Prepare for the advent of generative AI in Google Ads – The company introduced a range of new generative AI advertising products at its Google Marketing Live conference today. 

🔍 Generative AI Search Ads

Perhaps most notably, Google Search ads will soon automatically adapt to queries using the tech. 

Last year, the tech giant rolled out automatically created assets for Search ads, which use content from landing pages and existing ads to generate headlines and descriptions.

Google will now expand on this process with generative AI, enabling Search ads to dynamically adapt to user queries. By leveraging the context of a search, AI can use content from a business's landing page and existing ads to create a new headline that aligns more closely with the query. For example, if a user searches for “skin care for dry sensitive skin,” the AI can generate a headline like “Soothe Your Dry Sensitive Skin.” 

💬 Chat for Campaign Creation

Google introduced a new ‘natural-language conversational experience' within Google Ads that automates campaign creation. With the tool, brands and marketers can add a preferred landing page from their site and Google AI will summarize the page. Then, it will generate assets for your campaign, including: 

• Relevant and effective keywords
• Headlines
• Descriptions
• Images 
• And more

These suggestions can be reviewed and edited before deployment. 

🤖 Generative AI Comes for PMax

Google also said it's bringing generative AI to Performance Max campaigns. 

Once advertisers provide their site, Google AI will learn about the brand and populate the campaign with text and other relevant assets, including suggesting new generated images.

Google’s AI Chatbot in Search to Feature Ads

Google also detailed its plans for running Search and Shopping ads in its AI chatbot within Search.

The company recently demonstrated how ads could be displayed above and below the chatbot experience, which we previously reported on.

With these ads, when users search for a new bike using the generative AI feature, they receive information on factors to consider when buying, along with matching product recommendations. Users can then ask follow-up questions or explore other suggested next steps. Throughout this experience, Search ads will continue to be displayed in dedicated ad slots on the page.

👉 Directly Integrated Ads in Search

Today, Google said it will also soon test ads that are “directly integrated” within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode. These ads will appear alongside relevant queries and will be introduced in the coming months.

For example, someone searching for outdoor activities in Maui may refine their search to include “activities for kids” and “surfing.” Once this is done, the consumer may see an ad for a travel brand promoting surfing lessons for kids in that area.

These ads will be clearly labeled as “Sponsored” using bold, black text.

Google Joins the AI-Generated Product Image Trend

Google is also bringing AI-generated images to advertisers.

The company introduced Product Studio today, a new tool that lets brands and merchants create product imagery for their ads using generative AI for free.

Brands will be able to create new images within Merchant Center Next, its platform for businesses to manage how their products show up on Google.

With the tool, advertisers can:

• Add a product
• Remove a background
• Generate a scene
• Improve image quality

Product Studio will roll out in the U.S. later this year. These features will also be available to merchants using the Google and YouTube app on Shopify.

ANALYSIS: What It All Means for Media Buyers

So those are the headlines, what does all this mean for digital marketers and media buyers?

For some analysis, I checked in with Jyll Saskin Gales. Jyll spent six years at Google Ads helping some of the biggest brands with their campaigns. Today, she runs the excellent Inside Google Ads [affiliate link] training program, and was a panelist in this morning’s pre-event tailgate that we did.

Does This Change Our Jobs?

Jyll Saskin Gales: It changes the job a lot, but not in the way most people think. It’s not that AI is coming for our jobs, big and scary. AI is being incorporated into AI creation, into targeting, into every single aspect of the Google Ads process.

But of course, that AI needs to learn on something right? Artificial Intelligence doesn’t bring its intelligence from thin air, it learns from something and the thing it learns from is your website.

As PPC practitioners, so often we’ve been focused on the media buying, and our job is done when someone gets to the website. Now, I think our jobs are continuing to change and focus on the importance of landing page optimization, conversion rate optimization, if your client or if you do not have a well structured, well thought-out web page with lots of great information that can be understood by the AI bots, then your Google ads are not going to perform well.

Are Schemas Dead?

Tod: Google has always tried to get us to use our website integrated with with their systems. They’ve done this in the past through schemas, primarily, where if you’re a recipe website, there’s a Recipe schema; if you’re a movie review site, there’s a Review schema. But this AI does not rely on those sorts of quasi-API tricks, does it? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s not looking at the website like a human would?

Jyll: Exactly. It’s smarter than that, you know, that’s exactly what machine learning is, rather than feeding it a set of rules, if schema is Travel, then run it this way. It just looks at it and understands it the way a human would, because it’s seen 1000s, if not millions of other websites like that.

Tod: And the focus of the real audience of a website has changed over time. When the web first started, of course, the most important people looking at our websites were people. Then the search engines came along. and we all had to make sure that the way a search engine looked at our website was important. Will we now have to consider how the virtual eyes of an AI algorithm will see our site?

Jyll: I think this is a welcome change towards going back to the eyes of a human. You know, a year ago, I was saying that it was the best time to become a GA4 expert, because over the last year, we’ve all needed experts in GA.

This is really the time for SEO experts to shine in the world of paid ads. They have this expertise and their jobs have really been changing too. I think it’s a welcome change for all of us that we no longer have to do dumb stuff, just to get computers to understand our websites, like create great content for humans. And by the way, that’s not just a PPC thing — I would say that applies to social media and content marketing, in general: create great content for humans, and you will do well.

Impact on CPMs and CPCs

Tod: Does this have any impact on the ad auction? If AI is writing copy now and creating images and we end up flooding the platform with computer generated campaigns, what impact does that have on things like CPM and CPC?

Jyll: It’s interesting, you know, we spoke earlier on our tailgate that queries are going to be so much longer. Usually a query has two, three, or four words in it. You know, “best flights to Maui” or “accounting software for small business”, right?

But now, your query is going to be this multi-sentence prompt or conversation that we’re having with the AI.

So in a way, we could actually see CPCs decrease because there’s so many more varied queries, and advertisers may not catch up right away to broadening the scope of queries they’re advertising against.

I think it’s also going to bring a lot more inventory. The auction is all about supply and demand. So you know, over time, CPCs always rise. That’s a truism. But in the short term, those who can jump on this quickly and figure out how to take advantage of this automation and not be scared of AI, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some lower CPCs to start.

A Bit of a Disappointing Event

Tod: Honestly, as a marketer, I was a little disappointed that the scope of today’s announcements was just so AI focused, but certainly lots to take in.

Jyll: We all have a lot of anticipation and what’s going to happen and all Google said was “AI, AI, AI,” and there was nothing that brand new or innovative. They just added AI to everything. They didn’t talk about the topics we want to hear — about the keywords, or like privacy. It was just AI.

It was almost like AI wrote the announcements about AI!

So I think overall, it was a pretty boring event. But I’ll take boring because everything’s always changing so quickly.

This was just one of many marketing stories we covered today — get ALL the day’s digital marketing news by subscribing to our free newsletter and/or our free daily podcast.