Google Marketing Live is an annual event hosted by the search engine giant, currently being held in San Francisco, California on the 14th and 15th of May (PDT). This year, the two-day event is packed with exciting announcements from Google’s ad experts, revealing new ad products that focus on helping businesses deliver useful experiences in an ever-evolving and complex customer journey.
Amidst the excitement within the digital marketing industry, this year’s Google Marketing Live is a special one for Pure SEO. Our very own Richard Conway, Founder and CEO, is currently attending this invite-only event among 5,000+ attendees from 68 countries, with Pure SEO as the agency representing New Zealand .
Here’s what his journey is looking like so far!
The Ads Innovation Keynote mainly delivered by Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Ads and Commerce, showcased Google’s newest advertising innovations. The new products are focused on three ways that Google is helping businesses online meet consumer expectations: by being there, being useful, and being responsible.
Raghavan also acknowledged that consumers no longer follow a linear path and expect more seamless and personal shopping experiences. In light of this, the tech giant promises to deliver daily helpfulness to its users by understanding intent so businesses can anticipate intent. And to do that, they’ve created new platforms that attract customers with rich, immersive content such as images and videos.
Before we dive into these new products, here’s a quick reminder of what the first ever ads looked like on the SERPs (image below) from all the way back in 2000.
Almost two decades ago, all we had were text ads. The lack of local results and ad labelling are two noticeable differences when compared to modern ads – both of which make a big difference when it comes to user experience.
It’s clear that Google’s online marketing platform has come a long way, and it doesn’t look like they’re ready to slow down. With that, let’s jump into this year’s new product innovations!
This year, Google has announced several new ad products that will expand businesses’ reach across Google’s platforms. We’ll be covering all these new products in standalone articles, so stay tuned on the Pure SEO blog for more exciting updates from this year’s Google Marketing Live.
In the meantime, here’s a quick breakdown of the new ad products!
Discovery ads are image carousel ads that are rendered natively across each Google property, including the Google Discover feed, mobile YouTube feed and Gmail. Through Discovery ads, Google promises results and unmatched reach, as well as the ability to inspire customers through rich and relevant creatives of your brand’s products and services.
Gallery Ads is a new visual and interactive ads format rolling out on the mobile SERPs. Advertisers can upload four to eight images that users can swipe through and click to expand the gallery into a vertical view, with a text CTA at the end. The new gallery ads can be utilised for several purposes, whether you want to tell a brand story, feature a new product, etc.
The new and improved Google Shopping experience will come with a personalised homepage for shoppers, complete with shopping recommendations and shopping filters – all based on previous shopping and search activity.
The revamped Google Shopping experience is intended to rival Amazon, as it comes with the ability to let users pay directly with their Google accounts where Google handles the transaction and retailers handle fulfilment. Not only that, Google will also be stepping in to mediate between customer and retailer, handling returns and customer support with their Google guarantee.
People can buy confidently, knowing Google is there to help if they don’t get what they were expecting, their order is late, or they have issues getting a refund. With this new experience, we’re merging the best of Google Express with Google Shopping
– Google Blog
Showcase Shopping ads – another highly visual ad format – will be rolling out to Google Images, the Discover feed, and YouTube, expanding omnichannel shopping experience through more Google properties. These ads feature a main image with supplementary smaller images that expand into multiple product offers.
Last but not least, Google will be enabling app deep linking from Google Ads, where users can go directly to the relevant page of a mobile app when clicking on Search, Display or Shopping ads. The catch here is that customers need to have the app already installed. However, this aims to nurture relationships with loyal customers as it optimises the destination based on what a user wants to do next.
Stay tuned on the Pure SEO blog for more updates on Google Marketing Live 2019! We heard Katy Perry will be performing for dinner…
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