Google’s AI Evolution: How You Can Use It to Your Advantage
Google’s AI Evolution: How You Can Use It to Your Advantage
Danny Shepherd, Co-CEO • Intero Digital • July 20, 2023
In the ever-evolving world of advertising, change is the only constant. Just as the industry adapted to the mobile revolution, a new wave of transformation has arrived, fueled by the remarkable power of AI. With its potential to revolutionize marketing strategies, AI is set to redefine the way businesses connect with their audiences.
Serving as a platform for this innovation, Google Marketing Live has been instrumental in shaping the trajectory of AI in the industry. It is here that technological advancements are unveiled, paving the way for a future where AI takes center stage in marketing strategies. With each passing year, Google Marketing Live showcases the immense power of AI, demonstrating how it can revolutionize the way businesses connect with their audiences.
How Google Is Using Generative AI for Marketing
AI and technology are evolving at an astonishing pace, and Google is a major player in this space. During Google Marketing Live, the company unveiled a plethora of new features and advancements that showcase its commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI. These innovations promise to revolutionize the advertising landscape and empower businesses to reach new heights of success.
One of the standout features introduced is the natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads. This cutting-edge functionality simplifies campaign creation by combining human expertise with the power of Google AI. Advertisers can now effortlessly generate keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and other assets by providing a preferred landing page. Google AI summarizes the page and generates relevant and effective suggestions, allowing advertisers to review and edit them before deploying their campaigns. This seamless integration of AI into the campaign-creation process ensures improved performance, enhanced ad relevance, and a more streamlined experience for businesses.
Another significant advancement is the integration of generative AI into Performance Max, an AI-powered campaign solution. This new capability allows businesses to create custom assets and scale their campaigns. By providing their website, Google AI learns about the brand and populates the campaign with text and relevant assets. Additionally, Google AI suggests new, unique images tailored specifically to the brand, ensuring businesses stand out across a wide range of inventory and formats. With Performance Max and generative AI, businesses can achieve remarkable growth, increase conversions, and effectively engage their target audience.
Google also announced new generative AI capabilities in Search, making it smarter and simpler than ever before. Ads integrated within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode deliver highly relevant and customized ad experiences. Users searching for specific information will encounter ads that align seamlessly with their queries, providing them with tailored solutions and recommendations. By leveraging generative AI, businesses can ensure that their ads are not only relevant but also deeply personalized, thereby maximizing the impact of their advertising efforts.
The pace of AI evolution and Google’s commitment to innovation were abundantly clear at Google Marketing Live, but the numerous new advancements also mean change is coming for marketers, whether they’re ready for it or not. As AI continues to evolve and Google leads the charge, businesses must stay informed and embrace these advancements to stay ahead of the competition, unlock new opportunities, and fully harness the potential of AI in their advertising strategies.
Lean Into the Evolution
With Google evolving more and more each day into an AI space, how can you stay ahead of the curve and ensure your strategies are effective against your competitors? After all, AI is here to stay, and it won’t take inactivity or dismissal for an answer.
Fortunately, marketing agencies that take cues from the mega-powerful search engine and join the AI game now stand to reap dividends of benefits that can set them well on the path toward business success. Simply put, agencies that adopt AI will fare well. The following are just three features from Google that you can adopt to ensure long-term success and remain digitally relevant.
1. Leverage Enhanced Conversions.
When it comes to Google Ads, Enhanced Conversions is a feature that leverages machine learning and advanced modeling techniques to help you track and optimize your conversions more accurately. It offers several benefits, including cross-device tracking, conversion modeling, time lag adjustments, and conversion value prediction. Cross-device tracking allows you to understand your customers’ journeys across multiple devices, providing a comprehensive view of conversions and increased personalization opportunities.
Enhanced Conversion modeling also uses machine learning algorithms to predict the probability of a conversion occurring, even when direct tracking is challenging. With time lag adjustments, you can easily view the delay between ad interactions and conversions, thereby gaining a more accurate understanding of ad contribution over time.
Conversion tracking plays a crucial role in AI-powered advertising, as it facilitates data-driven decision-making and enables real-time optimization. These capabilities can help you allocate funds appropriately and adapt to evolving digital landscapes. Ultimately, if you’re looking to stay ahead of your competitors and make the most of all AI has to offer, leverageEnhanced Conversions.
2. Adopt robust tagging practices.
In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), robust tagging involves implementing comprehensive and accurate tagging to track events and user interactions on your website or app. Robust tagging also ensures that you collect reliable data necessary for understanding user behavior and making data-driven decisions.
Key aspects of robust tagging include event tracking, where you track specific user interactions like button clicks or video plays. Enhanced measurement capabilities in GA4 automatically track common events, but robust tagging allows for customization. Custom parameters capture additional information about events, such as product IDs or transaction amounts, providing deeper insights and more room for data-driven decisions.
Implementing a tag management system (TMS), like Google Tag Manager, streamlines this tagging process as it simulates a centralized platform for managing and deploying tags. However, thorough testing and validation are crucial to ensure accurate tracking and data collection.
By implementing robust tagging in GA4, you can gather comprehensive and accurate data about user interactions, events, and conversions. This empowers you to understand user behavior, optimize marketing efforts, and make informed decisions for better performance and user engagement.
3. Attribution modeling is king.
With the increase in complexity and granularity offered by AI, the need for robust marketing attribution models becomes even more critical. Here’s why:
- Understanding AI Decisions: AI and machine learning algorithms make decisions based on the data they’re given. Attribution models provide this data, outlining which marketing activities lead to conversions. A robust attribution model can help marketers understand why the AI made certain decisions and how to improve future campaigns.
- Multi-Touch Attribution: Google Ads AI often interacts with customers at multiple points along their journey. Without proper attribution, it would be difficult to understand the role each touchpoint played in the final conversion. This understanding can inform strategy and budget allocation across different channels and campaign elements.
- Cross-Channel and Cross-Campaign Insights: AI-driven campaigns can span multiple channels and campaign types. Proper attribution allows marketers to understand how these different elements work together, providing valuable insights for future campaign strategy.
- Optimizing AI Performance: AI and machine learning algorithms learn and improve over time. By feeding the AI accurate and comprehensive attribution data, marketers can help the AI learn more effectively, improving the performance of future campaigns.
As Google Ads and other platforms continue to integrate more AI and machine learning capabilities, the importance of marketing attribution in understanding, validating, and optimizing these tools will continue to grow.
AI is the Future. Embrace It With Intero Digital
Embracing these core principles of AI for content marketing can help position your business as a forward-thinking expert in your field. However, you don’t have to do it alone — in fact, you probably shouldn’t. Working with a team who understands the benefits, challenges, drawbacks, and opportunities associated with AI is one of the most important things you can do to excel in the age of AI.
Fortunately, Intero Digital is here to help. Our team has first-hand experience with AI solutions and can guide you through questions or concerns as you take the first step toward future-proofing your business. Together, we can make sure you evolve with AI and ensure your success today as well as in the future.