Google introduces a new era of AI-powered ads

When Google Marketing Live started back in 2013, the ad industry was in the midst of a major shift: the move to mobile. Fast forward ten years and AI is similarly transforming our industry.

In a blog, Jerry Dischler, VP and GM of Ads, Google, writes that AI is foundational to Google Ads. For many years, it has been quietly helping in the background, supporting advertisers in maximising their time and return on investment. It’s fundamental to many of the products Google has built over the last decade, driving growth for businesses of all sizes, from features like Smart Bidding to fully AI-powered products like Performance Max.

At the Google Marketing Live event, the tech giant shared how new generative AI advancements will bring AI front and center, making it the best tool in brands’ marketing toolkit, helping them make decisions, solve problems and enhance their creativity.

Manage complexity through chat

Dischler further writes that for businesses it can sometimes feel overwhelming to get up and running with a new campaign. To address this, a new, natural-language conversational experience has been introduced within Google Ads, designed to jumpstart campaign creation and simplify Search ads by combining brand expertise with Google AI.

For this, brands need to simply add a preferred landing page from their website and Google AI will summarise the page. Then, it will generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images and other assets for the campaign. Brands can review and easily edit these suggestions before deploying. Now, brands can chat their way into better performance – asking Google AI for ideas, just like one might ask a colleague.

Last year, Google started rolling out automatically created assets (ACA) for Search ads, which use content from the landing pages and existing ads to generate headlines and descriptions. Soon, Google will be supercharging ACA with generative AI to more effectively create and adapt Search ads based on the context of a query.

For example, with a search for “skin care for dry sensitive skin”, AI can use content from the brand’s landing page and existing ads to create a new headline that aligns even more closely with the query, such as “Soothe Your Dry, Sensitive Skin”. This helps marketers to improve ad relevance while staying true to their brand.

Boost creativity in Performance Max

Performance Max is one of the best examples of how AI-powered campaigns can drive growth for one’s business. Dischler claimed that advertisers who use Performance Max achieve on average over 18% more conversions at a similar cost per action, which is up from 13% roughly a year later.

Google is bringing generative AI to Performance Max to make it even easier for advertisers to create custom assets and scale them in a few clicks. For this, advertisers need to provide their website and Google AI will start learning about their brand to populate their campaign with text and other relevant assets. Google will even suggest new images generated just for them, helping the brand stand out to customers across a wider range of inventory and formats.

This capability will also be available through the new conversational experience in Google Ads. To make it easier to increase revenue from both new and existing customers, Google is also enhancing its new customer acquisition goal and introducing a re-engagement goal for Performance Max campaigns.

Deliver new ad experiences with generative AI

At Google I/O, new generative AI capabilities coming to Search were announced. These new experiences will make Search smarter and simpler, and Search will continue to be a jumping-off point to the best of the web, including businesses, wrote Dischler. As the future of Search evolves, the future of advertising will evolve too –bringing more opportunities to grow businesses and showcase brands.

This new Search Generative Experience (SGE) can be found in Search Labs, a place to access Google Search experiments. At I/O, we showed how ads will appear above and below this new experience. Now, over the coming months, Google will experiment with Search and Shopping ads that are directly integrated within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode. Google will also experiment with new formats native to SGE that use generative AI to create relevant, high-quality ads that are customised to every step of the search journey.

For example, if someone is searching for “outdoor activities to do in Maui”, and narrows the search further to ask about “activities for kids” and “surfing”, they may see a fully customised ad for a travel brand promoting surfing lessons for kids, explained Dischler.

He reiterated that Google is committed to transparency and making ads distinguishable from organic search results. When Search ads do appear, they will continue to feature Google’s industry-leading clear and transparent ad labels with the “Sponsored” label in bold black text.

An AI-powered and privacy-first future

While stating that building user trust is vital to the long-term durability of the ad-supported internet, Google aims to help advertisers navigate this moment with Google ads products that are privacy-first and AI-powered. As third-party cookies are phased out of Chrome next year, Google’s ads teams are actively testing new privacy-preserving signals from the Privacy Sandbox to help advertisers to reach relevant customers and measure results.

These ads products are guided by Google’s AI Principles and are designed to help businesses thrive. Dischler added that Google will continue to experiment first, testing and listening to users feedback along the way.