come and do our jobs for us. So yeah, we just need to, you know, Bring ideas to the table and try things.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: Yeah. Well said. And I think in, in a short period, we’re going to be less productive because we’re spending going time going down rabbit holes that lead to nothing.

But, but, but again, ideally this is where the leadership of the team, you have someone to go and figure this out, who has the liberty to have that time. And then, you know, sort of write it down as a process and figure out how to get your whole team to be successful with it. And by the way, that’s also why tool companies like Optmyzr exist, because like I said, I mean, there’s hundreds of AI companies out there and they all do amazing things, but very few of them bring it back to, okay, this is what you need to do in an ads account.

These are the metrics that you’ve historically had in your ads accounts. And this is what that means in terms of what you should do next. And then these are the five technologies you could deploy to get that done. Because the worst thing that you can end up doing is like having a chat GPT conversation.

And then it’s like, Oh my God, now I need to make a gajillion spreadsheets to just feed that back into Google. Like, that’s not productive either, right? Nava, what about you? Final takeaways?

NAVAH HOPKINS: So I, I shared, I was excited about a lot of things. And I think the, the long and short of what I’m excited about is the democratization of the, the Tasks that typically would be out of the price range or out of the skill levels for the average company.

And why I’m excited about that is for two reasons. Reason number one is it’s going to open up Google ads and the other ad channels that are following suit to take advantage of the full width and breadth of all that it has to offer. To Mike’s point, we only use a fraction of the internet. We only use a fraction of all these resources.

And sometimes that’s due to just. We get, go down rabbit holes and sometimes it’s due to be just, we just can’t. And so I think that’s one of the things I’m really excited about. The other thing I’m genuinely excited about from a point of a software agency consultant, what have you, is that we are now going to be freed up to really solve it.

Innovative, interesting problems because we’re not going to have to build to make up for the deficiencies in or the frustrations in the app platform. We’re instead building off of what is truly going to drive this success. There was a question that we didn’t get to answer in depth around, say, how much does CRO factor into this?

I think One of the things that’s really interesting and exciting is how much this sort of innovation is going to allow the silos to break down in different marketing departments to actually build meaningful, scalable solutions, like looking at your site and how well does it serve not just from an SEO standpoint, but from a, how well will it help you build your Google campaign standpoint?

And how well is it, meeting the user where they need to be. So take this as a, as a point of the tools are available. You now have the freedom to own your path to profit. And there are so many resources, like this amazing panel here and, and beyond who can help you beyond the basics so that you don’t have to pay for the basics.

You instead are paying for the, the premium, amazing results.

FREDERICK VALLAEYS: And then a viewer comment from Silvio Ferreira. I mean, I think he’s making a point that many of us are sort of making here, but BARD or GPT, whatever it is, use it for your research, see it as a research assistant, do competitor analysis, and then use all of that to build more effective marketing campaigns.

Right? So this is not going to automate everything for you. This is just another tool in your toolbox that you’re going to, it’s going to make you more efficient. By the way, I love the whole thing about like the whole internet is in your pocket. Right. But it’s so massive. Like, how do I find the thing that I care about?

And that’s where we still need Google. We need search engines to give us the best results, the most high quality results. And that’s why we speak to experts here, because we have interesting viewpoints that hopefully move the industry in the right direction. And I mean, you have to do a little bit less work yourself to get to the heart of what really matters.

So with that thank you for joining this live episode of PPC town hall. If anyone’s been watching and wants to subscribe at the bottom of the page, please subscribe to our channel. We do these episodes about every two weeks. If you’re looking for a great tool partner look at Optmyzr. We have two week free trial.

And we’ve been using AI from long before chat GPT existed. So we can help you with that. And then of course we have Cory and Mike they have agencies, so they can help you. Mike is more on the retail side. Cory’s more on the video side. And then Navahand I work together. So I won’t let her pitch the same thing that I just pitched, but thank you so much for watching and we’ll see you for the next episode.

Thank you.