Ginny Marvin is a well-respected digital marketing expert, renowned for her knowledge in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, e-commerce, and search engine marketing (SEM). She’s known for her past role as the Editor-in-Chief at Third Door Media, overseeing the editorial direction of its publications such as Search Engine Land. Today she serves as Google’s Ads Liaison. Ginny’s articles and presentations have been instrumental in shaping strategies for digital marketing professionals globally, with her insights often being key resources in understanding the dynamic landscapes of online advertising.
Q: One of the challenges when businesses go to use AI generated creative is legal claims and brand voice. What advice would you give marketers and customers who cannot lean into these tools for legal reasons?
A: Great question and these are issues we give a lot of thought to.
First, I just want to lay out where generative AI will be used in asset creation for anyone who missed the GML announcements:
- New conversational experience for Search campaign creation (opt-in). You can use natural language to ask Google Ads for ideas to easily generate relevant keywords, headlines, descriptions, images and other assets.
- The new asset creation flow in PMax to easily generate and curate high-quality text and image assets by just entering your URL.
- Automatically created assets (opt-in) to simplify and automate the generation of high quality ads to achieve your business objectives.
- Our existing ad policies apply to all ads and advertisers, regardless of how an ad was created. That means GenAI-created assets also go through our standard policy checks.
- All of the AI-generated assets are grounded in your own inputs, including your website content and existing ads – and what you enter into the conversational experience when using that feature.
- You’ll be able to review/edit/remove assets created in the conversational experience and asset creation flow in PMax before they run to ensure they reflect your brand voice. With automatically created assets (ACA), you can review and remove any assets you no longer want.
Q: Will there be any opportunity in the future to integrate some sort of brand voice/tone guidelines at an account level as AI becomes more sophisticated?
A: I don’t have an update on that at this time. It’s still early days and we’re excited to see conversational experience come to the UI.
Q: What metrics can we use to track the success of AI features? Will we have the ability to test short of the basic data in the platform?
A: Metrics will be reported as usual. Also note that advertisers can also view reporting on ACA (and remove any assets they no longer want to serve.)
Q: Do you anticipate Demand Gen campaigns to run side by side Pmax campaigns or be an ‘instead of’ campaign type? They look to be Pmax without the search or display component.
A: Here’s a bit more on Demand Gen campaigns shared last week https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/new-ai-powered-ads-to-drive-demand/
Q: For those who love paid search but see how quickly AI is developing, should we be concerned that the paid search practitioner may one day cease to exist?
Q: For agencies who split work across functions, do you see this as a time of more collaboration, or is there still value in that structure (a video team, search team, etc)?
A: I think it’s always been helpful for teams to break down silos and now see collaboration playing an even more important role with cross-channel campaigns.
Q: The ad customizers for RSAs are quite a powerful tool but we lose that with Pmax. Placing a location in an ad, for instance, or a countdown, can be a good tactic to stand out from the crowd. Would there likely be any integration of such a feature in Pmax at some point?
A: I don’t have anything to share on this, but I’ll pass it along to the team.
Q: What steps has Google taken to address the issue of ad fraud and ensure that advertisers get genuine traffic and clicks on their ads?
A: There is huge amount of ongoing work and investment in addressing invalid activity and ad fraud. More on those efforts here: https://www.google.com/ads/adtrafficquality/ but these efforts are varied, including the use of 100+ algorithms to identify bad traffic in real-time and many other efforts and resources. We also credit advertisers when appropriate and possible for invalid activity.
Q: "Merchant Center Next” seems like it will be a big update for merchant center, especially since it’s coming with a name change. What can we expect from this new iteration of Merchant Center?
A: Merchant Center Next is a simplified version designed to make it easier for smaller businesses to get up and running while still supporting the needs of larger retailers. A big update is the option to automatically populate your product feed with information we detect from your website, rather than having to build out a feed. (Merchants can always edit what gets pulled in, or turn this off and use a feed.)
A couple of other things to note: When you switch to Merchant Center Next all existing setups & settings will be retained, feed uploads and ad campaigns will keep running. Merchants can still use feeds & multi-feed support is coming soon.
Additionally, all insights reports are consolidated under the Performance tab in GMC Next. And omnichannel merchants can see all of their online and local inventory in one view to make it easier to prioritize updates and fix any errors.
Q: Looking ahead, what trends or changes do you anticipate in the world of online advertising, and how is Google Ads adapting to these shifts?
A: We are in the early days of generative AI, but I think it’s clear this is going to be a time of rapid advancement and innovation. We’ve seen automation and AI incorporated into almost every facet of the platform and now, as you saw at GML, generative AI is the next step.
In terms of trends, we’re seeing seemingly contradictory trends:
- More complex consumer journeys, but impulsive buys are also on the rise
- On YouTube short-form mobile video viewing is up but so is long-form TV screen viewing
- Privacy & regulation bars are rising and so is desire for relevance
Q: Does Google have any focus on voice search at this time, especially when it comes to advertising?
A: From an advertiser standpoint, there isn’t anything we would suggest focusing on in terms of optimizing for voice search specifically.
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