In our second part of our Google Marketing Live part two review, Grace and Liel look at updates that improve privacy and enhance the use of first-party data to a revamped assets library and an, even more, AI-dependent responsive search ad assets.
Join our conversation as we discover what could potentially stick and change how we use Google Ads as we know it, just like other announcements in Google Marketing Live from previous years have completely transformed the platform.
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Transcript
Liel: [00:00:00] Google made a series of announcements at its annual Google Marketing Live event, including new opportunities for ads in YouTube shorts. New layouts for responsive display ads, plus improved analytics and new ad testing options. 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. Welcome to part two of our Google Marketing Live 2022 Review. I’m doing camera politics, private legal marketing conversations. Grace, welcome back. How are you today?
Grace: [00:00:59] Good. How are you.
Liel: [00:01:00] Doing? Great. Grace. Very excited to continue talking here about Google Marketing Live. We had our first episode last week. That was part one. We looked at five out of ten takeaways or main takeaways that we are basing ourselves from. And today we’re going to go with 6 to 10. So Grace. Before we even do that, in case someone is joining us to this episode without having heard the first one and they are not that into wanting to hear episode number one on Google Marketing Live 2022. Let’s do a quick recap on what is it that we’ve covered. So, Grace, I’m going to start here and I think, you know, it’s going to have to be new features for performance. Max. There are so many of them. I think Performance Max is said to have stolen the show last year at the 2021 Google Marketing Live, and it looks like it really wanted to do a repeat this year. There is a lot of new things happening with performance, Max, but I think based on what you and I both talked about last episode, it more has to do with enhancements that will really benefit retailers that are interested in driving in-store traffic and also be able to track sales in store. And so for legal industry, that may not necessarily be very relevant, but a few other things that were exciting for those who are using performance Max kind of as an alternative to a local campaign, which, by the way, they’re going away are things like the experiment tools that’s going to allow you to test the campaign against other Google arts campaigns, explanations that will give you insights and feedback as to how you can better improve the performance of your campaign, as well as with recommendations and optimization score. And obviously, it was also mentioned that it will now be available in search ads 360, which again 360 is Google Ads Manager, but it’s for enterprise sites accounts. So Grace, that was performance. Max Carey To tell us a little bit about new data for Insights Page.
Grace: [00:03:06] Yes, definitely. So the new data for the Insights Page, just as a quick review for everybody has to do with attribution insights as we spoke about. Right, which means you can tell where they came from starting from the very beginning, kind of all the way through multi-touch attribution, right?
Liel: [00:03:22] Yeah.
Grace: [00:03:22] They added the budget insights, which basically allows you to see on one screen what you should do if you have certain budgets allocated, if you’re going to spend the two too fast on something and you can potentially move it to something else, basically anything having to do with insights on that side of it. Then they talk about first party audience insights, which we discussed having to do with more like VIP customers, returning customers, prospective customers. And it basically allows you to use your current first party data to help you see what segments might be performing best and then provide signals for Google’s machine learning to help it optimize your campaign performance.
Liel: [00:04:00] Absolutely. And then Grace, we went on to just very, very quickly over the top touch on shopping updates. Why? Because it’s shopping and we don’t really care about it that much in here. But what we’re getting out of these updates is signals of what Google is trying to do, which is the same agenda. Right. Try to keep users for as much as they can inside in the actual search results page. Now they’re adding a checkout button on items that are showing on the shopping carousel. And what that means is that now you can just go directly to the website to check out for the item that you saw on the Google search results page. We are thinking that the goal here is that eventually you will be able to check out and pay from the actual search results page. So definitely something that seems to be trending in the right direction that we will be set up from years now. Now we then talk about reporting updates, Grace and they’re really interesting things here that we’re announced information that’s going to let you measure, for instance, how often people who see your YouTube ads are then visiting your website without necessarily that being tied to an actual action from the ad itself. And I think that is great. And it will give you metrics also as to how that performs against those who are not necessarily seeing your YouTube ads. And so now you’re really starting to get some real insights as to how much of an impact campaigns that are primarily run for the purpose of brand building are having in actual driving traffic to your site.
Liel: [00:05:44] And even though when it happens after the ad or the interaction with your campaigns happened and. Then we also talk about simplified tagging, which is actually very, very cool. It allows you just to use one simple tag to have all of your Google Analytics accounts implemented in your website. And then we are also had a quick look as how Google Analytics forward is going to be displaying data for Google ads, which obviously, as we know, Google Analytics four is going to be replacing universal analytics. It’s right now transitioning into becoming that and Grace. I believe that’s pretty much where we left and we are now going to move on to the next few things that were discussed. And quite honestly, Grace, this next one is a little bit of a rabbit hole and it’s a little bit too technical and that’s privacy sandbox, right? They announced this very early on when they announced the event itself. And that’s one of that was one of the items that had a lot of expectation and Grace. Basically, Google is really trying here to enhance privacy and make the environment safer, both for advertisers and for users. I think what is worth mentioning here, Grace, is what we’ve discussed in one of our episodes recently, and that’s going to be my ad center, right? So for those who did not listen to that episode, can you care to explain a little bit what my ad center is going to be? Because that was also part of Google marketing live. They explain and they mentioned that that’s coming up.
Grace: [00:07:34] So, yes, definitely the it’s a big part of the privacy movement, right? I mean, everybody has gone towards that direction anyway. So this can, in my opinion, can be encompassed under that part of it, which is for the user. It’s now going to be easier, easier on the user side to be able to choose what kind of ads you actually want to see. And it’s going to be done basically through your settings and a certain ads. I forget they actually have a name for it, right? Isn’t it like.
Liel: [00:08:03] My ad center?
Grace: [00:08:04] My ad center. Thank you. So the my ad center is going to make that easy, right? Absolutely. My ad center is going to allow you as a user to be able to choose what you want to see, what you don’t want to see. So I know that they kind of have that on the iPhones. And when it comes to Apple products, they have a strict policy and very specific permissions that they don’t allow people to kind of get into your own private stuff. This is supposed to help kind of be geared towards that, where you choose what you want to see. So if you want to see ads about flowers, you want to see ads about shoes, you don’t want to see ads about lawyers. This is where you are going to be putting that in. So the flip side of it is the privacy side. How are you going to, as an advertiser address that new feature for the My Ad Center for the user. Right, because they are blocking you. So you really have to think about this and it’s got to be something that is extremely important to you because, well, you’re going to have less and less reach the more people say they don’t want to see your ads.
Liel: [00:09:08] I absolutely Grace. That’s one of the things that are coming up. And again, just like we’ve said, this really is going to put to test the the quality and the creativity of advertising, even in platforms like the search network. Now, Grace, just to talk a little bit more about this topic, I think one thing that is interesting here is because of the transition to a cookie less environment, now, there are some direct integrations that Google is setting up with CRM, such as, for instance, HubSpot, that allows you to track conversions on their pages, on their platforms without necessarily having to use cookies. So again, this is kind of all different steps and implementations that are being made towards being able to adapt to a to an environment where there is going to be less tracking as we know it now. Now Grace. So let’s talk about one item that I think is going to be very exciting, particularly to use, is you really love everything that has to do with AI and that’s going to be on the on the topic of assets creation. And that is because there is going to be now out of generated responsive search ads assets. So if something that was already super automated and super depending on AI is now going to become even more AI dependent. Care to explain a little bit why is that?
Grace: [00:10:37] So the RCA assets for you are based on the content from your landing pages and existing ads. It’s automation for automation. I mean, that’s and I’ve used this actually for another ad that I set up for a pest control company. That I do ads for. And it works pretty well, I got to say. But it does have, as you said, limitations. So when it comes to these types of generated headlines descriptions, you don’t really have control over what’s getting auto generated. So if they choose what they want it to say, it may not be exactly the language that you’re trying to achieve. So it’s a nice idea if you have a very, very narrow scope of what you’re trying to like. Pest control for ants, pest control for termites. I mean, there’s only so many strings of words that you could put together for that. But when it comes to being a lawyer and services provided, this may not be the best route to go.
Liel: [00:11:39] Yeah. Again, Grace, Google is here and you have to give them credit for it. They’re just they’re just trying to remove the middleman out of the space. Right. They try to to remove the difficulties and difficulties and technicalities of and the complexity of running a campaign. The reality is that it’s just like what you’re describing here. The end result is just not great yet. And when you’re just leaving it up to a machine to create the ad copy for your campaigns and then also decide which keywords with search terms and how to manage the entire campaign, you are putting a lot at stake. And so while in concept this sounds wonderful, what we’ve seen so far is that it tends not to work terrific. Now, the other thing that you need to keep in mind here is because everything is auto generated based on what Google picks up as being the main topics and the main interest in your website. This is more likely going to end up being a branding campaign with a little bit of an additional coverage, because what Google’s going to understand that you’re going to be very relevant for primarily is going to be your brand. And so, you know, it may not necessarily end up being or achieving the results that you want because it’s just not putting the right focus where you need it. So I think it’s interesting and, you know, we’re going to see how these how this progresses.
Liel: [00:13:07] But as of now, I can tell you that these campaigns that tend to use this level of automation and artificial intelligence tends not to perform very well. Now, Grace, one that I really like here is the new asset library. And this is school. Like these kind of things are really like because it’s kind of like a mixture of both things is kind of like the current version that we have for responsive search ads. Well, now Google allows you to go through your Google ads account to create all kinds of different assets and types of assets by just adding very, very simple elements into your Google account. And then Google will use those to create all kinds of different assets that could be run on the display network, on YouTube and definitely on search network. And so you’re basically rather than having to curate ads that are already put together to be used on a particular platform, you’re just giving kind of like to Google the ingredients. And in this case we’re including also logos, pictures and such. And so then Google mixes and matches it all together and creates different ads for you. I think this is actually very, very cool. And the nice thing here is that it takes away from you all of the burden of having to set up and monitor and track A B testing. Right. It kind of does it for you.
Grace: [00:14:31] So this is another tool that I’ve actually used as well. Yeah, yeah, I did. I actually used the asset library. It was kind of nice to see a pop up in there. It made it a little easier for me because I do have a lot of assets for that particular company on their behalf that I created. So it was nice to have a location where I could see where the best performing assets were, kind of already part of a group of assets that I have, and it would allow me to just select the ones that I knew were best performing for another campaign. So it it it really is useful when it comes to products so far. I would think when it comes to being able to use it for any other ad you might want to use it for, it should still be a good resource, right? I mean, you can put your videos in there, you can put your.
Liel: [00:15:19] Absolutely.
Grace: [00:15:20] Everything. So one stop shop truly for all of your actual creative assets for ads. To me, that’s a big, big win for marketing people.
Liel: [00:15:29] I mean, yeah, 100%, 100%.
Grace: [00:15:31] Graphics again, you know.
Liel: [00:15:34] It’s absolutely especially, you know, when you are in need of refreshing campaigns, keeping them current, making sure that, you know, people are not seeing too many times the same creative. This is a great way of actually having multiple things, multiple creatives ready to deploy. Now, Grace, this next one is very interesting. And quite honestly, it’s been kind of like around for a while in different forms. It’s been as a form submission extension. There’s been before, I believe, already, attempts of trying to initiate conversations like chat conversations from the ads themselves. Now, what we see being one of the features that’s going to be added, I think it’s one of the extensions that’s going to be added to ads in the search network is going to be Google business messages inside the ads. And so what happens here is that rather than sending the users to a landing page or rather than the user going and initiating a phone call from the ad itself, they can also have the possibility of starting a conversation with the business through the Google My Business Staging solution. And so I know most of people will initially say, yeah, you know, this could be interesting.
Liel: [00:16:56] Let’s add it, let’s add it. But I think just particularly when it comes down to law firms, you need to remember what is your preferred method of conversion? And if your preferred method of conversion is going to be phone calls, then this is going to be a distraction to that. Now, will users prefer to want to drop a message or start Google my business chat with you? I’m going to also have a hesitation on that Grace, because I don’t think Google might Google my business messaging experience is that great, to be quite honest with you. I think if it was something like WhatsApp, if it was something like Facebook Messenger that has better user experience, that it’s better integrated to their devices, then I would say, you know, that’s something that is worth testing out. I still think that for the search network, you don’t want to detract from anything a way that it’s not a phone call. Sure, you need to give another option of a conversion, but to make it specific on your ad that you’re preferred or that you’re encouraging chat as a method of conversion, I think it’s not a great move.
Grace: [00:18:03] I actually have a little bit of an opposite view on that because we’ve had chats and they’ve done pretty well, I have to say, on the ads and it’s we gave them multiple options, you know how we are, right? As persistent as a software company on that side of it. We want them to be able to communicate with us in every single way that they want to. Right. We include Click to call. We include the chat option on the ad and we’ve gotten a couple of people that seem to like the chat function, especially when it comes to later at night, or they just don’t want to really talk to somebody and they’ll send a chat, you know, inquiring about whatever the specific ad was about actually give you an example was we had a hernia mesh ad that went out and there was a chat option and somebody requested information about hernia mesh and if they qualified through the chat. So there’s a couple of people that did that. You know, it was like I’d say a handful. And so it’s it’s like you said, it’s worth giving them the option. I don’t think that you should focus on that at all because it’s still very, very unfriendly in terms of I think I’ve used it for when I’ve seen Google, my business chats for other companies, I’ve used it on the consumer side and it isn’t friendly. As Yeah.
Liel: [00:19:19] I just think it’s more about the placement of it. You can certainly have your chat enabled on your website, on your landing page. If again, chat has proven to be a valuable way of converting leads, then if that is the case, then by all means. But just particularly, you know, my mind is going through personal injury, very, very high cost per clicks. I think going after limiting the user to a chat. I think it’s a very bold move and not necessarily a very effective one, particularly since the limitations that you may have by having to run the chat itself through Google my business, which quite frankly I don’t know very well if it allows any any ability to customize the experience by having a greeting message, by actually allowing your team to manage the Google my business chat through other platforms that they are also using to communicate with clients. So I would say just primarily based out of limitations, it’s not my it wouldn’t be my my most exciting extension at type for search campaign, but I can definitely see why Google wants to give more opportunity to business to use the chat feature under Google my business. So again, Google my business becomes a better I’m more important than central part of the communications with their with their client base. Now, Grace, let’s move on and talk about YouTube shorts, ads and YouTube shorts, as we’ve talked about before in this podcast. It’s basically kind of like the equivalent of a TikTok video for you to their verticals or for mobile. They tend to be short and they are actually performing very well. I mean, can you believe that over 30 billion of these videos is are viewed every day?
Grace: [00:21:12] I do believe it is another one that I used for for an ad that I did for them. 5 seconds. 5 seconds. Youtube. Yeah.
Liel: [00:21:22] So, yeah. So obviously now when users are watching these types of short videos, you have the option of showing ads as shorts as well. Right? So vertical with the call to action there in embedded within the video and such. So I think this is good. I think this is a great opportunity to expand your YouTube campaign and to give an aspect ratio that is going to be relevant for the type of experience that the user is having. So I give this one at this one a thumbs up. I think this is actually great way of being present. And then there is also kind of like the exact same thing. But now for the display network, right? So Google is creating what they call the mobile first layout, which in other way is know in other words is the vertical aspect ratio for display advertising. And you can see here the examples. They look great because basically what it does is it takes over your entire screen vertically and it showcases your ad. And I think from an advertising standpoint, this is tremendous visibility, tremendous real estate, tremendous opportunity to capture the attention of the user. And you’re also just serving them a much better ad. I will say, though, however, I would like to see these ads video more so than on a static ad. But I think, you know, nowadays in the display network, you can do it. So I actually do like this a lot.
Grace: [00:22:56] I like it as well. I mean, anything that you can make it easy for the user to purchase something or to do anything or take action, it’s always the best, you know, thing possible. So a mobile first layout for a responsive display ad? Yeah. Looks beautiful. It really does on full screen portrait mode and it just makes sense. This is how people are used to consuming ads. Consuming content now is is vertical, right? I mean it’s and and yeah. Portrait mode rather. That’s the best way to put it. Portrait mode and.
Liel: [00:23:27] Mobile.
Grace: [00:23:28] Everyone’s on their phones. So I really like it too. I agree with you. I think this is one of their better updates.
Liel: [00:23:34] Yeah. And they can be scrolling scrollable. Right. As I’ve mentioned this, these are actually video based ads as well. And so it’s a very much better experience than the traditional way that we are used to seeing display ads just embedded inside a page without it really necessarily standing out that much. I think just coming up with this ad, as you’re doing your scroll through a page, it’s going to just not just grab better the attention, but also engage the user is better and get them to acknowledge what you’re actually showing. Grace. The last one here is again one that would be more relevant for those using 360 to run their campaigns. But basically what Google is doing is it’s making available its audiences for running campaigns to connected TV. And so I think this is, again, a great way of using first party data. This is even though it’s not under the category of privacy and security, you can clearly see here on the list as we’re going through it, that a lot of the steps that Google is taking are around allowing users to do the most that they can with their existing data, and that’s going to be through their first party data.
Liel: [00:24:58] And so by being able to use your existing audiences for connected TV and to also use Google audiences such as affinity, in-market demographic, it’s just going to by far enhance your reach on connected TV campaigns, right? Which again, it’s yet to be seen whether this is something that’s going to remain just available for 360 advertisers. But it would be a really cool, very interesting for Google to start entering the space of connect TV advertising or OTT through their traditional platform. And that’s something that I think will significantly change all that advertising as we know it. But for now that doesn’t seem to be very clear. So we’re going to assume that this is primarily for 360. So Grace, believe it or not, we’ve just went through the final six. Points that were announced in Google Marketing Live. I think there were other things that we may have not introduced here, but we certainly covered the main, the most important, and I believe we emphasized on the most relevance, at least for the legal industry. Grace So what are your initial ideas for what could be our three takeaways?
Grace: [00:26:15] So I’d say one of my first takeaways would be take a look at some of the new updates, particularly when it comes to like the asset library. I feel like that’s one of the ones that will help a team of people, and particularly someone that moves as quickly as legal services have to. Right. So like for me, one of the first ones is asset library. So I would say my first takeaway would be take a look at the asset library, see what experience you have in there, make sure that all your assets are added and that you’re your team is not just aware of it, but that now they have a resource and additional resource to place all of your creative assets, particularly for ads. And as Leila had said before, this is great when you need to refresh something, when you need to kind of switch out things, and even when you’re split AB testing with particular assets, you can swap them right out from inside of your asset library instead of having to go chase it down in some folders somewhere or digital management asset platform that you have to then go look for it and see what’s actually performing best. Now you can use your creative assets for your ads right within your Google ads manager.
Liel: [00:27:26] Yeah, so asset library is already really amazing. It’s an amazing asset that Google has and it just looks like the new version is just the asset library. But on steroids, that’s going to allow you to just not only continue doing creatives in an easy and organized way, but in a much faster way in which with potentially even less resources than you than you may have had to use before. So, you know, Google is really working hard here to make it easier for advertisers to create the creatives that they need to run campaigns. Right. Because ultimately that’s been a big roadblock for some companies. Is that, well, who’s going to take care of it now? I think, Grace, I’m going to I’m going to just kind of play devil’s advocate here with my second takeaway, which is going to be be cautious with too much automation. So something like auto generated responsive search ad assets may seem like a dream come true. You now don’t need to do anything about your Google ads campaign, but what could happen there is that you let basically lose of all of the specifics that you need your campaign to achieve. And that could turn out to be our recipe to I’m not going to necessarily say disaster. It could definitely be disaster if you only do not watch carefully. How do you set up your ad spend budgets and limits? But it can certainly turn out to be just a very bland campaign that is not necessarily generating anything, or at least not the type of leads that you are looking for. So that’s going to be one of those. Now, Grace, what would you add to that or should we move to take away number three?
Grace: [00:29:11] I think you pretty much covered that because I agree with you. You know, you just got to be careful with automation. And we’ve discussed that a few times. So I think we can move on to take away number three. For me, take number three has to do with the reviewing, the new idea of conversion conversion modeling updates that they have. But hand in hand, in my opinion, not so much the technical side of it, but the multi-touch attribution so that you can really look at where people are starting, where they’re going, and how many times and where they touch your ads to see where that conversion really lies so that you can spend more money on the ads that make sense, right? If it’s display or search or somewhere else within that, potentially within that attribution model, where should you spend more money or just right, maybe not spend more money. Maybe you just need to adjust your budget on one side of it. Maybe the brand awareness phase versus another part of the attribution that you’re trying to see where somebody is coming in as a client and then becomes hopefully converted to one and then reconverted right with reengagement and so on and so on. So let me break that back down to just basics. Look at your multi-touch attribution that is now available within Google to find out where your people come in and spend money accordingly.
Liel: [00:30:35] That is actually a very exciting one. Attribution Insights. I think they’re just going to give you such a visual idea of how users are actually seeing and interacting and where the conversions are coming from and the journeys, the different journeys that are taking. And I think so much can be learned from that. And I think this is going to be particularly valuable for those of us who have been running our performance max campaigns. Now, I’m also very excited about things like the search and conversion live tests to help you measure the impact that your YouTube campaigns are having. I think that’s also going to be a very well and transparent way of measuring the impact that your brand building efforts through YouTube are having in the overall traffic that you may be driving to your website, even if it’s organically after the ad have seen after several days that the user actually seen the ads. So I think these are really good new insights that we’re going to have access to as soon as these things roll out. So, Grace, I think this has been a really, really rich, very interesting conversation and kind of like a peek into what potentially is going to be the future. A few things that we already know that are coming. This is a trend that’s not going to stop and that’s going to be that performance. Max is here to stay. Local search campaigns are going to go.
Liel: [00:31:55] They’re just powering up performance, Max, with more features. And I think it’s going to be very interesting to see how these new features improve the quality of these campaigns. And another thing here that we know that is on its way out, it’s a universal analytics being replaced by Google Analytics, for which I think also can be an exciting change. We’ve seen here that Google is going to really report insights in a very nice and user friendly way. So I think there’s a lot of very exciting things happening. And then again, right, it’s going to be what what of the announcement that we’ve just saw this year are going to become more of the norm in the in the in the in the years to come. I think there is a big focus in things that have to do with measuring the impact of foot traffic in stores and in-person sales and such things that are not necessarily that relevant in the legal industry, but certainly that are giving us an indication of how Google wants to kind of like become the metric and the measure for everything. And so I think we have a lot of signals here pointing out that there’s probably going to be also some interesting developments and enhancements done to local service sites, which they are pretty much been static for a while now and they are potentially getting get some enhancements as well. So Grace. Any final thoughts?
Grace: [00:33:22] Yeah, just one last thought. If you haven’t started local service ads or done anything with that, please do. I mean, that is one of the hopefully easier ways to be involved within your particular community that you can focus on your section and your area and, you know, hopefully make an impact if you’re particularly if you’re a smaller firm, right. I mean, it will help you a little bit to at least get people interested within what you can provide to them. If you’re a little bit larger, I would say obviously you should still do it. But it’s most important for the smaller firms that don’t really have a huge presence or they’re just getting started to get involved on the LSAs because it can help you get people interested in and help you with brand awareness at the same time as actual foot traffic.
Liel: [00:34:06] I still believe that Google does have some consideration over over or giving an opportunity to newer businesses to stand a chance to appear, to show up, to have impressions on Google Local Services. Ads. But one thing that you’re not going to be able to get a shortcut on is generating reviews. You’re still going to have to generate reviews to play. And so while you may be able to have impressions, if you’re relatively new with just over a dozen reviews, you’re still going to have to have some to get some visibility. So make sure that you are not underestimating the value that reviews have. And then obviously as you continue establishing yourself and to remain competitive, you’re definitely going to be worth having to work on provenance and on continue increasing those number of reviews so that you can continue being visible because it gets harder. The more established you are, it’s going to get harder for you to show up if you’re not staying up. Relevant for Google. Grace, thank you so much for a great conversation. And we’ll be back next week with another very exciting one. Thanks.
Grace: [00:35:16] Thank you, Liel.
Liel: [00:35:19] And 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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