Google Marketing Live 2022: Everything you need to know

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Google’s annual Marketing Live event is just about to kick off – and Google is unveiling a slew of updates to its ad products. Announcements from this year’s event are heavy on automation, Performance Max and YouTube Shorts, as expected.

Here’s everything marketers and advertisers need to know from Google Marketing Live 2022.

Performance Max upgrades. Google is helping more advertisers try their most automated campaign type, Performance Max. These enhancements include:

YouTube Shorts ads. Those advertisers currently running video action campaigns and app campaigns will have ads automatically scale to fit Google’s TikTok competitor, YouTube shorts.

Shorts are limited to one minute in length and advertisers may want to tighten up and hone in creative, given the timeframe. This will be rolling out now to advertisers globally, so make sure to measure results and annotate accordingly.

Swipable shopping ads in search. A big, bold new ad display pairs organic shopping results with shopping ads for a highly visual shopping experience. This is for apparel brands only and will be available through Search and Performance Max campaigns.

Product feeds for a shoppable YouTube experience. Later this year, advertisers will have the ability to connect product feeds to campaigns to create shoppable video ads on YouTube Shorts. Google said they have been experimenting with ads in YouTube Shorts since last year and are now slowing rolling out to advertisers across the globe.

Google said this is a “key step on our road to developing a long-term Shorts monetization solution for our creators, which we’ll share more about soon.” Beyond that, no additional context on this interesting marriage of the feed and Shorts was provided.

Coming soon to search results: 3D models of products. According to Google, “Augmented reality (AR) on cameras gets us close, and shoppers are ready for it. More than 90% of Americans currently use, or would consider using, AR for shopping.”

Merchants will “soon” have the ability to have 3D models of their products appear directly within the search engine results pages. No additional details on the program have been released.

Insights page updates. The Insights page is getting a major overhaul, with a focus on attribution and first-party data.

A new attribution section will show advertisers a better view of what drove conversions within accounts.

This will also recommend a better attribution model if Google detects it can provide a better view on conversions.

The last new insight is the support of first-party data. The insights page will help advertisers view which customer lists are driving performance for campaigns – with privacy at the forefront.

According to Google, new budget insights may help to identify opportunities to optimize ad spends. This feature will show how spend is pacing against performance.

The implementation and rollout will be interesting to observe, but much like Google’s recommendations, this should only be one piece of the decision-making puzzle.

Loyalty program ads integration. Advertisers using Performance Max along with a product feed will be able to drive more loyalty sign-ups across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps, Google announced.

While this sounds interesting on paper, there will be a lot to unpack in the execution of this program. Advertisers with shopping feeds generally look to drive revenue from ads, not sign-ups.

The details are fuzzy at this point, but Google said more updates are coming in the second half of 2022. This is slated for the U.S. only.

Google Audiences for Connected TVs. Advertisers will soon be able to use connected TV campaigns to target viewers across YouTube and “most” other connected TV apps. This exciting new development will bring affinity, in-market, and demographic audience segments to connected TVs.

The affinity audiences are available in a global beta. The in-marketing and demographic audiences will be in beta for global advertisers at the end of Q2.

Checkout on Merchant. Google will be streamlining checkouts for customers that “have decided what they want.”

With this implementation customers won’t need to go through so many screens/pages in order to checkout and will instead be sent directly to the existing buy-flow from the merchant – directly from the product listing. According to Google, Merchants will “own the customer” as the transaction happens directly in their flow.

While an interesting concept, this direct purchase may see a decline in AOV as users won’t browse the site and will instead click the product listing and directly purchase. This is currently a closed pilot and Google is working to expand and move towards general availability in the coming months.

Why we care. Some of the items released (e.g., Checkout on Merchant and swipeable shopping ads) may have a major impact on advertisers, while other features (like the Performance Max experiment tools and Shorts expansion) may not.

Like every year, with many of the new features the devil will be in the details but the additional insights, and targeting should shake out to be an upgrade for advertisers across the globe.