Google introduces new AI based advertising and marketing tools

The company announced new ad formats with the Search Generative Experience among other new ad products at the Google Marketing Live 2023.

In its annual Google Marketing Live event, the company introduced a host of new marketing tools for advertisers. "New generative AI advancements will bring AI front and center, making it the best tool in advertisers and merchants’ marketing toolkit — helping them make decisions, solve problems, and enhance their creativity," the company said in a release.

At the Google I/O conference, the company introduced a new feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE). The SGE is a generative AI bot that will give out AI generated responses to queries put in into Google's search engine.

At the Marketing live event, the company introduced two new ad formats experiments under SG. These ad format experiments are currently available in Google's Search Labs only. Shopping ads will be directly integrated within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode. Further, new formats native to SGE that use generative AI to create ads that can be customised as a user engages with the search engine. Further, ads in the SGE will display “Sponsored” ad label, just as they do in search results today.

The company will also be introducing Google Product Studio. With this product, brands can use generative AI's abilities to help them tailored product imagery. Further, Scene Generation will also introduce text-to-image AI model to help merchants create new lifestyle product imagery from basic product photos. It is set to allow merchants to prompt the tool with a brief description of their desired scene to generate lifestyle scenes without the added cost and time of photoshoots, the company says.

With Product Studio, brands can create new imagery based on changing marketing needs — whether seasonal, campaign-based or simply experimental — without the added cost of new photoshoots. Companies can remove background imagery and and increase resolution for the image with this tool as well. These features will be available in the US right from Merchant Center Next or the Google & YouTube Channel App on Shopify.

AI is foundational to Google Ads, the company says. "We’ve heard from businesses that it can sometimes feel overwhelming to get up and running with a new campaign. Today, we're introducing a new, natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads, designed to jumpstart campaign creation and simplify Search ads by combining your expertise with Google AI."

The company also introduced a new product called Merchant Center Next. With this, they aim to simplifying how to set up a product feed. In the past, merchants setting themselves up on Google for the first time had to manually add their products, prices, images, descriptions and other details. With this, Google will automatically populate a merchant’s product feed with the information they can detect from their website (merchants can always edit what gets pulled in, or turn this off) — making it easier to quickly show their products across Google.

Merchant Center Next will show all products in one comprehensive view. This can aide in managing online and in-store product inventory together. The center will also show new insights about the potential benefits of fixing errors in product data, so it’s easier to prioritise updates. Global testing will begin later this year. Google will start upgrading smaller businesses over the coming months, with plans to complete the global rollout in 2024. Merchants will be notified when the new experience is ready for them.

"We’re also making it easier for merchants to access and understand their performance by bringing all insights reports into the Performance tab. Now merchants will have one place to review their best-selling products, what businesses show up next to theirs, and even how shoppers are engaging with their local business on Search and Maps."

A brand needs to add a preferred landing page from their website and Google AI will summarise the page. Then, it will generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images and other assets for their campaign. One can review and edit these suggestions before deploying the campaign. "Now, you can chat your way into better performance — ask Google AI for ideas, just like you might ask a colleague," the company asserts.