Just Media attended Google Marketing Live 2019 at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco May 13th – May 15^th.  At #GoogleMarketingLive, or as the live stream announcers boasted: the “Super Bowl of Ads,” a number of new ad products and formats were announced including Discovery Ads, Gallery Ads, and the Bumper Machine. 

We’ll recap the main announcements below, but be sure to check out some of the main stage keynotes and seminars on-demand here: Google Marketing Live on-demand.

During the Ads Innovation Keynote, Google announced a half dozen new ad types and several promises around measurement and attribution.  New and exciting features are coming for the retail sector, including Showcase Shopping Ads and deep-linking into apps.  Just Media’s client partners in B2B & B2C should be looking forward to the following new features:

Discovery Ads

Discovery Ads roll out later in 2019 and will be native ads served across the YouTube home feed, the Gmail promotions tab, and the Google Discover feed.  The goal of these ads is to provide reach by targeting users when they are most open to learning about something new. 

Just Media expects its effectiveness with the elusive technology buyer to be delegated by the audience targeting options Google makes available for these Discovery Ads.  According to Google’s VP of Product Management Brad Bender, Discovery Ads are “visually rich, mobile first and use the ‘power of intent.’”  We might then assume that “power of intent” will be similar to Google’s existing In-market audiences segment.

Gallery Ads

Gallery Ads are essentially an image carousel in search results.  Featuring 4-8 images, a 70 character tagline, and up to 3 headlines “to test different calls to action,” campaigns that have Gallery Ads in them have “25% more interactions” in a mobile search environment.

Bumper Machine

6 Second Bumper Ads aren’t new to YouTube.  Bumper Machine is new.  Bumper Machine allows users to input longer form video content, and then have 6 second Bumper Ads automatically generated.   Created in an effort to address pain point of having strained creative resources, Bumper Machine is set to ease entry into the video marketing game by allowing resource constrained advertisers the ability to rapidly create short form videos, and more easily test video elements that are generating successful campaigns.

Custom Audiences

Custom Affinity is merging with Custom Intent to create: Custom Audiences.  Custom Audiences will be available across Google Ads: Display, Gmail, YouTube, Discovery Ads, etc.  In a silent homage to Facebook, Google also announced a new audience expansion tool.

Smart Bidding Updates

A few major updates were announced to Google’s smart bidding toolbox:

1. Campaign-level conversion goals.  You will now be able to optimize bids within a campaign towards a single goal.  This means if you have Engagement conversions as well as Form Fill conversions in an account, you can delegate which conversion action a campaign should optimize towards.  This will be huge for advertisers with a diverse set of KPIs.
2. Conversion Value Optimization. Define rules that adjust conversion value.  Optimize towards conversion value,
3. Seasonality adjustments. Predefine seasonality bid adjustments.
4. Conversion action sets.  With conversion action sets, you can create a set of conversion actions that you can use in campaign settings to select which conversions to optimize for and count in the “Conversions” column at the campaign level.

While many of these features will not be available until later this year, Just Media is given beta access to many of these products.  Ask us, and we can help upgrade your campaigns to utilize these new features and stay ahead of the competition.

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