Google’s yearly Google Marketing Live is when the search engine juggernaut announces what digital advertisers have to look forward to in the year to come. This two-hour hybrid event that took place last week had some exciting updates. Here’s Reunion Marketing’s take on what to be looking forward to in the year ahead!
Performance Max Campaigns
Reunion has been utilizing the intelligence and automation capabilities of Performance Max campaigns for quite some time now and have been impressed. Google largely preached about the success of these ads that lets you advertise across all of Google’s properties with a single campaign and told several anecdotal stories of businesses having success with these automation driven campaigns. A few updates to P Max campaigns were:
- Burst Campaigns & in-store goals will soon be available in Performance Max.
- In-store goals allow you to optimize for store traffic, in-store sales, and other local actions.
- Burst Campaigns will work in tandem with your in-store goals to help you run short-term campaigns during seasonal spikes
- Experiment tools allows you to measure incremental improvements in performance. Will launch throughout the year.
- The OptiScore will be a tool on the Recommendations page and provide suggestions for further improving Performance max campaigns based on history, campaign settings, and Google search volume and trends.
Privacy & Google Analytics 4
Most know that Safari and Firefox no longer use cookies to track website behavior. Google’s Chrome will sunset cookies in 2023 and for now, they are making further preparations that uphold users privacy, but still allow marketers to operate off of insights and data. The notion of Topic APIs to be able to build buyer persona information and target accordingly was a notable announcement as well as Enhanced Conversions which would continue the practice of conversion tracking, just without cookies firing in the background.
The Google Analytics 4 update is an incredibly important pivot toward the cookieless future. GA4 will focus much more on predictive analytics and insights so marketers can better understand potential.
For automotive dealerships, Google Analytics should be viewed as a guidepost of accountability – a place where all their various vendors’ data is tracked and held accountable for success. While goal tracking and other analytics might be changing, this destination will continue to be as important as ever in giving accurate accounts of onsite actions and helping marketers better adapt strategies.
Shopping Experience
The Google shopping experience has boomed in the past few years. Google has curated the inventory from online stores that sell the product that matches the search of the user in one convenient location. Here are a few of the notable mentions as it pertains to the Google shopping experience.
- CTA to “Checkout” being added on Merchant – enables a shopper to add an item straight to their shopping cart and complete the purchase
- “Immersive shopping experience” will enable multiple images, mix organic results and ads in the shopping feed, and dynamically show more product details in the shopping center. Not super clear, but this might just be an Apparel industry improvement
- Augmented reality (AR) to show 3D models of products!
- Product feeds on YouTube Shorts and Search – enablement to shop actual inventory after a video ad that features said inventory is shown
Things To Look Out For In The Automotive Industry
There were many, many more announcements and improvements mentioned during last week’s Google Marketing Live event. These are a few more of the items mentioned that Reunion Marketing will continue to keep a close monitor one.
- Expanded capabilities of Image Extensions
- Enhanced Conversions for Lead Generation – lead gen marketers can measure offline conversions without a full CRM integration. Marketers an upload the GCLID when they import their offline conversions
- Google Tag – the global site tag is turning into Google Tag, existing gtag installations will get new capabilities like codeless features, cross-product interoperability, and a more seamless setup
- Google Business Messages will allow consumers to message with businesses directly via Search Ads.
- Google’s affinity, in-market, and demographic audiences, will soon be available for connected TV campaigns
Have questions about any of these innovations? Reach out to us at salesteam@reunionmarketing.com.