Client Update – 30 May 2023
Cross-account negative keyword lists
To help our clients get better performance on their Search campaigns, we will now share negative keyword lists across accounts of similar industries. This will be done anonymously.
As our valued clients, this helps you get the best exclusion opportunities from irrelevant search terms that may not have been excluded from your accounts before.
Previously (and in most managed Google ads accounts), each client account had its own set of negative lists. However, we find that when we share it across accounts that are in the same industry, this helps lift up every account inside.
Generative AI in Google Search
Google search will soon be changing to create a more natural and intuitive Search experience with the integration of generative AI. Users will now be able to understand a topic faster, uncover new viewpoints and insights, and get things done more easily with the help of intuitive AI responses.
Ads will continue to play an important role in helping people connect with useful information and allowing businesses to be discovered online.
In the future, both Search and Shopping ads can appear in Google’s new Generative AI search results and also while the online user is conversing with Google’s AI. These search results come with a distinctive background and will stand out from the usual search results.
Generative AI within Google Ads
Not only are the search results evolving but also your Google Ads account! Your Google Ads account will be getting a host of new AI features later in the year. Things like: using a conversation to quickly create a campaign, 2 brand new campaign types, and using AI to quickly generate assets, images, and texts to create highly relevant ads to reach your customer’s queries.
We predict that we will see these capabilities available in most of our Ads accounts by this year.
Our Insight: Google’s products will be increasingly built around AI as it prepares itself for the next frontier of web technology. We aim to integrate these updates into our clients’ accounts as soon as they become available.
One central theme we see in Google Ads in the last few years has been the dynamism and relevancy of the ads. With AI, these traits will be further intensified to keep up with ever-growing consumer expectations.
We strongly recommend clients keep their websites in pace with the evolution of online ads, as they are both key to converting a customer. Keep your websites clear and focused. Pay attention to the user experience on your site. Make checkouts and form fill simple and direct. Make information on your website easily accessible and at the right place for the end user. All these will increase the likelihood of a user turning into a customer in the end.
Google Product Studio
Product Studio is the upcoming Google tool to help merchants buff up their existing product images into alternate creative using Google AI. With the help of generative AI, Product Studio will help merchants create unique product images without needing a graphic designer. It can do things like adding a unique scenery image to make their product more impressive, removing backgrounds, and increasing image resolution.
Our Insight: There’s currently no set date for this product to be widely available. Per our experience with Google updates, this may be released by 2024 and be a standalone product instead of being integrated into Google Ads.
It is a tool designed specifically for Merchant Center clients; being able to visually transform their store products with a single click and then uploading them to Merchant Center will be a huge boost to most advertisers.
Google’s Merchant Center Next
Moving on to news further off the horizon, Merchant Center Next will replace the existing Merchant Center for our e-commerce clients in 2024.
Merchant Center Next looks to be the next generation of the existing Merchant Center. It is said to come with major improvements toward automation and convenience, lifting the work of creating a product feed. Merchant Center Next will detect the products from your website and pull them in automatically.
Google’s plan is for the rollout to be completed in 2024. We will be notified when Merchant Center Next is ready in your accounts.
Our Insight: Google’s existing integration is already far-reaching. Most e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify, Woocommerce, and Wix, can seamlessly integrate products into Merchant Center. However, Merchant Center Next is another AI update that Google is pushing forward.
One major difference is that compared to previously, we would need to create a product feed (think of it as a big Excel sheet of all the products you sell with their metadata, such as the product’s title, description, price, availability, etc.). However, in Merchant Center Next, this important step seems to be redundant as Google will solely rely on its AI to know exactly what you are selling and extract all the information it needs directly off your site. At least that is what it aims to do.
In our experience, AI still cannot fetch something that does not exist on your website. So providing greater details to your product categories and single product pages will be much more important moving forward.
Future automated emails from us
We will temporarily stop sending automated emails to you, such as the search terms reports. This is because the Google mail system has flagged our email updates to you as spam. As a result, many of our automated email updates cannot be sent successfully.
We will continue optimizing your keywords and regularly exclude irrelevant search terms from your account. We may use other methods to update you on this in the future.
In Summary
We are now living in an unprecedented phase of online advertising as we see AI taking precedence from both the advertiser and end-user standpoints. This means that new skills will be needed to prosper in the age of advertising AI. We hope you are equally excited about what’s to come on the horizon.
We are always diligently studying the changes in these ad platforms so that we can best advise our clients on the most optimal way to move forward and succeed.