Top PPC Experts React to the Announcements at Google Marketing Live 2022

Episode Description

From automation to video ads to privacy, Google had plenty of updates to share at #GML2022.

As a result, it may seem harder to focus on the ones that matter the most for your business.

That’s why we’re speaking to three top #PPC experts — Joe Martinez, Navah Hopkins, and Kirk Williams in our next PPC Town Hall to break down all the updates and understand how they can impact advertisers.

In this episode, we’re going to:

• Look back at all the GML 2022 updates
• Help you figure out the adjustments you can make to grow your business and
• Answer your questions

Episode Taskaways

Look Back at All the GML 2022 Updates:

• The episode recaps the significant announcements from Google Marketing Live 2022, with a focus on the visionary shift of the event towards shareholder interests rather than detailed technical discussions.
• Experts discuss the emphasis on high-level strategic directions, particularly in the realm of machine learning and its applications in advertising, noting a move towards broader, less granular insights.

Help You Figure Out the Adjustments How You Can Make to Grow Your Business:

• The discussion highlights the implications of new privacy regulations on advertising strategies, stressing the need for transparency and adaptation to maintain effective targeting and measurement.
• Insights are provided on leveraging Performance Max campaigns and the integration of tools like Zapier to streamline and enhance advertising efforts, emphasizing the importance of understanding and utilizing these new features to drive business growth.

Answer Your Questions:

• The experts address audience questions regarding the practical applications of announcements, particularly around machine learning enhancements and privacy changes.
• They delve into the challenges and strategies for adopting new Google Ads features, such as Performance Max and the broader use of broad match keywords, offering guidance on how to navigate these changes effectively.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co founder and CEO at Optmyzr. So last week, I had the great pleasure of attending the Google Marketing Live event at the new Mountain View headquarters the Bayview campus. And And beautiful campus great concert at the end of the day But there were also some interesting announcements that are relevant to all of us in search engine marketing So it’s been a week.

We’ve had a little bit of time to think about it We’ve had a nice holiday here in the united states long weekend. So, now that we’re back to work Let’s go and dig into some of these topics and find out what really matters And who better to help us understand kind of how how these announcements fit into the broader picture Than some of the best ppc experts that have been on ppc townhall before so got some great guests today I will chat about gml and we can’t wait to to hear what you have to say.

So this is a live episode Put your comments in chat. Tell us what you thought was most interesting. Tell us what you want to talk about You But let’s get rolling with PPC Town Hall.

All right. And here are my experts, Joe, Navah and Kirk. Welcome back all of you.

Joe Martinez: Good to be here with this crew.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And Kirk, Kirk, good to see you again. I saw you last week. You were actually at the GML event, right? So yeah. And since we’re doing this live planning media you’re setting the bar here, where else is everybody calling in from?

So do tell us in the chat. Say hello. Great to see where you’re coming from. But yeah, Kirk let’s maybe start with you. So you were actually at the GML campus or the GML event on the Google campus. Tell us a bit about what it was like before we dive into the the topics they discussed.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. Just kind of big picture.

So I think Matt Umbro had called us out on Twitter and I, I tend to agree with him and that’s that like Google marketing live, whatever, whatever and wherever it kind of started, whatever purpose it is for. You know, it, it, it began as what I see Google marketing live really is, is not really a specific, like here are the specific things we’re changing.

Here are the tactics. Here’s what you can think about as an advertiser. I kind of see it more and more as kind of this high level, like directional visionary, like for our shareholders type of a thing. And so even starting with that as just kind of like, what is it, what are they actually trying to do as we kind of think through and react is probably important.

So we’re not. Kind of expecting different things from Google. And again, we can, we can even want it to be different than that, but that’s kind of the reality of what it is. At, at this point, kind of those big picture type topics.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, it was certainly a highly polished and you know, they put this.

Very expensive. I’m sure sign up there in front of the building, but to sit on a Google bicycle after not having been at Google for 10 years. So so that was cool. Also great running into Seth. So he’s one of the people commenting here. So we ran into a couple of friends from Optmyzr and customers.

So that was great to see you all there as well. But Navah, introduce yourself real quick. So people remember who you are and give us your take on.

Navah Hopkins: Sure. Howdy. I’m I’m Navah Hopkins of Navah Hopkins LLC. I’ve been in the space since 2008. I’m on usually on the top 25 list with these lovely folks who I get to learn from every day and they are amazing.

GMO this this year. I think those of us that were only seeing the live stream actually had a very different experience than those of us that got to attend live. It definitely feels like there were some really good nuggets in the Q and A’s that maybe those of us that weren’t, or didn’t have access to those Q and A’s just, We could only gleam what was the pristine, beautiful presentation as opposed to maybe the, the, the nuts and bolts getting into the nitty gritty.

I definitely had a lot of questions and I’m very excited to see some of the, the follow up that’s come out since the event. But I definitely agree with Kirk this, this event Each year seems more and more shareholder oriented than new product innovation. There definitely were some great nuggets and there’s some things I’m Beyond excited about coming from an SOM path perspective as opposed to just straight PPC but yeah, there’s there’s definitely a lot of Good, good things to dive into here.

Frederick Vallaeys: It was a little interesting too. I felt it was somewhat sterile which is a different way of saying it’s a shareholder event. And what surprised me was so Jerry Dishler gets up on stage way at the beginning and he does have some announcements about, Hey, we’re thinking about more transparency into machine learning.

Okay. And like, we should all be super excited about that, but I’m like, but I hold back because like everybody’s just. Very like, I felt like they needed a warm up comic or something to get the audience going. Kirk, I don’t know if you had that sense too. But nobody was responding to anything. So there was no energy in the room, at least for that first session.

And then the energy did build, I think for the later sessions, but I’m not sure if those were live streamed.

Joe Martinez: I was at home like Navah and like, you could barely hear the audience in between. So I couldn’t tell if it was like, Oh, the mics are just really good on the people or was it a dead crowd? Like it’s for, from at home, it sounded great.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I know it was small. I mean, so they had 800 people on the campus. And I wonder too, I mean, so if you can only send a limited number of people compared to in the past when it’s been thousands that you could send to the San Francisco Convention Center, do you send the people who are more senior, maybe not as excited about like this actual thing that’s going to make their life much easier?

Are they less likely to stand up and cheer? I don’t know what it was, but it just, it was, it was different. I know that I had my turn, but for the record, anyone can get anyone to stand up and cheer with the right motivation. So, I mean, I think you’re right. They needed maybe less Miley Cyrus and more stand up comedians.

Oh my god, Miley was great though, like, although it’s funny because she, during her show, she was like, wait, why am I here? Where am I?

Kirk Williams: Thank you, Cleveland!

Like, Fred, to your point, I think it is interesting, like, probably You know, my guess who’s in the room. It’s probably tends to be more senior level people at, at brands or large agencies, and they might not even be as in touch with some of those specific things that are changing. So some of that may even be not being fully aware of like when something is released, whether that’s something cheerworthy or, or boo worthy or nothing.

Right. And so one of the things I’ve, I noted was. Like I think there might be the potential for this sort of event where you could maybe have best of both worlds. I don’t know maybe have like kind of the bigger picture high level type stuff directional. Here’s what we’re thinking about doing with our Google marketing stuff.

But maybe there could be an option for some sort of physical More tactical type focus thing with key advertisers and those who are kind of in the weeds to really have connection with engineers and that, that happens somewhat with Google. And sometimes with surveys, things like that, but, but not entirely.

And that could be an opportunity at that sort of like maybe a couple of day event or something like that with GML, where there’s more of strategic and then more tactical type of an option in the future. But

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah, and we’ll dive into the topics here next, but. So they had this these demo stations.

Right. And what I find fascinating was you talk to literally there’s a booth for automation and one person talks about RSAs and one person knows about smart bidding and one person knows about like image ad extension automations, but even between them, there’s very little, I think, overlap in terms of what they know and how they understand that their feature impacts something else.

And so I think as advertisers, we often come away a little bit frustrated Oh, Google builds. Like like value rules, for example, or new customer acquisition focus, but they mess up your value reporting. And then in reporting your reports now look wonky because you put in different numbers and you go to them and you talk to product managers or engineers and they’re like, Oh, that’s kind of outside of my area.

Like I didn’t know this was happening because they also never use Advertising themselves, right? They just build the products so I mean my message to everyone listening here today is like don’t assume google is like just Not wanting to do the right thing. They often just work in such silos that they really need us And you to give feedback on this is a very specific pain point And so we did have a chance being at the event live to to interact with those people and maybe Push them a little bit towards what they needed to be doing But i’m really hopeful like you said kirk that is going to come back as a more Hybrid event where more people can engage with engineers because they do they do they do need us to know what to build But good.

We have a lot of big topics here. The first one I wanted to start with and I’ll throw this one to you, but it seemed like ads are going to be everywhere. Do you want to tell us about that?

Navah Hopkins: Yeah. So my big takeaway from the whole event was how much the page SERP or search engine result page and the organic search result page or SERP are going to merge together that we’re going to have Display and shopping even more intermingled than it already is that we are incenting people to build.

Their, their paid programs into their organic. I mean, that’s already been happening with local service ads. And one of the things that I actually found really interesting that I was, I was hoping to hear something about that. We, we didn’t is how, you know, Much the search result pages have actually been shifting over the past couple of months.

And I, I, you said we could do a screen share, so I, I pulled up the tweet. I don’t know if I’m allowed to share.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, please you’ll have to request it. I will turn it on for you. Well, Navah pulled that up, so they, they didn’t say anything. Oh, do you have it ready to share? Yeah. Yeah.

Navah Hopkins: So one of the things that’s really interesting is that this version of the search result page has come up quite a bit.

And this is just search. And you have the local service ad right up here. You have the text ad, you have the map pack, and then you have the organic listings. And every time it comes up and every time I bring it up in TPC chat, Barry Adams will sometimes cover it, cover it we’re told it’s a bug but the more that it was discussed that we’re going to have those display placements actually serving, you know, With our shopping results and our organic results the less that this feels like a bug and the more it feels like there are some tests and how can we blend the line between sponsored and earned content and that we have to start thinking about how we present ourselves uniformly and collaboratively from both a paid and SEO perspective.

I’m really expecting not just from a privacy standpoint, which I know all of us have thoughts about, but from also just a creative standpoint, how are we setting ourselves up for success to look really good and to have consistent brand messaging however we’re showing in the search result page because that line is basically dead not just on the search side, but also from display.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then so what they showed at the event and they didn’t really talk about it, I think that it just kind of like glossed over it. But Jerry Dishler was up there and it’s like, okay, a search results page ads at the top and then you scroll a little bit and then there’s more ads and then you scroll a little bit and then there’s like maps and then scroll ads and scroll maps video.

Right. And. He was talking about this infinite scroll. It’s more of a social feed sort of experience. But so instead of going to page two and seeing more ads on page two, the ads now become interspersed in various locations. And then that’s really exciting for us advertisers. I mean, obviously that’s more inventory. But I’m curious from the other two. So with this blending of PPC and SEO and having to be maybe more consistent in branding, is that something you’re thinking about? And Joe, maybe to you, like, because video does play pretty highly on the search results pages, right?

Joe Martinez: Yeah, my, my curious, I don’t know, did they say anything, or I’m just curious in general, we may not know, is if it’s an infinite scroll, is there a chance that you’re at?

Could pop up again. You know, it’s one of those things where I’m curious about that. If that is that that’s exciting. I mean, for the other formats, like you mentioned video, it’s just an opportunity. It’s pretty much almost like just an in feed ad that we already get on YouTube search results. But now within the main google.

com, I, we, our YouTube channel benefits. Greatly from the organic video placement there. But now it could be an opportunity from a lot of brands to get those placements and have a sponsored one up top that just blends in with the same result, just like a regular in feed ad. So the video guy, video guy in me loves that one for sure.

Frederick Vallaeys: And the algorithm is like, damn it, Joe, you’re really supposed to click on this ad. So we’re going to show it to you again and again, until you like actually click it. It was right.

Joe Martinez: Well, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, you visit a lot of websites and you’ll see the same ad from the same company, like three, four times on a page.

I know it’s not supposed to do that, but it happens all the time and it is Google ads. So I’m, I’m curious how that’s going to be controlled from internal, from a first party.

Frederick Vallaeys: Same page, frequency copying. That’s a new feature we need

Kirk Williams: there. Good thing. There’s no average position anymore. Right. Cause that would totally be obsolete.

I mean, it, it’s really interesting to me. Like Google’s always going to be under. Some sort of legislative focus. And, and right now they’re like being hit from two sides, right? You have the privacy stuff, which is always a big deal and kind of increasing everyone needs to figure that out. But like, I mean, Google just got hit.

Was it last week? I forget the names of everyone, but like with the antitrust stuff, right. Yeah, you even had people on, you know, complete polarized views and a lot of things who are, you know, So I I’m really excited to hear what you guys have to say on this. And I like that that Google is getting involved in this because they know it’s less about like the big Twitter accounts and more about like like getting people to log in and playing a game that’s on their phone.

But for a lot of people I just I don’t think that’s the case. I think that it’s more about like, what, what do you do with your time? Any future steps that you could take.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yes let’s shift over to the second big topic here. So privacy. I know we have a lot of subtopics to talk about that, but my ad center was sort of the first thing that they talked about.

So let’s cover that. Here was another slide and this maybe to put the things in context, right? I think us as advertisers, we kind of understand What data Google tends to use to show ads, a lot of consumers that I talk to, they still get freaked out and they’re like, Oh my God, Google’s reading every email that I sent.

Like they are reading my docs. They know everything about me. And yes, they obviously have access to that data, but that doesn’t mean that the advertising systems run on that. So here was a reminder for everyone about Google’s privacy commitments. Fairly basic stuff, but always nice when Google says it publicly and stands for then they will be held accountable to these.

Standards as well, right? So just as a reminder, but the next step there is my ad center So now do you want to tell us about my ad center?

Navah Hopkins: Sure and and I I feel like i’m i’m definitely getting a little bit of favoritism. So so definitely everyone else, chime in so my ad center i’m actually very excited about because I think it’s going to be a much more robust and and to be frank more highly used You tool for privacy and for curation of content other than the current settings.

When I talk to my family that aren’t initiated in digital marketing, or even to be honest, some folks are just getting into digital marketing the current settings to see what kind of content Google is looking at to, to serve ads to you is really hidden. And, and most people do not know how to access it.

If you want, we can do a tutorial of how to do that. But. That could also be a resource for after. But what’s nice about the my ad center is that it’s going to be a standalone Really easy to use and also help you Control what bits of content you get more ads for and which ones you get less so what that means is that rather than being bombarded by video content display content search content that just you don’t find useful Or you’re just You were in such an exploratory phase that it would be a waste for advertisers to spend money on you.

You can say you want fewer of that content. If you’re like, nah, I’m like really into this, like just, I need help with more vendors or, you know, sometimes ads are really well done. I genuinely enjoy this. Like, Bring it on. But let me spend that sweet money. And yeah, I’ll likely engage. Sure. You can say you want more of that content.

So it’s, it’s a really powerful way that you can curate what content you get. And also allow advertisers to have that better message mapping as they are losing the kind of nag at the Christie cookie targeting that they used to use.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yep. So the bar gets higher for all of us advertisers. If we run bad ads, consumers will be able to say mute ads from this brand.

It’s just going to become easier. This also really impacts measurement, right? And I want to throw this one to you, Kirk. But as things become more private, third party cookies are going away. What, what were some of the things like the tag, for example, that you heard from Google that have to do with measurements?

Kirk Williams: Yeah, I mean, let me start by noting I’m, I’m gung ho about whatever Google is trying to figure out with privacy stuff. I should be careful and saying whatever, but I’m, I’m happy that they’re trying to figure stuff out and doing some of this stuff, even if it makes it a little frustrating for us learning in that.

And that’s because I really want to avoid an iOS 14 event in the, in the, in the SEM world, in the search marketing world, like, Social advertisers had, and some of why everything just crashed and burned so much with Facebook ads is because it was such a big deal and a surprise thing. And it was like an event, right?

And so some of what I see Google doing is like seeing, like, I think they’re maybe doing a decent job of like looking down the road and seeing kind of like what’s coming in some ways, like having the benefit of looking back on things like iOS 14. And like, these are the sorts of changes that can happen in our industry.

And. And and, and so let me just note, like, I, I, I’m actually happy with them trying to do this so that we can transition this stuff over time and avoid kind of this, like this hard hitting thing that then we got to figure out and deal with clients and budgets and that. So like some of what they announced and some of what that looks like are things like on device measurement.

So like, I’m no, I’m no privacy expert, right? But the idea, the idea being that when, you know, when someone. Access is something then, you know, they’re, they’re looped into the audience, whatever it is, and then, and then that just is immediately erased right on their device. It never leaves that. So there’s kind of a more secure thing.

They’re likely that’s going to be more in line with future laws, things like that. And then and then the Google tag they announced is, is intriguing to me, and they did not give much information about this at all. But one of the things we do know, I mean, like G4 is switching to like an event based model as opposed to session based, which is universal analytics and I was just talking to Simon Poulton about that.

He’s someone to follow on Twitter. S P O U L T O N Simon Poulton. And he’s going to be on our, our privacy podcast episode that we’re releasing soon. And it just kind of talking through like, what are some of the reasons for that switch and how that has to do with privacy. But one of the interesting things about the Google tag is.

That you’re only going to have to have one tag now for both GA4 and, and ads. So you’re just going to have this, this one first party cookie tag. And it’s just going to be kind of interesting to see like what I don’t know. Is like, what does that mean? Even in terms of what sort of data Google ads is now would, would be collecting that may include additional data, like analytics type data, they didn’t have access to in order to inform machine learning.

And that I, I honestly don’t really know that. But it’s just, it’s just very interesting to me that there will be this singular tag. And like what that means in the future is probably at the very least something for us to be aware of.

Joe Martinez: I think a couple of times they mentioned like. With GA4 stuff with a lot of the app stuff being built in.

So they did mention like app information a few times. I’m like. You’re assuming like everyone has an app, you know? So it’s like, I understand it’s important to know for a lot of people who have them, but like a lot of them don’t, most of my clients do not have an app. They’re just not in that industry or space.

So it’s, I’m, I’m curious about that one, the singular tag thing that you mentioned and a lot of GA4 stuff, especially since the information that we’re seeing in GA4, there’s so much information at least pulled away from us visibility. So where are these, you know, Additional signals coming from if we can’t see him in the new GA4 interface.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, good question. I do like the whole unification of tags because it has gotten really complicated with privacy, right? So now you have one tag that does remarketing and a different tag that does your audience list building or whatever and now you have to figure out Well, did I get the consent from the user and then my subsequent tags can fire, right?

gtm So if you have one tag and so google is building consent mode into these tags So the moment that the user says I approve You These three out of four types of things that you track. So look at GTM, right? Oh, sorry, the GDPR, I mean. So look at European websites. You go there, you have to approve four different tags.

Google’s automating this. So that that’s huge, a huge win, I think for us, because I don’t want to deal with that technical detail. I just want to advertise. I don’t want to worry about sequential tags firing. But then yeah, where does all this extra data come from? Come from, where does it go to? Because there was also a lot of talk about audience list sharing, right?

And that touches maybe a little bit on video and performance max campaigns. I don’t know if anyone wants to talk about that.

Navah Hopkins: I’ll chime in on audiences, but Joe should chime in first.

Joe Martinez: I, there was a lot on performance max. That’s probably when I turned the Twitter feed off of people’s response to all the performance max news, because Twitter was like, Oh, here we go.

Here we go. I mean, it’s a campaign type that’s not going away. So it’s one thing that we have to embrace it. So any additional features that they could give us there are, it’s just going to be beneficial. So the fact that I think, you know, experiments are stuff that we could test between them is something that I like and, you know, more transparency on.

What they’re doing to optimize that performance max campaigns. Where are they getting the information from that feeds the changes that they’re making within the account? So I think that’s one, a few new features that I thought were beneficial. Anything in terms of like, Oh, but we’re also adding optimization score to it.

I’m like, Oh, okay. Optimization optimization score for all, all campaigns. While I still think it’s valuable, it can give you insights on stuff that you are missing. I don’t blow it off completely. It’s not my. Live all be all I’m not going to do everything that they say I will definitely pay attention to it.

But I still think in terms of what I want to control, I’d rather set up some more like experiments and tests where I can look at different assets between even campaign types and see which ones are actually making the difference.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Here was the big stat about optimization score. So 10 point lift and optimization score gives you median 14 percent increase in conversions.

So obviously that’s highly desirable, right? But I always love these though. It’s like Blanket conversions. I was like, where, what, what are they pulling as conversions? You know, it’s one of those things where like, cool, what accounts was this from? Like, how is it set up? Just an overall blanket. Yeah. They saw a lift in conversions.

Joe Martinez: I was like, I need a little bit more information to get excited about that. Google. Yeah. I mean, we just did an RSA study for for SMX advanced and that anyone who hasn’t signed up for SMX advanced, it’s free this year. It’s in two weeks. So go ahead and register. But yeah, we, we looked at if you do different things in RSAs, what’s the impact on conversion value ROAS?

Frederick Vallaeys: And a lot of those numbers we figured are, you can’t really trust because conversions are self reported, value self reported. And then we found this one account that had like 3 billion worth of conversion value. And we’re like, pretty sure that’s not right. They’d have to start filtering that. Still think of it a huge grain of salt.

Kirk Williams: Well, and didn’t Google just change, I believe customer match. So if you, if you upload a customer latch match list, I believe by default now it can be included in smart bidding. Yes. And so, I mean, that just happens that that was kind of an interesting, again, like a lot of what Google changes tactically for us almost happens in kind of almost sometimes quiet ways, like throughout the year to, to, to monitor.

One of the, I’ll just note this real quick on the customer match side. So. One of the things like for us advertisers, just to, just to be aware of and think through, like, so, so I think ideally, like you, I, as much as possible, it would be ideal for you to no longer touch customer match list because that is like, that’s starting to get into holding personal private information of your clients, customers.

Right. So I’m kind of thinking agency in that. So like we’re starting as much as possible to try to have our. Like to have our clients actually upload that. So then it’s, it’s them holding that data and Google, right. But the flip side is like, if, if we are as agencies holding that data, like what we are doing now just to really be as much possible privacy compliant is like we are getting rid of that data.

So we might receive that from a client. Uploaded that in the Google, delete all forms of the file, get rid of that in every sense, because that way we personally, as an agency do not hold private information and that is something I think just, you know, I, I doubt a lot of agencies are doing that. And I think that is really something to ponder as we continue to move into this privacy area where that sort of thing can get you in trouble in the future.

Navah Hopkins: And I’ll just chime in there from a tool standpoint. Gone are the days where we even have to hold customer lists. Most CRM systems most landing page tools have that direct integration with Google already, and even if they don’t Zapier, it’s there. It’s easy. It’s easy, easy, easy. So unless you are holding your own list of a Google Sheet and it’s like the equivalent of a Google Sheet shopping feed and it’s like you own it.

Odds are you’re using some form of CRM. There’s zero need to have that downloaded list. Almost every single tool has a direct integration. So 100 percent with you there, Kirk. Like there’s. We shouldn’t ever be seeing that list. It should always be hash. It should always be that direct integration.

Joe Martinez: Yeah.

From the smart bidding effect of that list, it’s set at the account setting level and it’s literally like you use it or you don’t. So it’s not what it’s like. It’s like all your customer lists. Or none at all. So it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to segment like, and only use these lists. These are valuable.

So if you want to use it, it’s an opportunity to go back into your audiences and clean up or remove a lot of old, irrelevant lists. Otherwise it’s all the customer list audiences that you have created will affect your smart bidding.

Frederick Vallaeys: And now one new type of list and customer segment is your loyalty users.

So that’s particularly relevant to shopping. Kirk, you want to tell us about that one?

Kirk Williams: Yeah they’re, you know, allowing for, you know, loyalty list users to be uploaded. So this is one of those things I think is like, it’s pretty cool for brands who use that, who you know, have some sort of loyalty type program.

And if you don’t, then You know, it’s, it’s probably not going to be something you’re going to utilize. Right. So like one of those, like, cool, if you can use it, access it. Kind of like they, they added you, I think in the future you’ll be able to upload 3d. Product images into the feed, right? So they can start doing like 3d models and that.

And it’s kind of like, yeah, if you have those, or if you have access to get them, absolutely upload them and use them. But that’s also probably a lot of people.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. So that’s like augmented reality shopping results. So you see a chair that you might like, you put it in AR, put it in your room, see what it looks like.

So I was talking to one of the product managers on that, because I was kind of the same point as you is like, I’m. Not a huge company. I don’t have these 3D files. Like, how do I get them? And so more and more services are coming up and it’s maybe a couple of hundred dollars to scan in one of your items.

And then if you have a big enough business and you sell enough of these, maybe it is worth going through that modeling and hopefully it gets cheaper to over time as more vendors start to support that. At the very, at the very least, like focusing, I mean, a lot of brands have like those five products that are whatever, you know, 60%, 80 percent of their sales.

Kirk Williams: Like then it really may be one of those things that ponder is like at the very least, maybe we take those, those top products, invest that money in those. We don’t necessarily have to do that for every single thing. It’s, it’s not all or nothing. Right. So really focused on optimizing those, those key products.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And then you optimize your feeds. And we’ll get to Tim’s question here in a minute, but we’ll optimize those feeds. And then you can also start using them with your video ads.

Joe Martinez: Yeah, they’re starting to bring back some more features too. I, I’m going to call it TrueView for shopping. I know it’s not called that anymore, but it’s just, it’s habit.

You give me that for so many years, it’s going to take me a while to adjust to that. But yeah, product feeds have been. Available in the, in the video action campaigns for a while. And Google has done stuff recently where they said like, Hey, we’re also going to expand it to the brand awareness campaigns.

And I laughed at that. I was like, well, that’s not a new feature because when they originally were released, they were released in the product and brand awareness campaign objectives. So, I mean, pretty much if you’re doing the website visits, you know, conversion shopping or a campaign without a goal, you can create a video action campaign, link your products up.

And from the video action campaign standpoint, you do have more options from product selection within the ad. Well, so people are scrolling on that from. A device, but there’s been some expansion there. So the ability now to include products for vertical videos, and we’re going to start seeing that coming through it in those specific placements on apps in YouTube is a pretty cool expansion.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yep. Sure. Let’s try to answer Tim’s question here. So back to privacy and tracking. So let’s do that question right there. So I don’t know exactly the answer. To this, but Tim so the Google universal tag is a third party tag on your site, right? It is not your own. So you would still have to go through the permissioning and the user would have to permit certain types of tracking to happen for that tag to be able to work.

So I don’t think there’s a huge change. But I think what you’re referring to is how iOS basically disallows a lot of these By default because they’re third party Google is obviously much more web focused. In safari, i’m sure they’re still going to see this as third party. So it’s going to get blocked but but I don’t I mean, I think google is just in a better position and google like you keep talking to advertisers who run on facebook and they’re all decreasing their budgets because it’s becoming harder it’s not having the results that they saw before so that money is shifting towards google.

You I don’t know if anyone else has a different take on that, but I don’t think it’s going to cause a huge shift in anything. So, and again, we start to get into some of this complex technical stuff. My understanding is that the Google tag is a first party cookie. Based on, I mean, I think that’s one of the reasons why.

Kirk Williams: They shifted, especially like to the G tag was because it was first party now and no longer, you know, having to deal with the third party stuff. But again, like a guy like Simon is usually who I’m like, Hey, Simon, can you help me with this super technical privacy question? No, not, but did you have some

Navah Hopkins: yeah.

So the, the core difference between iOS and Google A is the, is the time length. So I believe iOS has 28 days. And Google is 30 days that someone, the, the, the pixel permissions are, are remaining current and then need to be rechecked. The other piece to whether it’s server side or event based, my understanding, and again, I could, like Kirk, I definitely do not want to be quoted on this.

I just, this is, this is my, my understanding of, of, of how this plays out is that because it’s going to be device based. It would, it would be contained to, to the, the device. So it, it would actually, in theory, be cleaner. The other component to that is that you, the advertiser or the brand, can apply certain traits that you believe apply to the that audience segment that you’re, that you track within.

So. You actually kind of like with a custom intent audiences, you can apply what you believe is true about those folks, I will say, I have been pushing much, much harder for all of my clients and for everyone that I work with to focus far more on customer match oriented lists. Not only do they have a really positive impact on Performance Max campaigns they also are probably the cleanest to take between each individual ad platform and They are, they present the best opportunity to collaborate with your SEO friends from a CRO standpoint.

So as you build those consensual conversations and you get people to, to opt in to a customer list, that data is always going to Carry through, whereas their their discrepancy is in how long you can belong to a list on iOS versus Google, so the data might just be different. And so that can create discrepancies in your sources of truth.

So I tend to prefer more customer match audiences. And again, using Google. Thank you. A single source of truth G for as opposed to The individual ad platforms.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and then on device tracking, which Kirk had mentioned, comes into play here, too. So, even for those users who disallow tracking that goes off the site, if you can track on the device, then you don’t actually need to.

To write the same permissions, and this is flock technology, basically, so federated learning of cohorts, which Googled and scrapped. But one component of that was on device conversion tracking. And so Google is clearly not throwing away all that work, but you’re bringing it back into little segments. That makes sense.

But yeah, I can’t wait for your podcast episode and hopefully a follow up blog post to enlighten us on all of these difficult technical questions. So Tim, thank you for taking us on this wild goose chase, I think, like what works, what doesn’t, but we’ll have more answers soon. Let’s go back to Performance Max for a second.

So Joe, you already talked about OptiScore. We just talked about audiences, but let’s talk about goals. One thing they announced was in store purchase behavior. Kurt, that might be a good one for you to cover.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. Yeah. I can, I can chat about that. So that is so they’re getting that through like Google my business, right?

And then you do have to have that linked up and have to have that extension. The location extensions set there, but they are going to, it sounds like begin to utilize that within your, you know, performance max campaigns objectives, which, which again, suggests that you have certain amount of traffic in store that.

You know, that’s all able, able to be used and has enough data for them to pull their conversion modeling off of and make some wise choices in the, in the campaign. So

Joe Martinez: is it basically like a store visit type conversion action?

Kirk Williams: That’s a good question. Let me look back into

Frederick Vallaeys: again, the details are often my whereabouts.

I haven’t, right. So they, they kind of threw out what’s what’s happening, but then if you want to know how to do it, it’s like so you’re looking that up Kirk.

Kirk Williams: Yeah, I was like, I was literally looking to see, I believe that’s what they’re doing is more of that like store visit. And again, I was even trying to try and someone, you know, one of your Listeners might even have better insight into that. I was even like, I was chatting with someone internally.

I was like, so help me understand, are they, is this like a logged in user on their phone with physical like location tracking set on? And then that walks, I believe that’s how it is, right? That walks into a store again, like what you’re going to have to have a certain amount of percentage of that. I know in the past they had beacons.

Like I remember we had like, we had a little coworking space. We actually received a beacon and put it up. I’ve not really heard of beacons for a while. Are those things are beacons out of the picture for GMB or do they still send those?

Frederick Vallaeys: I don’t know. Yeah. Why, why were beacons even a thing, right? I mean, like the cell phone or the phones are tracking so precisely now. And so Google explained this at one point, but they use the Wi Fi signal strength and they know where the Wi Fi hubs are and they combine that with the cell phone and the GPS. And so even if you’re in a shopping mall, they can literally tell if you’re on one side of the wall in the Apple store, on the other side of the wall in the Microsoft store. So that’s like who cares about

Kirk Williams: a beacon. Maybe that was to help like originally train some of that. You know, some of their things. So anyways, yeah. Yeah. So I believe that that is what they’re doing. So you can start to have that as you know, a target as well, just to give the machine more data.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. But so performance max not going anywhere, more capabilities getting added to it. I thought it was interesting how. It’ll give you insights about all audiences that you haven’t so the department audiences historically has always been you have to add an Audience for observation to get any insights on it, but in pmax, it’s actually google will tell you Oh, you didn’t attach this audience, but we noticed it’s doing really well So here’s a new insight.

The problem is always, can you actually do something with it? Because performance max campaigns have very few levers. And maybe one of the most frustrating things, and Joe, you should talk about this, but like video in performance max campaigns and how Google will automatically generate a video. Have you had any good ones like that?

Or how do you do that?

Joe Martinez: No, I, because of that, I’ve told clients who want to test it. Let’s wait till you, let’s wait till you have a video. I, it kind of, the tool’s not around anymore, but there kind of isn’t a, whatever there was like a website where users can go to, it was a video builder tool. It was a beta thing for a while.

I know the beta is closed. Some people can still access it, I believe in some other ways, but it was Google wanted to build a tool where you can help you easily create a YouTube video, get it on your channel. So you can start using it for ads. They had some fault default, like. Prebuilt templates. And it was the same thing, like add a few images here.

You know, if you have an app, there’s a link to the app and they had different templates for all that, but it was literally like almost like a slideshow video, like, Oh, here comes one image with some text over here’s another image. So for brands that. Are very strict on how their brand is perceived or the type of quality of creative That is something where those built videos aren’t going to be for you And you might get yelled at if your client is like that.

So I we typically wait until We have a client that has a decent looking YouTube video uploaded to the channel and then try to push them to kind of leave it unlisted. So you can test it a little bit. So I know since the data in performance maxes and now it’s as clear as we want say, we know this video is in our performance max campaigns.

And then from there, it just gives us. Better information on how that video is actually performing. And then you can just create an audience of use this video specifically as an ad layer that into some of your other campaigns and get better insights on how that performance max video is doing. But you know, it’s, I recommend waiting till you have one, a video specifically created for it, but.

We understand you might want to just test earlier.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And it’s, it’s sort of weird how Google goes with these template based things where you said it’s just a boring slideshow. And sorry, Navah, let’s, let’s get this image off of your face. Production studio. Let’s get that image off of Navah’s face so we can see her.

But what’s fascinating to me. There you go. Thank you. So when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence and the generation of creatives, I mean, I think for a long time, we’ve said that humans are just going to be better at that than machines. But that is shifting a little bit, right?

So Optmyzrs soon we’ll be using open AI’s GPT three mechanism to write new headline variations. It’s kind of cool because you can say, listen, here’s, here’s the three headline variations that I have, write me a fourth and a fifth that are kind of talking about the same thing. And the machine learning is now good enough to understand what were these three headlines saying, what was the theme about them and how do we say those things maybe in a slightly different way.

Or you even say like, write me some text headlines that are, you know, within the character limit based on this homepage. And the machine does a decent enough job and you still want humans to validate it. You obviously still want your human creativity to be the marketing director. And the creative genius that comes up with a slogan, like just do it.

The machine’s not going to do that for you. But when it comes to you, just like having an RSA and struggling to get those last three headlines in machines is going to be really good at that. Now that’s text the next level of that. And then what I’m showing on the screen here is Dali too. So it’s from open AI.

So this is an image generator. So this astronaut on a horse obviously it’s not an actual photo, but it was also not done in Photoshop by someone. You literally just. Type in what you want the image to show and the machine learning is able to generate a photo realistic image Of something that you can now use in an ad you know, we’re probably just a couple years away from this being possible for video, right?

And so now joe you can go and say my brand has these colors, right? So stick with that brand scheme Here’s my logo, but like put that together And like the style of a music video and it’ll generate something. And again, you’ll have to review it. It’s not going to be perfect. It’s kind of

Joe Martinez: like, we have a few clients using promo.

com and a few, you know, they have a variety of just stock video footages. You can paste some texts wherever you want it and create a better looking video than some of the cheap tools out there. So, I mean, the more that they can get it in there, I was hoping they would continuously expand upon a video builder tool.

They kept like. Giving us something, releasing it, giving us something and taking it away again. So, I mean, the closer it gets and assume that there’s at least something to add to it, that’s better than a slideshow type video. It’s always a good thing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And then there were some fascinating talk at the event too, about.

You know, the, the machine learning mechanism that surfaces the best things like within RSAs or whether it’s in your asset library. It can only judge you based on what you’ve put in, right? You might’ve put in five headlines and it’ll tell you which ones are the best. And there’s new experimentation tools and maybe Navah you can cover that next, but it’ll tell you what’s best.

But it’s not going to tell you that five other headlines that you didn’t think of would have been better. And so that’s still the human element that we’re going to have to bring to the table. But let’s talk about experimentation now that you want to take that one.

Navah Hopkins: Sure. So one of the things I actually found really interesting about this event, most of the content wasn’t really geared towards what I would call the SMB experiments.

Was the one exception. And ironically, that’s the one exception that to be frank, I’m the most nervous about because it’s so easy to click a button and make a mistake. Now, granted, experiments are not going to take all of your money and they’re not going to hurt things. But Google made a very big point during GML about one click experimentations for performance max, one click experiments about upgrading.

That was, that was the other thing that I found. Kind of adorable and also horrifying that we’re talking about upgrading exact match to broad or upgrading your ETAs to RSAs and upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. It’s like the the Cybermen in Doctor Who. Upgraded. But yeah, the The long and short of it is that it seems like experiments are no longer just the, the domain of the, of the technical professional, like they’re, they’re trying to make them more accessible.

Yes. Ah, all right. One second. One second. This is actually really important.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. What did we just do

Kirk Williams: for all those

Frederick Vallaeys: of you?

Kirk Williams: While she’s gone, let me note a quick correction. We were chatting about this in, in chat. It is in store sales, Joe, not just in store.

Navah Hopkins: So for the record. Okay, this is, I know this is live.

This is my happiness box and whenever I would do in it is something with my team live, we would always use this. To talk about the happiness and like, so, yeah. So your happiness is bigger on the inside. Doctor Who, Star Wars, which are like Star Wars and Doctor Who. Screw GML. Like just start nerding out together.

But yeah, the long, the long and short of my rant about experiments is that they are much more accessible now within accounts. And so on the one hand, that’s great because it’s going to open the doors for everyone to play with them. But at the same time, that’s really horrifying because not everyone is going to understand exactly what they’re doing and they’re not always going to necessarily know what parameters to set for experiments.

The average business owner that I speak to that isn’t Enterprise or SaaS or, or seasoned they don’t know what their average customer is worth. They don’t know how many customers that they can get in a given month. And like there’s, there’s a lot of tools out there. And shout out to our host Optmyzr is, is actually building that into Optmyzr right now.

If you don’t know those basic. You’re not going to be able to set a meaningful experiment. So on the one hand, it’s great that experiments are being made a lot more accessible. But on the other hand, I’m actually very nervous about it. Particularly when it comes to performance max and broad match.

Joe Martinez: It’s already so many moving, so many variables in those types of campaigns. If you’re trying to set up multiple experience with, Experiments with all the different variables. It’s like how many tests are you actually running at the same time? And that’s something that people got to be careful for

Frederick Vallaeys: So google announced their first one click experiment Which is the one that takes all of your keywords and turns them into broad match.

Because did Google mention it? I don’t remember, but the 15 percent of searches being new, I actually don’t think they said it at the event, but then the day after I talked to my rep and they, they said it again. But yeah,

Kirk Williams: they said it one time. They said every time, I don’t think they did. That’s crazy.

Right? And that’s, that’s, that’s a stat that they’ve putting

Joe Martinez: out for years.

Kirk Williams: Whoa. Maybe it, maybe it dipped, maybe it changed that now guys, that’s interest. Interesting.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. But no, I’m, I’m really excited about these experiments. Do I think just the way that we have to manage these accounts and run statistically significant tests has obviously changed.

And I’m happy to hear that Google is making that easy. But then at the same time, I do have a concern because like they always talk about insights and like, Hey, did you know this audience does really well? Or, or do you want to try broad match keywords? But, but sometimes, you know, if we find broad match doesn’t work that well.

In some cases, like what’s the alternative, right? Like, sure. We can go back to exact, but exact is no longer exact. So how much control do we really have? So is this just making us feel good? Or is this actually helping us make the accounts better? And I think that’s the next thing we kind of have to push Google towards is and I, you know, I talked to some PMs, right.

And they’re basically like, okay, we’re in performance max. We’re going to tell you if an audience is underperforming. Well but they’re like, that doesn’t matter because smart bidding is accounting for that. So you’re automatically bidding lower for that. But my point was. I don’t want to bid lower for that underperforming segment.

I want to know who that segment is and why they’re underperforming, right? Like if it happens to be that New York is not performing quite as well, is that a bidding problem or the messaging product mix problem, right? If you don’t tell me that, then I can’t optimize my business. I’m sure I’m still coming in.

Under my, my goals for CPA, for example, but that’s not really what I want. I want to optimize my whole business, not just my bids. And that’s the thing that I think they often don’t quite understand. Again, because one team manages bidding, the different team manages the insights that you get, but they haven’t connected those two together.

Kirk Williams: I was just talking with a Googler actually at GML about that exact thing. And, and like, you know, he brought up the insights tab. Well, you know, we have insights tab and there’s some interesting stuff. And it was like, I don’t, I don’t just care about those few audiences that you might see statistically change.

So you want to show me like those few things, like exactly like you said, Fred, like what about all the other stuff? What about the opportunities that we have that might not be statistically significant enough, but that we might be able to find. Ways that we could target this specific audience with this shoe and then be able to build that into more of a statistically significant audience, right?

Yeah, good. That’s a that’s a great. I think that’s a I think that’s a huge point. And a lot of us have been talking to Google about that for a while, like in removing things like search terms. You’re not just, it’s not just about like, eh, we want control. It’s that we were like using that for a lot more than just simply negative keywords.

We were informing landing page creation. We were informing like SEO stuff. There’s just, there’s a lot of business stuff that goes into losing data that’s, that’s more than just a few of us advertisers wanting about control.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. So we’re coming up on time here. So anything that we haven’t covered that you feel is important and you want to talk about?

Joe Martinez: I just think overall it was, yeah, a good portion of it is search still, but I think a heck of a lot of it wasn’t really about search. There’s a, I mean, performance max covers, you know, pretty much everything. We got a lot of video announcements that we typically don’t get. And the fact that they almost led that thing off.

In the keynote with video stuff, we got display announcements and updates to discover and everything. So it’s, there’s, it’s a lot more than search. And so it’s a huge landscape. So I know there’s so many accounts out there that are still just search, search, search, search focused. I think eventually those are going to struggle without other information.

Feeding the beast. And the reason I’ve always loved YouTube is that it was just, it’s YouTube is the Google property. It’s a massive Google property where we can collect a bunch of first party information from there. And now look at all the other opportunities we get to collect other first party information and audiences from those things.

So it’s, that is one way to kind of feed different signals is to actually start testing all of these and not just do. Pure search, especially with all the limitations and the search queries that we’re losing. Now it’s, we need to find different channels within the Google landscape to get more signals, to make better campaigns.

Frederick Vallaeys: And Google said that YouTube on connected devices on connected TVs is the most watched video platform. So it’s not Netflix. It’s not some other ones you might watch. It’s YouTube.

Joe Martinez: I was disappointed. There’s one announcement I wanted because I talked to the product team for a few different countries, like half a year ago.

And I told them I want QR code extensions for YouTube. And I was hoping we’d get something like that. Like Hulu has, you know, you watch And on Hulu is a QR code. And so many people are watching YouTube on TV. I was like, when’s the QR code extension coming? You get that. Take my money.

Frederick Vallaeys: Keep asking for that.

The other thing I just started and talked about, like everything’s becoming more visual, right? So we talked about the search results page becoming a hybrid of SEM and SEO. But what we haven’t really talked about, and I think we should all be thinking about is it’s becoming more social. Google thinks of it as a feed with lots of images, lots of videos.

And if you think what people do on Tik TOK, what they do on Instagram, like that’s the bar for the interaction with those pages. Now, obviously it’s a search, right? So the intent is different, but the outcome of it and the window into shopping ads or your retailer, your advertiser is becoming more of a social thing.

Joe Martinez: They had that cool example of like. You could take a picture and upload it to Google, like you’re, you’re image searching, but you’re taking a photo. You can add text over the photo that you’re uploading for the search. So it’s that type of visual engagement. That’s going to be extremely important.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly.

Multi sort of input type searches.

Kirk Williams: I, I have, yeah, a couple of brief thoughts to close. Again, like whether we like it or not, it’s clear what direction Google keeps running, running in. And so I just, I just really think that brands investing more and more into just nailing creative is really important because someone might complain like, well, performance max and, you know, because they have the assets and you do all that stuff, man, if, if a brand can really figure out how to have fantastic creative and actually invest in it Then, I mean, also you can just utilize that across multiple platforms too, right?

But I just think that’s going to be really, really crucial moving forward, especially in these kinds of mixed campaign types. And then one just real quick, small thing that I haven’t really seen anyone anywhere talk about. So I’m almost like, man, did I almost mishear that? But so Zapier, Zapier is being integrated into Google ads for like for measurement.

Which I think is kind of a cool little thing. So you will be able to utilize your CRM and get some of that data in, which for B2Bers, I know a lot of times, and you know, unfortunately, like a lot of times Google’s focused more on e comm than B2B, but some of the things with B2B at some point, I do think that leaning into the value based.

Machine learning that Google clearly uses and just figuring out how to like conversion inputs of, of different layers of the, of the customer journey, assigning value, and then having that integrated in. So Google can utilize that is probably just really something to B2Bers are just going to have to kind of lean into and pay.

It could be a little bit easier for you if, if. You know, with Zapier’s integration. So exactly. I totally agree. And it’s becoming easier. So they announced a HubSpot integration for that. And then Mizzle is sort of one of our listeners is asking about struggling with all these different assets. So another announcement that Google made was an asset library, which has existed for some advertisers for a while, but it is becoming globally available to all advertisers.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so it’s going to be one place where you can see how your assets are doing across your whole account and even multi account. So that’s going to hopefully simplify things a little bit for some. And they’re adding,

Joe Martinez: they’re adding video to the asset library, which helps instead of just images, but they need to add a remove.

feature to it so you can get rid of the ones that you don’t want anymore

Frederick Vallaeys: bulk edits. Now, by any final thoughts from you,

Navah Hopkins: just that I’m really interested to see what the outcomes of the trust fall is going to be with the broad smart bidding RSA. That I think caused the most knee jerk skepticism amongst all of us, even less so than the performance max. Mostly because performance max can work well, whereas broad match, like we all are so terrified of it. To be fair, I actually like broad match in certain instances, in certain instances. But there is something to be said for bidding on the broad keyword dating versus finding the right partner near me.

In the giving an age range and putting in those two words on broad match. Yes, it is true that the algorithms have, have, Exponentially improve the machine learning is wild. But until we actually see the nuts and bolts of what goes into that machine learning to be frank, it’s it’s not reasonable to ask folks to trust fall completely into a single word on broad match.

And then RSAs without pins, and then Smart Bidding without guardrails. Like, we still need to be somewhat involved but I do think that a certain amount of trust volume will be needed. And I definitely actually really encourage everyone, if you haven’t already tested Performance Max do, do go ahead and do so especially if you’re actually a lower spending account.

I found that some of the accounts that really struggled with search and this goes to the points that were made earlier that search is a first step for many, and it shouldn’t be. Performance Max has done a great job for accounts that either can’t afford search auction prices or to be frank, do better when display, discover, shopping, video, local are those, those first touches.

And, and there is a lot of If we don’t want to call it good we’ll call it passable. That can be gained from this automation. So please, please try it if you’ve still been skeptical about performance packs.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly, but have the guardrails in place. And often what makes it work out well, if you have a reasonable CPA or ROAS, then sure Google can find you incremental conversions for that.

Tammy’s pointing out one disappointing area where Google hasn’t made the connection between everything is budget, forecasting, and the planner tool. I believe when I was talking to them, they’d understand. They’re definitely working on it. It’s just a matter of when it becomes available.

But good Panelists, you’ve been amazing. As Alan comments that Skynet PPC, what could possibly go wrong? Yes, Skynet PPC was not announced, Alan, maybe next year. But now on Joe Kirk, thank you for joining and thank you for sharing what you all thought about GML. And looking forward to hearing again next year.

We’ll definitely be back with PPC Town Hall later this month. So sign up on pptownhall. com for the mailing list to know about new episodes or just sign up, subscribe here on the YouTube page. And thanks everyone for watching. We’ll see you for the next one. Thanks, Fred.

Navah Hopkins: Thanks for having us.