The Google Marketing Live 2023 event heavily emphasized AI, showcasing how AI-powered tools can enhance business outcomes, customer connections, and targeted messaging. Google structured its presentation around three key themes: customer connection, creative, and confidence, illustrating how its latest AI-driven tools and features can benefit businesses in each area.

It seems as though we were present… Curious about the latest developments in Google marketing for your business? Let’s delve into the notable updates and announcements from Google Marketing Live 2023:

1. Generative AI/SGE
2. Video view campaigns
3. Demand Gen campaigns
4. Broad match brand control
5. Performance Max high-value new customer acquisition
6. Conversational experience in Google Ads
7. Automatically created Performance Max assets using generative AI
8. Product Studio
9. Google Merchant Center Next
10. GA4 audience builder
11. Performance Max improved search term insights

Key Highlights from Google Marketing Live 2023

The resounding message from Google Marketing Live is clear: AI is an integral part of the future of marketing. But how exactly is Google leveraging AI to empower its tools, products, and overall user experience? Each presentation emphasized the three central themes previously mentioned. Let’s break them down:

• Customer connection: Enabling a more tailored and personalized experience for potential customers across Google’s suite of products.
• Creative: Harnessing the power of AI to develop high-impact creative assets for your Google Ads strategies.
• Confidence: Gaining a deeper understanding of your campaign performance while prioritizing user privacy in advertising. In line with these themes, we’ve categorized the Google Marketing Live updates accordingly.

Here are the essential Google Marketing Live 2023 updates:

Enhancing Customer Connection

These updates focus on helping businesses foster deeper, more personalized connections with their customers.

1. Unveiling the Search Generative Experience

Google Marketing Live 2023 commenced with the announcement of an AI-driven search experience called Google Search Generative Experience (SGE). While this was explored in greater detail at Google I/O, the event provided an overview and demonstration of SGE, including ad placements within the new search experience and future capabilities. This experimental search results approach utilizes machine learning to deliver more personalized results based on the user’s search history and contextual cues. For instance, in the example below, Google SGE presumes that the user’s query, “is it easy for them to learn surfing,” likely implies they are seeking surfing lessons for their children based on previous questions and searches within SGE.

Google SGE also encourages users to ask follow-up questions, transforming the search experience into a more conversational interaction.

SGE could be advantageous for businesses as users are likely to conduct multiple searches through follow-up questions, potentially leading them to a business’s website or ad for highly specific (and lower-funnel) queries. However, there might also be some disadvantages, as we previously discussed.

2. Video View Campaigns

Video view campaigns are designed to optimize YouTube results on a cost-per-view basis. These campaigns combine various ad formats, including in-stream skippable ads, in-feed ads, and YouTube Shorts. This new campaign type is expected to help advertisers better connect with their audiences by simplifying the creation of a single video ad suitable for various YouTube placements.

Google revealed that early testing of this campaign format yielded a 40% increase in views compared to single-format video ads. The beta version of Video view campaigns will be available starting next month.

3. Demand Gen Campaigns

Demand Gen campaigns were introduced as a novel campaign type for social marketers to engage with customers on visually-driven platforms like YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. Powered by AI, this campaign type aims to “engage and motivate consumers through immersive visual experiences.”

Demand Gen campaigns enable the creation of AI-powered lookalike audiences, customized audience segmentation, conversion tracking, and brand lift insights.

It’s crucial to have a robust reporting foundation in place when using AI-powered campaign types that leverage conversion tracking data. Google advises assigning conversion values, setting up enhanced conversions, and migrating to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to maximize the benefits of Demand Gen and Video view campaigns.

4. Broad Match Brand Controls

With Performance Max campaigns often defaulting to broad match keywords for search, many advertisers found themselves competing against other brands due to the less restrictive matching behavior. Broad match brand controls allow advertisers to limit their campaigns to only display for branded searches that align with their specified brands.

This update allows for expanded reach with broad match while ensuring it captures all relevant brand traffic. This feature is currently in beta testing.

5. Performance Max High-Value New Customer Acquisition Goal

Google has introduced a new “customer acquisition” goal for Performance Max campaigns. This update centers around attracting new customers with high lifetime value or those who haven’t engaged with the brand recently. AI empowers Google to prioritize bids for customers within these segments, ensuring that advertisers only pay more when they reach customers predicted to be of higher value to their business. This feature is particularly impactful for advertisers who believe that certain customers acquired through this campaign type are of higher quality than others, given Performance Max’s capabilities across both the upper and lower funnel stages.

Currently available in beta, advertisers can access this new feature by contacting their Google team.

Elevating Creative through AI

Let’s explore the Google Marketing Live announcements that will shape advertisers’ creative processes.

6. Conversational Experience in Google Ads

Scheduled for a July rollout, this update will enable advertisers to leverage Google’s guidance throughout the campaign setup process. By providing their landing page URL and responding to prompts, Google will generate assets based on the input, including headlines, descriptions, keywords,, and more. Google emphasized that providing more information will lead to more refined ads.

For example, Google will offer conversational prompts for ad improvement. Advertisers will retain complete control over which suggestions to keep or edit.

This feature could significantly benefit businesses new to Google Ads, simplifying the platform’s complexities. It could also save time for experienced advertisers or agencies aiming for rapid account scaling.

7. AI-Powered Performance Max Asset Creation

This update is another time-saving feature driven by AI. Advertisers can now provide prompts to Google for the automatic creation of custom image, video, and text assets for their Performance Max campaigns. Moreover, Google will now utilize AI to generate ad headlines and assets that better align with the specific query without compromising the offer. Instead of pre-creating ad assets like images and structured snippets, Google’s AI will dynamically generate and incorporate assets into text ads in real time to enhance relevance to each search query.

Are you taking advantage of all that Google Ads has to offer? Find opportunities to optimize your account with the Free Google Ads Performance Grader.

8. Product Studio

Google Marketing Live 2023 introduced Product Studio as a promising new tool for ecommerce and retail businesses. It has been demonstrated that Google shopping ads featuring products with multiple images achieve 76% more impressions and experience a 32% increase in clicks compared to those with a single image. Recognizing the challenge of creating high-quality product images for many businesses, Product Studio steps in to assist advertisers by simplifying the management, creation, and uploading of product content directly from the Shopping Feed. Product Studio will empower ecommerce businesses to edit and enhance images using AI, enabling background removal, image enlargement, and scene generation (describing the desired image appearance).

Google will then present four options based on the description for selection. The chosen image can be added to Merchant Center or an online store, and it will be automatically saved across all Google properties.

Building Confidence in a Privacy-First World

Maintaining user privacy while gaining insights into campaign performance is an ongoing challenge for advertisers, but it’s crucial to address. Google revealed that 49% of individuals would switch brands for an enhanced privacy experience. To address concerns about the measurability of privacy-centric advertising, Google introduced features to support first-party tracking and reporting. The final set of Google Marketing Live 2023 updates focuses on leveraging first-party data and obtaining deeper campaign insights in a privacy-conscious advertising landscape.

9. Google Merchant Center Next

Set to replace Merchant Center in 2024, Google Merchant Center Next promises a streamlined experience, enabling retailers to effortlessly connect product information from their websites and control product display on Google without manually updating feeds. Retailers will gain access to insights on top-performing products, pricing benchmarks, competitive intelligence, and more.

Currently accessible to a select group of retailers, Merchant Center Next will soon be widely available.

10. Google Analytics 4 Audience Builder

The Google Analytics 4 (GA4) audience builder empowers advertisers to create new audiences directly within their Google Ads account using Google Analytics data. This includes predictive audiences, which Google claims utilize AI to reach users more likely to convert. The GA4 audience builder seamlessly integrates audiences with Google Ads accounts, potentially unlocking more audience targeting options across Google Ad campaigns. While this feature will be available soon, it’s exclusively accessible through GA4 (a reminder that the migration deadline is July 1st).

11. Enhanced Performance Max Search Term Insights

Responding to advertiser demands for greater transparency into Performance Max’s performance drivers, Google introduces the improved search term insights report. This report provides visibility into how Performance Max adapts to changes, allowing for further campaign refinement. Advertisers will also gain insights into performance drivers and the effectiveness of specific creative assets.

This feature will be rolled out soon.

Implications of Google Marketing Live Updates for Your Business

The common thread running through all these updates is Google’s AI technology. If you haven’t incorporated AI into your marketing strategy, now is the time. As Vidhya Srinivasan, VP and GM for Google Ads, aptly stated, “You’re not competing with AI, you’re competing with other marketers using AI.” Google emphasizes the significance of a solid foundational setup across its platforms, utilizing AI-powered campaign tools and features, and maintaining an experimental mindset. To help businesses adapt to these updates, Google provided an AI essentials checklist:

In conclusion, here are the key takeaways from Google Marketing Live 2023:

1. Generative AI/SGE
2. Video view campaigns
3. Demand Gen campaigns
4. Broad match brand controls
5. Performance Max high-value new customer acquisition goal
6. Conversational experience in Google Ads
7. Automatically created Performance Max assets using generative AI
8. Product Studio
9. Google Merchant Center Next
10. GA4 audience builder
11. Performance Max improved search term insights For further insights into the potential impact of AI on PPC, you can find more information here.