Google Marketing Live 2022: 5 Key Takeaways

This week, digital marketers made the pilgrimage to San Francisco for Google Marketing Live —the first time the event’s taken place in the flesh since 2019.

As usual, the event included new product announcements, innovative insights, industry news and top-of-the-line keynotes.

While much was announced at the event, I wanted to highlight 5 takeaways that I think are relevant to B2B SaaS marketers.

1. Automatically Created Assets For Responsive Search Ads

Automatically created assets for RSAs were announced—sure to be a hotly debated topic amongst search marketers.

“If you opt in, Google Ads will automatically create assets for you based on content from your landing pages and existing ads. The system will then display the best-performing combination of automatically created assets, and the assets you provide, to make your ads more relevant.”?

In other words, Google will start writing ad copy on your behalf.

2. Responsive Display Ads?(RDAs) Keep Improving

The multi-format, automated answer to static display banners continues to evolve, with the updates including:

• Mobile-first layouts — portrait images are now able to be used (not just landscape or square)?
• Auto-generated vertical video — video will be created using existing static images, for advertisers who may not have video assets handy
• More control tools for brand safety

For all performance-oriented display, advertisers should look to have 100% RDA coverage. RDAs save time for creative teams and they perform better than standard banners. The only reason to run static banners at this point would be if brands required pixel-perfect control of visual brand standards.

3. Conversion Lift Tests?Rolling Out

This new feature will allow advertisers and marketers the ability to run in-platform holdout or incrementality tests. These are possible to do manually today but are cumbersome and the resulting data can be quite noisy.

One example shown was a geo-experiments functionality that will allow advertisers to show the incremental conversion lift of running ads by running ads in some regions and not others, then measuring the difference in total conversions. You can learn more about manually running holdout tests here.

4. Video Templates For YouTube Ads

Have you been wanting to try YouTube Ads but the cost and hassle of video production is a blocker?

Good news! Google announced the ability to create video ads in minutes using YouTube-optimized templates. We've been testing this feature at Outshine and output of the templates has been surprisingly good.

5. Broad Match Keeps Improving

This isn’t new news, as Google has been saying it for a while, but they continued to reinforce how broad match has improved significantly in the past few years.?

We have seen this transformation firsthand, with broad match keywords delivering strong performance while expanding reach.?

Many marketers who claim to be data-driven continue to hold on to the view that broad match is not effective. But, like any technological evolution, this machine, too, has improved—becoming more sophisticated—with time.

Coupling broad match with Smart Bidding and Responsive Search Ads is the new best practice in search:

• Smart bidding helps guide broad match to converting terms
• RSAs can flex to be relevant to the broad match queries
• Broad match covers changing consumer behaviour in how they search for things

For a full recap of all the announcements from #GML2022, check out the official Google post.