Google Marketing Live is an annual event where Google reveals its latest marketing innovations and shares its vision for the future of marketing. This year’s event was held on May 24, 2022. And in this week’s episode Grace and Liel explore what were some of the most and not so exciting announcements the most important event in the year on Digital Marketing had to offer.
From enhancements to performance max to a whole new range of features that will power your law firm’s first-party data and put it to work for your marketing.
Resources mentioned in our episode:
- Recap of product announcements from Google Marketing Live 2022
- 16 Announcements From Google Marketing Live 2022
Send us your questions at ask@incamerapodcast.com
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Transcript
Liel: [00:00:00] On the May 24th, Google Marketing Life took place as a hybrid event with some in-person attendance and a livestream. Last year, performance Max stole the show and this year it looks like it wants to do it again. I’m Liel Levy, co-founder of Nanato Media and author of Beyond Se Habla Español, How Lawyers Win the Hispanic Market. And This is In-camera podcast where we recognize the future of digital ads in a GLM slide deck. Welcome to In-Camera Podcast, Private Legal Marketing Conversations. Grace Welcome back. How are you today?
Grace: [00:00:59] Good. How are you, Liel?
Liel: [00:01:01] I’m doing very well, Grace. Thank you very much for asking. After having what we can call here in this podcast, kind of like an unplanned break, but one that actually was very nice.
Grace: [00:01:10] Grace Yes, it was. It was sometimes I guess we got to take a little break from our weekly podcasts.
Liel: [00:01:16] Yeah. So last week we had a memorial Day weekend and we did not publish a podcast. Just some technical issues got on the way. Thank thanks everyone for your patience. It was getting back on track, but I do want to say that I had a really exciting week last week since Natalie and I traveled to Mexico to meet with most of our team who came from different parts and from Mexico, where many of them are based. And it was just a great time to work on projects and get together after quite some time since pretty much the beginning of COVID. So yeah.
Grace: [00:01:49] That’s great. So you basically it is a company get together.
Liel: [00:01:52] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you know and you know, Grace, I think it really brings back to perspective the value and the importance that there is from those personal relations, from building just not a working relationship that is remote and very transactional, but just having those one on one moments with your colleagues and together, it’s just, you know, it creates culture, it creates atmosphere. It just changes completely the dynamics of things.
Grace: [00:02:23] It sure does. Personal touches. We’ve talked about it many, many times and on the podcast and different ones, there’s nothing like it. And unfortunately with COVID, it did take away a lot of that. But now that everyone’s coming back, we are now able to have that one on one relationship again with people.
Liel: [00:02:40] Yeah, and obviously when you’re dealing with an international team, things get even more complicated. But at the same time, I think it’s an effort definitely worth doing. And obviously in your case, also as your team has grown to be more spread all over. Right, you’re no longer just a team based out of South Florida. Now you have colleagues in different parts of different states. And so I know you guys value that a lot and you also do it. So it’s great.
Grace: [00:03:05] Yes. I’m excited that you got to do that.
Liel: [00:03:09] All right, Grace, that was really, really fun. But now today we have a big topic to cover and that is news and updates from Google Marketing Live. And for those of you who do not know, Google Marketing live is kind of like the big event in the year where Google makes all of their announcements in relation to Google ads and Google marketing. And so this is extremely relevant for our podcast because not only do we believe that Google Search is still the most powerful platform to advertise for any law firm, but also because it helps us understand where is Google taking their platform and when they’re where they’re envisioning their platform going, not just in the next few months but in the next few years. Because if one thing we’ve learned over the years is that Google marketing live is pretty much the place where you are likely to find about the next big thing coming up. And we can look at it just by seeing the trajectory of announcements that have come up. For instance, back in 2018, responsive search ads were announced. And nowadays, just like a few months ago or a month ago, we had an episode fully dedicated on how responsive search ads are now this month, becoming the only type of ad that you can actually run or create a new campaign for in Google Search. So that’s how big of an impact the announcements that you hear on Google Marketing Live will have in the future of Google ads.
Liel: [00:04:44] And again, we’re talking about responsive search ads that were announced back in 2018. As a matter of fact, Natalie was present at that Google marketing life. It was back in San Jose or then Mark’s conversion value, which was in 2019 that was announced. And I was back in San Francisco. I was that I was present at Google Marketing Live and then we went into pandemic mode. The event was held our remote. Now this year it was held hybrid. And you know, when we look at last year’s Google Marketing Live, the big announcement of that year was performance max campaign. And it’s really interesting because in the same pattern that other announcements of Google marketing live, they sometimes seem a little bit controversial. Right? And performance max campaign just happens to be one of those that has retained that controversy a little bit. They sound very exciting and promising in the first at a first glance. But I think there’s a lot of mixed feelings about how Performance Max campaign has actually really delivered results in, you know, when. Put into practice. And so it’s going to be interesting to see how that evolves. And a lot of the announcements where enhancements and new compatibility is put on performance, Max, which we’re going to cover in just one moment. But Grace. First, what are your initial thoughts? You’ve gone through the documentation, you’ve seen the updates. What do you see at a first glance?
Grace: [00:06:16] Well, truthfully, with Google’s updates every year, they unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot of them just kind of get muddied up together because you start seeing all these updates on top of updates and type of updates and you’re like, okay, what’s important and what’s not? So what? From what I’ve seen, I did see a lot of the things that they. Said at the Google Marketing Live I’ve actually had experience with over the last few months. So it was kind of interesting that they were talking about it as what’s new and what’s coming out and to the point about the performance, Max. I have experienced quite a few of those quote unquote optimizations to the project, I guess is what I would call it, and we’ll speak more about it obviously as we go along, but it’s very different and I can see why there’s some controversy to it. I see the pros and I see the cons right across the board on a lot of these things that they’ve done. But I don’t think there’s anything more controversial at the moment, at least for me either about than performance, Max.
Liel: [00:07:18] Yeah, I think it’s been, you know, one of those campaigns that puts a lot of emphasis in automation. And I think, you know, as we talked about this recently in one of our episodes, you need to make sure that you’re setting up for Google the right rules for performance max campaign to do kind of like you want the campaign to do. The other thing is that performance Max campaign also seems to be and we will talk about it just in one moment. Now, is that more so than the type of campaign that would help drive foot traffic or actually actual in-store sales, which seems to be more what performance max campaign is geared towards? Right. We see that it’s becoming more of a retail relevance campaign, more so than you would think, kind of like LSAs have been for service providers. And that’s going to be reflected in some of the updates and where they’re shifting their attention in making improvements for that campaign. That’s not to say that Performance Max campaign is not a very powerful local campaign, is just one that seems to be geared more towards generating brand awareness than potential valuable conversions or high content conversions. But Grace, we have a lot to cover and for that reason we’re going to split this episode into two so we can go through some of the different updates that we feel that are important to bring up. We may just go over some others that are really not going to be relevant for the industry in which we are involved. And so we may skip through some of the things that have been released for shopping.
Liel: [00:08:54] But as a whole, we want to try to squeeze and get get a good idea of how some of these new updates can already be put into use or what’s coming up in the next few months or later this year or maybe next year. Because that’s the other thing with Google. You never really know when things are going to become available. Most of the marketing live announcements are a combination between things that are rolling out on beta and what does it mean is rolling out on beta. It means that it’s only available to a very select group of advertisers, and that may be you or may not be. And then when they actually do other releases from other better betas, that also comes scattered. And it’s very hard to predict when they’re really going to be available to everyone to use. But I think we can also predict on those based on the relevancy and the clarity that exists on that particular update or feature. So Grace, let’s start where we where we are at, which is the new features for performance Max. So according to these actually great article from Word Stream, which we’re going to have here on the notes, what are some of the updates that performance Max is going to be having as new improvements announced on Google Marketing Live? And it looks like some of them some of them are going to be coming on on the third quarter of this year.
Grace: [00:10:21] Yes. And from what I see here in terms of the performance Max campaigns, it’s to your point about stores and store sales. It does seem to kind of be geared towards that. Right. They talk about store sales, reporting and bidding.
Liel: [00:10:36] Yeah.
Grace: [00:10:36] So essentially, if you’re running a performance max campaign for a store goal, like you’re trying to get people to the store for foot traffic or store sales as well, you will soon be able to optimize not just for the store traffic, but sales specifically. So once foot traffic won is the actual dollars and cents that you want people to buy. Apparently there’s a beta in the local campaigns, but it will be soon available in performance. Max So that means LSAs right that they’re currently available.
Liel: [00:11:07] But. Well, no, LSAs that local service sites, but local campaigns are basically going to be entirely replaced by performance max campaign. So it should. Yeah.
Grace: [00:11:17] So local campaign, can you explain a little about that?
Liel: [00:11:20] Yeah. So local campaigns are basically the older generation of performance max campaign. And right now they’re still overlapping. But Google has made it very clear that performance, Max, is fully going to take over it. And so now basically what they’re doing here is a type of reporting that already exists or feature or strategy that already exists on local campaign is going to be added also to performance max campaign. And so it’s primarily just so that by the time that local campaign campaigns are completely shut off performance max campaign is not lacking on some of the features that already existed on local campaigns. So yeah, that’s kind of just a release, but just primarily just they’re bringing performance packs up to speed so that it can really become the replacement for local campaigns.
Grace: [00:12:13] That makes perfect sense, actually, because basically what they’re doing all that nearby near me, all of that is essentially getting absorbed into the performance. Max. So they’re.
Liel: [00:12:22] Trying.
Grace: [00:12:22] To take everything out of the one and just merge them into this now new performance. Max Makes sense. Yeah.
Liel: [00:12:28] And you need to remember that performance. Max Campaign is a campaign that Google is trying to make it extremely easy for advertisers just to be discoverable anywhere across all the Google ecosystem. So that gives you an opportunity to be visible on YouTube, on display, on search, and obviously on the maps. And so it’s just a very efficient way of getting that visibility. The tricky part here with Performance Max campaign is really making sure that the traffic and the visibility that you’re getting is high intent and not just very yeah, very random, only based on really location, which at times may not necessarily be the most efficient if you’re actually trying to get cases out of this campaign. So that’s one of the updates, Grace. Now, the other one that they’ve announced here is first campaigns and also highly tied to what you’re saying, so that if you’re going to be running a campaign that is trying to measure things like in-store visits, you usually had to wait 30 days to gather enough reach. But now with the burst campaign, it basically allows you to cut that waiting time into half or half, kind of like the same impact. So nice. I mean, Google has been making it very clear that they understand that there is things in their system that take time, like machine learning for the system to actually understand the relevancy of your campaigns, of your ads, to give you a quality score, to give you the visibility that you want.
Liel: [00:14:01] It requires some time, right? You change the strategy from maximized conversion to maximize and maximize clicks. Right. It doesn’t really matter. It always kind of like requires for the for for the system, for the machine, for the algorithms to update themselves and understand what is it that you’re trying to achieve. And so now Google over the years has been promising that they’re committed towards reducing those wait times because they are obviously not great as a marketers, you make these type of considerations. Is it worth our while to make a dramatic shift on this strategy, knowing that it’s going to potentially slow us down significantly for a period of time? So you need to be thinking more kind of like on the mid long term and understand the consequences that you may face at the beginning. So I think trying to level off and remove some of that pain that comes with what has been traditionally the process of rolling in a new campaign and that and that’s great now. Grace. The other one here that comes up on the list is Experiment Tools. And I think this one’s a really, really good one and I’m glad to see it there, because let’s just backtrack a little bit for those who are not so seasoned on Google ads. You know that you now have the option of instead of running two different campaigns simultaneously and see which one works better.
Liel: [00:15:28] You can have one campaign running and then do an experiment inside that campaign that is testing out something different for you and let this ones go on for a month and then you are able to see which one’s performing best, right? And what Google does through experience, you may be thinking, well, what’s the difference between doing it that way and having the two campaigns separate? Is that per se? You don’t have to allocate twice the budget, so you can really have both campaigns equally geared towards running. What Google does with experiments is it allows you to really split kind of like in real time both of your campaigns. So you can measure them under the same circumstances without necessarily having to to double up on your on your budget or entirely build two different campaigns. And it will allow you to test, you know, other campaigns that you have going on, not necessarily, for instance, a local campaign, but an other search campaign, other campaigns on Google ads and just compare them towards with performance. Max run an experiment with that campaign are running as performance Max and I think that’s really interesting and that’s going to be a great way for those who’ve not yet tried performance Max to get, you know, to dip their toes in the water and see, hey, could this be something that get us some solutions to our needs? What do you think?
Grace: [00:16:55] You know me in testing, right? So when it comes to split B testing experiments, all of that within the same campaign, I love it and I’ve been using it since they released it in the beta version of performance.
Liel: [00:17:07] Max So yeah, yeah.
Grace: [00:17:09] I mean there’s nothing like it. You have to. And the most important thing I think a lot of people forget this, not if you’re doing it all the time, right? But a lot of people forget this only change one element at a time don’t change multiple elements when you do a split, a B test. So it’s just just a note about that. But yes, of course, when it comes to split AB testing, you don’t want to have to run to, you know, side by side, full blown campaigns pay the same amount of money, you know, and then all of a sudden this one was complete bust. Why don’t you run it within the same? You have a split AB test and an experiment, and that’s what the experiment is supposed to help you with, to figure out one element at a time between that particular campaign, as long as it’s all the same, like in terms of the overarching goal of the advertisement that you’re trying to place out there, you should be fine to just do a split AB test.
Liel: [00:18:02] That’s right, Grace. And so. That’s actually a great piece of advice that you say there about how to go about testing out things. And I think the only thing that I would add to it is make sure that you’re testing for a significant for us, you know, enough time. I think any test that is below 30 days is not going to generate enough data for you to really be able to have a substantial amount to not just look at it as. A snapshot of what could have been happening at a particular time. So definitely Google recommends that if you’re going to be running experiments, you at least let them run for 30 days and nothing less than that. So that is a great new addition that’s going to be available in four performance max campaigns. Now, there is other good features that I see, and I believe that this could have been potentially made available because of all of the feedback that there has been around performance max campaigns and their efficiency in generating results. Results is explanations. And so what basically this is, is that rather than the marketeers having to go around cross-referencing different data and reporting tools to understand what are the reasons their campaigns are performing in such way, Google will give you insights on your main screen, like you’re going to be an actual screen of insights and you’re going to be able to see they’re exactly what’s been affecting the performance of your campaigns.
Liel: [00:19:48] And obviously with that, you will get recommendations so that you could improve the performance of the campaign. And of course, also you will also have an optimization score on your performance Max campaign. So again, these are all some of the features that exist in other types of campaigns. We know about optimization scores. We’ve been seeing the recommendations that Google is making in other type of search campaigns. Now, these are all going to be added to performance, Max, so that advertisers have less of a hard time trying to get their campaigns to do what they want. And it’s going to be a matter to see, right, Grace? Because as we’ve talked about. In recent episodes. Not always. The recommendations are welcomed, right? Not always. The recommendations are the right ones. And so I think it’s not to be taken for granted that they are going to be accurate to shift the strategy towards the direction that you need it to go. But of course, any sort of insight is better than none. Any thoughts?
Grace: [00:21:03] Definitely. You and I talked about this actually when it happened to me that they were suggesting some things and I was like, I don’t know, like that’s not going to work for what I’m what we are planning for that particular ad that I’m running. So, yeah, I agree with you. It’s not always going to be the right suggestions, but it is kind of nice to see that they’ll try to give people recommendations that are a little more pointed and specific. So I have seen them and some of them were valuable and made it a very easy to quick fix, apply them with a button. Right. So that is definitely a fantastic feature for people that want to implement a suggestion very easily and quickly by clicking a button. But some of them, you do have to pay attention to the fact that you might it might not actually reach your goal. So it comes as part of an explanation to whomever it is that you’re running the campaign for. Unfortunately, it does add a little more work because now you have to explain to your person or the person you’re working for, providing the service to why you’re not going to implement that recommendation. In our heads, we know exactly why we’re not going to, but it has to do with explanation. So it does require a little more work now on the part of the marketing provider. But yeah, in a way I think it’s kind of better gives you the opportunity to explain to somebody why your strategy is what it is and maybe make them even more interested and have more buy in into what you’re doing for them.
Liel: [00:22:35] Yeah, absolutely. And and again, I think, you know, as long as you have a great working relationship with your agency and they’ve proven themselves and they know what they’re doing, you can be rest assured that whether if you are running performance, Mike’s campaign is part of your strategy, that this is this is part of the things that they will take into consideration, analyze and decide whether it’s fit for the strategy that you’re conducting or not. And I think, you know, you you hire great people to do work for you so that they can make these decisions for you. If you’re the type of person that needs to know at all, it’s worth asking the questions. But I wouldn’t get overly obsessed about it because it’s potentially just going to be a waste of your time, and it’s not the best thing that you can do with it. Now, Grace, there is really more things to cover, but. When it comes down to performance Max campaigns, these, I believe, are the main updates that are strictly applicable and related to performance max campaign. And as I’ve said, the reason why it’s important to separate between performance max updates and the rest of the updates is because many of these updates already exist in other types of campaigns, in Google ads, and they’re just being made available now for performance, Max. You know, I think the only thing that we’ve missed on mentioning here is that performance, Max. Max is only also going to be available through search ads 360, which is the more comprehensive platform that Google uses for bigger enterprise level organizations that run strategies through multiple channels that could include platforms like Google being, Yahoo, Baidu and so on and so forth.
Liel: [00:24:28] So that’s another thing important to keep in mind about Google marketing life. Of course, here we’re bringing it down to the level of legal marketing, but when you are at the event, a lot of the attention goes into the marketing platform and Google 360 because it’s huge for the bigger organizations. That’s that’s where they are running all of their campaigns from. So and there’s going to be a few other updates that are very particular to 360. So Grace here is one that I really like about and this is going to be new data for the insights page. So as you know very well, Google gives you information on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. You know, you select the date range and Google is going to populate for you information about how your campaign’s been performing, performing and on the inside stop. You can obviously see all of the small numbers that you care for from click through rate, cost per click, cost per conversion, all of the percentages that you care about. And then you also have the impression share. Now there is here a new concept that’s going to be joining the insights page, and that’s going to be attribution insights. Grace Can you care can you explain a little bit what attribution insights is being explained to us?
Grace: [00:25:49] I sure can. It’s one of my favorite parts, actually. So attribution insights for those of you who don’t necessarily know the term of attribution or those who do, it’s just, how do people get to you right through your different ad that you’ve placed on YouTube, shopping, Gmail, whatever type of ad you might actually have placed in Google? They now have a way of tracking. They always did up to a point, but now it’s a lot more sophisticated, I would say. And the idea is to help you better understand the conversion paths. So what path does my customer take across my different Google ad campaigns? Do they start in display? Do they start in YouTube? Do they start in Gmail on one of those little ads that pop on the side? So what they’re saying in the word stream article is very specific, and I think I could just use the sentence because it’s perfect, this multi-touch attribution information, it helps you finally see the value of campaigns that indirectly lead to your conversion. So I know many of us, particularly when it comes to legal, we have our billboards, we have our a lot of offline, we have a lot of online. So when it comes to this stuff and the online in particular, because you may have a Gmail ad, you may have a YouTube short, you may have whatever you have. Right. And this brings it all together and helps you see finally the multi-touch that gets them to you in the end and that last conversion.
Liel: [00:27:17] 100% Grace. I think this is wonderful. You explained it. Just what? Just exactly for what it is. It gives you a bigger insight into understanding how your display and YouTube campaigns and potentially search campaigns are all interacting together. And it actually allows you to see literally how your conversions are happening across multiple platforms. Where do they start? Like each conversion? First touchpoint happened on display, second touchpoint happened on search. The conversion happened after a touch point in YouTube and it’s so great. The reality is that there are multiple tools nowadays that you can use to track these kind of things. But of course, to have all of these tools already embedded inside your Google ads account make it just so much easier, A, to have access to the data and B, to actually be able to measure the results and optimize based on this information that you are getting. So this is extremely useful and definitely a great piece of insight that particularly for campaigns like Performance, Max, is going to be very critical because the whole thing about performance, Max, is that you’re you’re you’re you’re being visible through many different platforms, including Gmail. Right. And so it’s really good to see how are these helping each other and where are where conversions actually happening more frequently and after how many touchpoints. So really good stuff here when it comes down to the insights, the new sections on the insights page. Now the other one that is that was announced was Budget Insights.
Liel: [00:29:01] And again, I think this one is more about being able to get smarter with your budget. So a few of the things that it will help you anticipate are what optimizations you could potentially take if you are over or underspending against your total monthly budget or if you are over allocating funds into a particular campaign where it’s not likely to get spent. So you can deploy that budget to other areas where they are more likely to get used. And so, as I’ve said, it’s these are insights that you also could potentially be getting them already from other platforms, such as if you use Optimizer to manage your Google ads campaigns. But at the same time, having it inside Google makes it not just easier to access the data, but also to take action on it. So I love it. I have here a little screenshot of how things are going to look like and you have a little bar that’s showing you like the progress bar, how far you are, what’s the total amount for the for the month. So it’s making it very visual, very user friendly. I think that’s one of the things that really stood out for us is how much Google is trying to make the platform, which doesn’t necessarily stands out for being very user friendly from the UX and UI. Sorry, but I think these new boards are looking way more easy to read. In Grays. Then we have first party audience insights.
Grace: [00:30:37] Yes, these insights will use your first party data to help you see which segments are performing best. What we talk about first party data, that’s essentially the customer segments. So whether it’s a returning customer, a VIP customer as you qualify them, right, because it depends on sales and whatever else you have assigned to that demographic. I’d say our audience segment and what it will allow you to do is to see even more granular information on what share of conversion that particular demographic would be. Now, why is that important? Well, for obvious reasons when it comes to audiences that you build inside of the different Google search ads and campaigns that you have. You want to know how many you’re getting in terms of conversion from one group versus the other. I mean, that is probably one of the most important pieces of information that all of us need and want. Right. It’s how much am I spending on this campaign and how many are actually converting from what I believe are my VIP customers? If you’re VIP customers or return customers are converting in terms of your share of conversions at a higher rate than new leads or new customers. That usually means you’re doing a good job, right, in terms of keeping your customers and being able to convert them over and over again for whatever your product might be. This kind of does go back to Liel, and I’d like you to say maybe a couple of words on it, because it does kind of go back to like more retail, I’d say. Yeah, it can be applied to like maybe some service areas or practice areas, but it’s not that it’s easy, I’d say, for like torts or something like that. They’re very specific, right?
Liel: [00:32:23] I was actually it’s really funny that you mentioned this because I was actually thinking about about how the conversation is turning into kind of like a more general Google conversation, not very applicable to the legal space. But I want to bring it back to the legal space. And I actually think. Grace, you’re right. I mean, when you think about it from this standpoint and you’re thinking, you know, the way that Google is presenting it to you repeat customers and your VIP customers, you don’t use those terms in the legal marketing or sorry, in the legal industry that much because depending on the type of law you practice, you may or may not have returned customers. Right. But I do think you can certainly use these different segmentations and use Google’s insights on your different segments to be able to better run your campaigns. So first of all, first that first party data, this could be data that you’re collecting through your campaigns. And so obviously this could be different segments that you’ve built through your Google ads activity. But this could also be data that you upload to the platform from your CRM right now. Grace That’s where I feel the legal space can actually make and put this into their use. Because if you are data mining, right, for different types of mass torts and such, you can definitely have audiences that have already shown interest for particular mass torts.
Liel: [00:33:54] And I’m just going to use here one that is very obvious, which is going to be the baby Formula One. And as we’ve seen and heard over the past few months, there is an overlap of different types of cases, of different types of formula issues that may be of interest from a particular segment to another particular segment. Does that make any sense? Grace If you’ve had an issue with a particular formula, then chances are that you’ve probably, probably may also qualify for these other towards that is targeting this other issue with these other particular formula. And so now you can definitely use your different use your different segments and use that to run campaigns and see how they’re performing. Right, see how they are performing. You can definitely look at random audiences and see how are they performing with a paraquat campaign. Test out existing towards audiences for other towards is something that it’s already being done probably through email marketing. But I think there is a lot of potential to do it also through Google’s platforms, particularly when you’re looking at YouTube, when you’re looking at the display network that could be powerful and even Gmail. Right. And so I think this could be really valuable insights for being able to run data effectively.
Grace: [00:35:19] So that’s actually perfect. I’m glad that you brought up the baby formula because there’s three of them, right? Three mass torts. There’s the baby food. Right. So there’s baby food, there’s beef. Exactly. Baby formula, which is the neck necrotizing enterocolitis, which we have on another podcast. And then there’s the Similac recall for the Abbott Laboratories. So that is the perfect example as to what you can use this for. When you have those three, if you have a case for one, you potentially have a case on some of the others or they know somebody or they’re in the same demographic group of other parents. Right? So that is a perfect way to use this first party data and what is actually giving you conversions from one group to the next? So yeah.
Liel: [00:36:05] Exactly. So if you already have, let’s say you’ve started off with a baby food strategy, right? And you run that campaign and you are now setting up your baby formula, your baby your first baby formula campaign. And you want to add to the audience that you’re going to be presenting your YouTube and your display ads and any other type of ads that you’re going to be running here. You want to target your audience from the baby food campaign that already converted or at least clicked interactive, engaged in some shape or form on the baby food campaign. Now, you can strategically add them to the audience that you’re going to be targeting, and you can see how that audience, particularly those ones, are performing against other audiences that are also seeing the ads. And and that is great. That is really, really great because it removes all of the guesswork as to does it work or it doesn’t work. There is no connection because there a lot of assumptions. But until you actually have real data to prove things out, you don’t necessarily know whether it’s working or not. So Google is giving you here a way of getting that information in an easier in a much easier way. So I like it. And definitely this is just giving you an opportunity here to get more granular, to get more experimental, and to test test different things and be able to measure results. Because that’s the other thing. How many times aren’t we testing things but cannot actually tell whether they worked or didn’t because the data is not clear. So this helps. All right, Grace, should we move on to the next one?
Grace: [00:37:58] Yes, let’s go on to the next topic.
Liel: [00:38:00] All right. So Google shopping updates. What do you think, Grace? I think we’re going to skip through this.
Grace: [00:38:06] I think it’s mostly having to do with e commerce businesses. So for us it’s not really super relevant.
Liel: [00:38:12] And I will just say one of the things that you can do here is, you know, it’s just cool from the user experience standpoint. So, you know, not when you go and search something in Google and you see the carousel that has the items that you’re searching for and their price already in Google. And usually when you click on them, they send you to the website and in the website you can then potentially add it to the basket and then initiate the checkout inside the store website. But what Google is doing now is actually allowing for merchants to sell directly for stores to search, to sell directly from the search results page. So you can basically check out directly on the search results page. Now, my understanding is that when you hit checkout because you can see the picture, right? Grace Yes, it shows like some some sport goggles and then it allows you to click on checkout. And so what it does is it takes you to the page where it’s already been added to the basket and it’s already asking you for your payment methods. So you’re not checking out from the search results page, you’re checking out from the website from where the item is being sold, but it’s already taking you to the page where you do not have to manually add them to the basket and then kind of like initiate the sequence of steps of the checkout process. It already takes you to a checkout page inside the website of the the store. Now, what I heard here is that the goal is to allow people to completely pay for the transaction on the search results page, which we ultimately know goes very well with what Google is trying to do, which is keep the users on the platform. Why send them to a website? So what are your thoughts on on that? Grace Not so much on whether it is is applicable or not for the legal industry, but more so on the fact that, you know, Google’s continue to moving forward towards this pursuit of you guys can do it all here. Why? Why go to somewhere else?
Grace: [00:40:25] You know, obviously that. Kind of takes away a little bit from some people’s website, right? I mean, what we want to drive the driver we want for the most part is for them to hang out on a website and go to other pages, look at other products. So for the perspective of the consumer, which is the opposite, right? This is faster, it’s quicker, it’s less clicks. It’s going to be better for them. It really is. It’s a better experience, technically speaking, technically. Now, the reality for the merchandiser or the other side of the coin, which is the person putting these ads out, it can be a little tricky because you want them to kind of hang out and look at other products that you have available. So I have a little bit of a message. I know that most of our people have are usually actual legal service providers. So this may not this probably won’t be relevant. But if you do this, I would just say to always have a related services or related products page. And that way when they do land on the checkout page, it will still at least give them a little bit.
Grace: [00:41:28] If it’s still driving to your website, write your check page could have the related products or related services. So I’ve actually used this for legal before. I know it sounds. It’s mostly for requests to request a quote. So this works a little bit with more the estate planners and kind of will and testament like those types of services. So I was able to use it and kind of give like a three view, a YouTube short or whatever of the service that the person provides. And it’s really just like a video of the person or a3d view of their office and then request a quote. So there is a way to use this that isn’t specific to e commerce. Exactly. It is meant for e commerce, though. So what I would say is if you’re a will and testament lawyer, you could potentially use this and say request a quote and related services, probate, the estate, whatever else, and that it could be added to the end of this particular thing. You know, I could bring it together at some point.
Liel: [00:42:29] Yeah. I mean, look, I loved it. I love the initiative and the creativity. I think Google is still kind of like.
Grace: [00:42:37] Retail.
Liel: [00:42:39] Holding back. Yes. About around selling items that they cannot verify exactly what they are. Correct. But at the same time, it is certainly something that is heading towards that direction because that’s exactly what local service sets are. Right. I mean, local service sites is an advertising towards service that shows up in a very, very similar sort of experience. And will Google want to diversify on that in a different way and expand a little bit, make it more specific? I think it will happen. I think it’s I think it’s the natural progression. I think it’s not as pressing to them as shopping ads are for actual products. But I certainly see that being something that’s going to be happening over the next few years. And I actually think that it may it may very well be a good way and a good transition of the next generation of local service ads. Now, Grace, let’s leave shopping aside, because it’s really not what we care about more, although it’s interesting to always look at what’s happening there, to predict a little bit what’s going to be coming in the future. And that’s what we’ve just did. But let’s talk a little bit more about reporting, because there were a few new things that were announced from the standpoint of reporting. And as we were just talking a moment ago, reporting is everything right? I mean, the ability to be able to read and understand your data and get insights so that you can make better decisions and optimizations about your campaigns, it’s everything.
Liel: [00:44:22] And so there is a few new updates here. I’m going to start here with the first one that I see, which is search and conversion lift tests. So what does this does great? Is it actually tests randomly your different audiences between people that have seen and not seen you do YouTube ads that you’re running and see if there has been any lift in organic searches driven by your YouTube campaigns. Grace This is really amazing, particularly for those who are doing SEO and those who are running YouTube ads, which nowadays, honestly, it’s really kind of like a necessity if you are a law firm that is doing brand building. Youtube is a place where you cannot not be. And now Google is going to give you a really, really cool insights on how different segments or different audiences have responded to your YouTube ads. If they’ve actually gone in search for your brand or for your services after seeing YouTube campaigns and see how those compare to those who are also making those searches. But without necessarily having seen your ads and see whether the YouTube ads are actually helping in driving traffic to your site, what are your thoughts here?
Grace: [00:45:51] So you know me in numbers, right? So when it comes to being able to know if somebody actually looked at your ad and didn’t, this is a lot to do even with social media, right? You want to know if people look got on your social media account and if you’ve increased followers, this is the same concept where how many people have seen my ad and have I actually increased my conversion? Have I increased the impressions, the lift? Right. So versus those who’ve seen it versus those who haven’t. You don’t want to spend more time and effort on people that have already seen it. So to be able to see. Those. And also and to me, this is kind of the most important part. So maybe I should back up a little bit when it comes to looking at the lift or the increase in conversion based on those who’ve seen it and those who haven’t seen it. I think it’s very important for people to remember that when they’re looking at these numbers, you didn’t have that exact information, at least not this clean. And so when you’re looking at now lift conversions from one thing versus another, you just make sure that you’re aware of the fact that you’re seeing those who have seen it or haven’t seen it. But also what the are saying in here in terms of the funnels. So. They instead of random. It’s a little more specific, right. So you can see your organic search and YouTube campaigns. And for me, that’s one of the most important things is the YouTube stuff, because like you said, YouTube is where you have to be, particularly for brand awareness. And unless you’re one of these huge names in legal, you’re a lawyer in your particular state and they may not know who you are across the nation or even in your area. So it’s important to be able to see this information and the fact that they’re giving it to us now. Use it.
Liel: [00:47:40] Yeah, please. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Grace, I think everyone I think the bigger guys are going to care about this and the smaller law firms that are just getting started. This is key. This is super important. And I think, you know, these are this is data that’s going to really primarily give you. And I think what Google understands here a little bit is that, you know, the way that we’ve digested digital marketing over the past few years has sold us into the idea that results and attribution needs to be black and white. You’re either getting clients through it or you’re not. And we’re forgetting about the fact that a lot of digital marketing nowadays is also part of brand building as well. And I think here what Google is trying to do is to connect us to those two dots and help you see it more clearly, how your YouTube campaigns are helping you drive traffic potentially to your website. And that may not happen directly when they’re seeing the YouTube. Why? Because they’re in YouTube watching content. They’re not going to stop and just interrupt what they’re doing to go and search you. But even if if they were to do it afterwards, you can actually see it, right? You can actually see that it’s helping drive traffic to your brand. And that’s that’s amazing insights. That’s really, really good. Grace Now, there is a few other things here. There’s one that it’s the conversion lift test.
Liel: [00:49:12] I will tell you what I’m very excited about is about the next point, which is simplified tagging. So one Google tag will replace global site tag for all of Google ads and Google Analytics accounts. So you’re basically going to be able to have a more simple way of tagging your website so it can actually gather all of the data that you care. And so that’s always welcomed, not just because, you know, you want to keep things simple and clean, but also because you want to make sure that your website has as little code as possible so that it’s not heavy and it’s not slowing it down. So simplified tagging seems like a great new addition, and with that comes also a new feature called New Reporting. So the new data that’s going to be available, it’s going to be on device conversion. So this is going to be interesting and it’s also going to give you an actual report of the full funnel. Right. And so obviously, this is going to be depending on the way that you are setting up your events and your conversions so that Google can actually measure this data for you, but it can tell you first numbers. Well, the example that it shows here, it starts from number of clicks or interactions. So it will make sure clicks. Then how many of those converted, then how many of those actually qualified and then how many of those actually turn out to become retained clients? Now, again, this is something that we’re going to have to see how how does it work? How do you set it up? But it certainly sounds like a good way of being able to measure all of your funnel.
Liel: [00:51:02] Very effective, I think, for display and very effective for YouTube campaigns. I think a little bit less relevant for search campaigns where the intent is higher and the conversion journey tends to be more straightforward. And most of the conversions are also happening over the phone basically scenarios. So not too sure how much this is going to be helpful for that type of strategy. But yeah, potentially a good opportunity in the different types of campaigns that you may be running right performance, Max. Definitely. Now we we already know Google Analytics four is here and it’s going towards becoming the replacement of universal analytics. It’s going to happen next year. So right now it’s transition period and there is going to be just more consideration over the way that you can get insights from Google ads into analytics for. And it looks very well. It looks very organized. Very. Detailed. Remember that because your Google ads is page strategy. You get demographics insights. You have other insights that you do not get of your organic traffic. And so obviously analytics is going to be able to share with you in a very user friendly way all of these valuable data that may be super important for you.
Liel: [00:52:27] And that’s one thing I always say Grace, is that I think it’s important to look at your Google Analytics and look at your data for your paid campaigns and and use that to correlate what are you doing on offline marketing and see whether it matches, right? I mean, different platforms. Different audiences. Yes, that could be the case. But it could also be a good way to see where are you getting high levels of engagement and response and interest online and see whether you’re you’re also reaching those same segments offline through your strategy. I think it’s definitely worth keeping that in mind. And a lot of times it’s it’s just not looking at those numbers, not looking at that data. And so Google Analytics is a great place to gather insights about demographics when it comes down to your paid campaigns, also available in Google ads. But this is the type of data that you usually be looking more in analytics when you’re analyzing your website as a whole. So Grace, I think this is a great moment before you make your closing remarks to stop for this first episode on Insights on Google Marketing Live 2022 and then get back for our second episode next week with more updates and our takeaways. But first, what are your final thoughts?
Grace: [00:53:58] My final thoughts are I really like the new updates that are coming out. I really do, because it has to do with more numbers and more data and really figuring out where your clients are coming in, where they’re going, and if even up to the point where if they’re seeing someone else’s ad, you know, I know that was a little weird in terms of the way we were. They’re kind of showing us that information right to Lyft and conversions and search. Lyft is very technical. However, with all that being said, when we see that information kind of come out, we’re going to let you guys know what that means, right. In terms of does that actually work or does that help you in any way? Right now, we don’t know because we don’t necessarily see that over time. We need like 30, 60, 90 days to really see a lot of the reporting and how that might affect what you’re doing going forward. But besides that, I think the performance, Max and all of these different things and all these new features, it’s just new ways and actually additional ways pulling from their other products and seeing what works and putting it into all these different products that they’re just making better. So hopefully not. Hopefully, Google is always about the user and the users intent. So as long as they continue the same way and down this path, you know, we, we as the marketers and as law firm service providers to clients and to consumers, we just need to keep up to date on everything that they’re doing. And that’s one of the most important things to do, is just keep an eye on things as they’re going on and make sure that you know what’s going on in the market of Google because Google runs just about everything.
Liel: [00:55:35] Yeah, absolutely. Great. And and as you were saying. Right, particularly with these conversion life tests, I mean, it’s really interesting because what Google basically here is is opening the doors to I think, you know, like when you’re looking at option insights where where you cannot basically see how well you are performing against your competitors and who are your competitors for those campaigns that you are overlapping with? You know, you’re basically now getting a new way of measuring yourself directly against your your competitors and and and see whether you you’re performing better than them. Right. And I think it’s a very interesting approach. I’m yet just yet to see how how much data they’re going to be sharing about how are you doing and what are they doing right. Whether your click through rate or the actions or the conversions are higher, lower, the same if it’s a percentage against what your competitors are doing or you know, the way they put it here, the next ad that would have played based on the beat, on the ad rank. So yeah, interesting stuff. Grace if this is getting a little bit too technical, you know, it’s normal. It’s it’s Google marketing live and it’s always about things that have not yet necessarily become used on a daily basis. But it’s good to keep our eye on them. And I. On then, because they’re very likely going to be in the next few years. So, Grace, thank you very much for a great conversation. And we’ll be back for our second part next week.
Grace: [00:57:15] Next week.
Liel: [00:57:21] If you like our show, make sure you subscribe. Tell your coworkers. Leave us a review and send us your questions at: ask@incamerapodcast.com. We’ll see you next week.
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