Google Marketing Live 2018 Keynote

Hundred thousands of people from 200 countries around the world tuned in to follow on livestream the broadcast of the #GoogleMarketingLive Keynote 2018 ended up few minutes ago. You didn’t make it? Don’t worry, we got you covered.

The event held in San José is the largest Google Marketing Innovation event of the year, where all the products and features related to ads are unvealed. Let’s see together what’s has been announced.

Google Senior Vice President of Ads Sridar Ramaswamy opening the session shared a kind of ‘mantra’ to describe the new principles that will infuse Google advertising products and features: Valuable, Transparent, Trustworthy. The keywords have been recalled more and more times to explain how “Advertising at its best puts people first”.

Digital is nowadays a great part of consumers’ lives, as well as marketing spent. But each user interaction in digital is still one to one and people expect marketers to undestand and satisfy their intent through meaningful assistance. “Ads should add value” and people should receive the most useful message based on the context. Nevertheless focusing on transparency and trust means that people can control and choose what they want to see managing their Ads Settings.

Consumers are more curious, demanding and impatient and expect assistive experiences and technology – let’s think to mobile and machine learning – is useful not only to give assistance but to anticipate their needs, saving time and money.

To deliver transparency and choice on the media buyed and on how to measure results two important updates have been announced:

• Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads later this month: a simpler way to buy ads across the whole Google networks, such as Search, You Tube, Google Maps, Google Play and so on.
• Google Marketing Platform will combine advertising and analytics enterprise solutions, DoubleClick and Analytics 360 Suite in one place.

Through Machine Learning and integration Google aims to achive better results, simpler experience and stronger collaboration. Let’s take a look at the new products announced.

What’s new about YouTube?

In order to be relevant, capture attention using videos and drive performance on YouTube two new options are introduced.

TrueView for reach

It is aimed to increase the awareness among a broad number of customers. It’s an instream format with the simplicity of impression based buying.

TrueView for action

It is optimized to drive conversions on the Web, showing a prominent call to actions that persist even after the video ends. The call to actions can be customized to achieve specific goals “book now”, “buy ” or “learn more” and generate leads directly from the video ads. When paired with custom intent audiences it helps to reach specific targeted users that are ready to buy.

Maximise lift bidding

It will be available later this year and uses Google’s machine learning to reach people that are more likely to consider a specific brand after their exposure to an ad.

What’s new on Search?

Responsive Search Ads

If the focus is achieving better results then Machine Learning can be of great help in prioritising the smartest ad and delivering the most relevant. Responsive Search Ads are aimed to simplify the process of ads creation and testing. The system will build ads through mixing and matching multiple headlines and descriptions to find the best performing combinations and orders. They are also flexible, allowing to display up to 3 headlines and 2 description lines, among the 15 headlines and 4 description lines that can be provided. They will be available over the next few months.

Mobile landing page speed

Mobile ads experience often fall short of users expectations when a landing page takes too long to load. Optimising for speed becomes more and more criticali f we think than more than 50% of users are not making a purchase due to page loading time. That’s why a new column on the “Landing Page ” report inside Google Ads will show from today on the mobile landing page speed score. It’s a ten point scale score, based on page speed and potential conversion rate. The data will be updated daily.

Cross devices reporting and remarketing in Google Analytics

Measurement is critical also to better allocate marketing resources, but it can be a challenge as users move between different devices multiple times through the day. To accurately measure the impact of the campaigns a new Cross Device reporting and remarketing in Google Analytics is introduced starting by today. Its goal is to give a consolidated, comprehensive ad holistic view on how users behave across different channels, no matter which device they use. It surely provides deeper insights and trends to reach highest-value customers via remarketing. The report shows aggregated data from users who agreed to share it, while individual data are not included.

What’s new for Small Businesses?

Smart Campaigns

To help small business grow, Smart Campaign are a new advertising solution tailored in order to be simple, save time, deliver real results and to be set up and running in minutes. They are built and optimized leveraging machine learning and grabbing information from the website and Google My Business listing. The ads run across Google Search, Local search results and 3 million sites and apps available through Display.

Auto-optimized landing pages

Often small business owner do not have a website. The idea is to provide an easy tool to automatically create web pages optimized for ads, showcasing all the information about the products and service.

What’s new for Retailers?

Automated Feeds for Shopping Ads

To give Google all the information about products and simplify the manual management and updating of the feed, Automated Feeds crawls the Website, gather all the relevant details and automatically creates and mantains the feed, avoiding manual process and daily checks to make sure the products are up to date.

Smart Shopping Campaigns

Launched in May, Smart Shopping Campaings reduces the complexity of managing campaingns as it is automatically optimized for a selected goal. It runs ads across Google’s major properties including display remarketing. As a result of the integration with Shopify, retailers will be able to sync the inventory in realtime and – by the end of this month t- o manage their campaign directly from Shopify interface. Moreover additional goals will be introduce such as Driving store visits and Acquiring new customers, to allow retailers to connect online and offline.

Local Campaigns and Hotel Campaigns

Two more dedicated campaign types are announced to help driving local conversions, like in-store visits and promote location in the first option or maximise bookings in the second, always by using Machine Learning capabilities.

What’s new about Google Marketing Platform?

The new enterprise solution is presented as an Integration Center that includes Google Analytics 360 suite, Google Optimize 360, Data Studio, Survey 360 and Tag Manager 360. But also DoubleClick will be included and rebranded as Search Ads 360, to help marketers plan, buy, and measure search ads on Google and other search engines. Display & Video 360 allows to manage display, video, TV, audio, and other advertising channels in one place. The platform is aimed however can be connected to third party platforms for media buying and for measurement as well.

A Marketplace inside Display and Video 360 will allow marketers to choose publishers that are ranked by their historical performance with the brand.

Instant reporting can be built by drag and drop and provides always fresh data, loading in seconds to get quickly insights and charts.

We are thrilled and can’t wait the next weeks to put our hands on the new tools and features!

In the meanwhile enjoy the event here