Google Marketing Live announces Generative AI advances & tools
The idea is to encourage advertisers and vendors to easily create customized product imagery, improve ad relevance, scale campaigns, and better manage creative assets
At the 10th edition of Google Marketing Live, held on May 23, the technology behemoth announced the launch of several new generative AI advancements and tools for Google Ads, Performance Max, Product Studio, and Search Generative Experience (SGE) in Search Labs. The company hopes to encourage advertisers and vendors to easily create customized product imagery, improve ad relevance, scale campaigns, and better manage creative assets.
In one of the blog posts announcing the release of the tools, the company noted “In e-commerce, eye-catching images are a business’s digital window displays — and merchants with the right mix of imagery online can get better results. In fact, while many product offers on Google have just one image, we see an increase in both impressions (+76%) and clicks (+32%) for product offers that include more than one image (as per Google Data, Global, April 6th, 2023).”
It continued, “Our new Product Studio, designed with Google’s AI Principles top of mind, brings the benefits of generative AI to businesses of all sizes, helping them easily create unique and tailored product imagery for free and get more value from the images they already have.” These features include adding custom product scenes; removing a distracting product background; quickly increasing resolution.
Meanwhile, Performance Max is meant to be one of the best examples of how AI-powered campaigns can drive growth for business. “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. We’re bringing generative AI to Performance Max to make it even easier for you to create custom assets and scale them in a few clicks. Just provide your website and Google AI will start learning about your brand to populate your campaign with text and other relevant assets. We’ll even suggest new images generated just for you, helping you 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. Global testing will begin later this year.”
Regarding the announcements made at Google I/O around new generative AI capabilities coming to Search, the statement noted, “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 your business. As the future of Search evolves, the future of advertising will evolve too — bringing more opportunities to grow your business and showcase your brand. 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, we’ll experiment with Search and Shopping ads that are directly integrated within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode. We’ll also experiment with new formats native to SGE that use generative AI to create relevant, high-quality ads that are customized to every step of the search journey.”
Google also announced advances to its Merchant Center, dubbed Merchant Center, while noting the number of businesses using Merchant Center has doubled in the past two years. According to the release, “Merchant Center Next is a simplified version of the platform, built to make it easier for smaller merchants to get started, find customers online and grow their businesses. And while we’re simplifying, the features that larger retailers rely on aren’t going anywhere. One way we’re doing that is simplifying how to set up a product feed. In the past, merchants setting themselves up on Google for the first time had to manually add their products, prices, images, descriptions and other details. In Merchant Center Next, we’ll automatically populate a merchant’s product feed with the information we can detect from their website (merchants can always edit what gets pulled in, or turn this off) — making it easier to quickly show their products across Google.”
