The first bit of work travel in over two years, Nile Rodgers and Chic, Fatboy Slim getting the “Googlers” going wild, my first uninterrupted night’s sleep since my son was born (of course I still woke up at circa 6am!) and some updates from Google about automation and first party data. That pretty much sums up my experience from Google Marketing Live 2022 but I’m sure you’re here to find out a bit more of the details so here goes…

Google has coined us as “Omnibuyers” – we no longer just know what we want and go out and buy it. Instead we search for ideas, we read reviews, we watch unboxing videos on YouTube and listen to “influencers” who tell us the pros and cons of anything and everything before we eventually make that sweet, sweet purchase that means everyone gets paid and the world keeps on spinning.

So with that in mind Google are releasing, or have already released, a number of products to aid us in our advertising endeavours to help make our brands stand out amongst the rest in what many people are calling the “messy middle”.

Starting with YouTube because it is 2022 and video is life. We’ve got three key features on their way.

Video Action campaigns with product feeds

Ok, this one is actually already with us and it’s pretty cool especially for e-comm. If you’ve ever seen an ad on YouTube and thought I’d really like to buy that product or something similar, well now you can. Advertisers can link their product feeds to Video Action campaigns and display a subset of products that relate to their YouTube ad – allowing you and me to simply select the product we want and be well on our way to buying it.

YouTube Frequency Campaigns

This is a nice feature on its way, historically we’ve only ever been able to average a set number of views to users. However with this new campaign type we’ll be able to define a set number of views per user per week. A good move from Google and this will help advertisers maintain control and not become spammy.

YouTube Shorts

Google’s answers to TikTok have begun the ad roll out and Google boasts some impressive figures with 15 billion daily views on shorts. The aforementioned Video Action campaigns with product feeds will be making their way to shorts in the coming months making for an immersive shoppable experience.

Onto updates within the more traditional search sphere then – and there were quite a few things to keep an eye on.

Testing

With the impending cookieless world on its way, testing is going to be one of the key tools available to us to work out what’s working and what’s not. Within Google Ads we’ll soon be able to run Geo experiments and Search/Conversion uplift tests directly from the UI.

Shopping

We’ve got some new ad features on their way with immersive shopping ads coming. This sounded a lot like a rehashed form of showcase ads to me but let’s see.

More excitingly though, and this is Google going toe-to-toe with Amazon, we’ll soon be able to add products directly to a merchants basket from Google and click directly through to their checkout page removing the need to actually visit their website.

Ads

RSAs, the new default and soon to be the only text ad type you can create, will start pulling headline assets from their landing pages and other ad groups in your account. Think of this as DSAs meet RSAs. Inevitable really.

Another new feature to ads will be Google Business Messages which will let potential customers message directly with a business from the SERP.

To finish up there were a couple of updates around tagging & tracking which are worth a mention.

Google Tag

There’s a new google tag coming that will replace the global site tag for all Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts which should simplify tagging across the board.

Attribution

DDA (Data-Driven Attribution) will become the default attribution model in Google Ads for all new conversion actions and will be eligible for use with no prior data. This is a good step forward and brings us one step closer to laying last click attribution to rest. DDA is also going to be widely available in GA4.

To wrap up there were two more bits worth mentioning.

Multisearch (which just sounds cool) will allow people to search with both images and text at the same time. For example you could snap a photo of a dress you like and ask to see results for that same dress in green.

And Scene Exploration will let you scan the outside world with your camera and see real time information about what you can see. Think about scanning a shelf of products and asking google to only show you ones with a 4+ star rating.