DEEPDIVE

As usual, we saw quite a lot of activity from Google across their 2 annual events in I/O and Marketing Live. Whilst I/O is centered on broader Google and less advertising, it still has an impact on how Marketing operates.

There is plenty of interesting parts to dive into, but as expected, AI dominated the theme of everything presented, from both a Generative & ML perspective. Here are my key callouts and thoughts:

·       AI Overviews will continue to evolve, specifically from an advertising perspective with paid ads now being rolled out into it. For advertisers & publishers, the potential implications of this to standard SEO and organic traffic remains a key area. Currently this is a flagged bug to spot referral traffic in this manner for SEO, but is being fixed.

·       AI Mode only available in the US to start with also seeks to redefine how users do absolutely everything. You can almost thing of it as its own platform, with ads also on the cards. Again this spells trouble for SEO but ranking will still matter. However similar to AI Overviews, ads are only eligible on certain types of Google Ads campaigns i.e. PMAX / Shopping / Broad Match Search and the new AI Max for Search.

·       I/O saw 1 mention of 3rd party cookies & the Privacy Sandbox, through a in-depth guide to dealing with identity / payment systems that depend on this legacy identifier. Showing that it is still important to migrate / think about the Sandbox despite the negativity of it and 3rd party cookies staying on Chrome.

·       Video ads themes continue to be pushed, whether it is on YouTube or CTV or even traditional video built via Gen AI. For Google, they know Video hooks so why not roll it out to more placements, especially when they can also charge a bit more for it.

·       Asset Studio in Google Ads looks to be a 1 stop shop for curating creatives in different formats / sizes with the use of AI. Does this spell danger for certain creative solutions and AI based imagery tools? Absolutely but as we have seen with other Google attempts in the Creative Ads space (Ads Creative Studio etc), it doesn’t always go to plan and is unlikely you’ll see social advertisers logging into Google Ads just to curate an image for Meta.

·       Lots of focus on infrastructure, specifically the single Data Manager API approach to standardise how data is baked into Google Ads. With Google Ads being the key word here, GMP is still to come. But it is a smart move to consolidate, similar to what Meta have done with their Conversion API to support web / app / offline as one API.

·       We also saw GA4 showcase some channel forecasting features and looking to introduce more omnichannel measurement. Which is good to see but maybe too little too late, where a primarily click based attribution view is still inadequate.

·       Commerce Media is slowly a focus point for Google as they try to compete with the big ecommerce platforms but also the likes of Pacvue / Skai. Though for now, the main proprietary output is the use of certain commerce audiences on YouTube activity. Will certain retailers be happy about giving their 1st party data away at scale for “free”? Probably not. The true potential of commerce on Google will come down to BigQuery Clean Rooms vs any ad solution, as Amazon are also attempting to do with AWS.

·       Finally we have plenty of Agentic AI automation, from spotting errors with tag implementation to providing insights in how to optimise campaigns. This is something that will continue to evolve and is now time to embrace it, but factor in that it will not have a view of any data point that it cannot see, which may be challenging for things like measurement using 3rd party tools.