Background:
Google hosted its annual global marketing event Google Marketing Live in San Jose last week. This year Google merged the Marketing Next annual event with the Google Partner Summit to create the event – bringing together leading digital marketers from around the world for two full days of product innovation updates on Ads, Analytics and Platforms, as well as sessions on industry insights.
Details and Implications:
Google Marketing Platform (Launching officially on July 24): The idea is to unite DoubleClick advertiser products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite under a single brand – Google Marketing Platform.
Under the new brand:
- DoubleClick Bid Manager will become Display & Video 360, a product that brings together planning, creative, buying and measurement features into a single tool.
- DoubleClick Search will be named Search Ads 360.
- DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Studio will be named Campaign Manager and Studio, respectively.
Integration Centre Platform: A new tool that is specifically designed to help advertisers see the connections between the various tools that are part of the Google Marketing Platform
New Google Ads:
TrueView for Action: Now open for all advertisers, these ads help drive leads and conversions by adding prominent CTAs (calls to action) and headline text overlays to your video ads.
TrueView for Reach: Now open for all advertisers, these ads combine the in-stream format of six-second bumper ads with CPM buying and can offer both 95% viewable and audible videos.
Maximise Lift Bidding: A new smart bidding strategy for YouTube campaigns that can optimise delivery to users most likely to consider a brand after seeing the video ad.
Responsive Search Ads: A new ad for search, powered by machine learning for multiple ad copy combinations based on expected performance and relevancy to the user’s query
Landing Page Speed Score: A 10-point scale being added as an additional optimisation metric to show the speed of landing pages.
Smart Shopping Campaigns: This campaign type will now integrate Shopping across ad networks by setting a goal and automatically optimizing towards it. The goals can be sales, ROAS, new customers and in-store visits, to help measure the impact from online-to-offline.
Local Campaigns: A new campaign type to drive footfall to physical retail locations. Useful for retailers with offline performance metrics.
Cross device reporting and remarketing on Analytics 360:
Google promised to address common questions around identifying users across devices along non-linear consumer journeys, if the user opts-in to share this information.
Summary:
This event was about faster and frictionless products; offering more relevant and valuable ads to consumers to drive better results for advertisers. Machine learning was at the core of all ad product updates, combined with automated delivery more than ever before. Mobile speed and cross device tracking were also a big part of the event. Retailers sit in the centre of the updates trying to connect the eCommerce and physical retail worlds. Because of the changes Google has made to create Google Marketing Platform it has also strengthened its position with those using its tech stack as pushing its services into the Google Cloud Platform makes those advertisers more ‘locked’ into the overall tech stack and increases the difficulty of switching to other providers as they become more embedded, integrated and therefore reliant on the new suite of services.
Further Reading:
Google Marketing Live / Think with Google / Search Engine Land / Google Blog
