Highlights of Google's Marketing Livestream 2021

Yesterday I watched the annual Google marketing Livestream 2021, in which Google announced new features & rollouts of existing tools for advertisers. Here are the key takeaways!

Be ready for what's next in APAC.

Scott Beaumont, President of Google APAC, states that he sees Asia-Pacific shaping technology for the world and brought some interesting data:

• The Asia Pacific is leading the world's biggest technology trends, from digital payment and video to commerce.
• 2.5 billion people use the internet here
• It's the number one region for retail e-commerce sales, mobile subscriptions, and the app market.
• It's the source of almost half of the world's gaming revenue
• the place where almost 80% of all digital payments take place
• is the most dynamic place in the world to be a developer or founder

Today, more than 1/3 of all startup unicorns are based in the APAC

The impact of COVID has only increased Asia-Pacific's pace of digital adoption. It definitely creates lots of challenges, but also big opportunities. In Southeast Asia alone, 40M more people came online in 2020.

Every business can help respond to this surging demand, be it through building new digital services, making new services more accessible, or investing in expanding the digital economy for everyone.

The future of Marketing

From today, they are expanding the Performance Max beta (a new Google Ads Campaign type) to thousands of additional advertisers globally and full launch later this year. This campaign type will consolidate all of Google’s ad inventory, including Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail and Maps, giving advertisers expanded reach without managing multiple campaigns. 

Performance Max campaigns are intended to help advertisers: 

• Find more converting customers due to the expanded formats
• Drive performance based on their goals
• Deliver rich insights into the automation used 

Internet's growth

It was mentioned that Broadband triggered the internet's first growth phase by bringing the world online. Next came mobile, which democratized the internet and made it possible for marketers to reach their customers anywhere at any time, and now the pandemic. This public health crisis has had negative consequences worldwide, and we've taken a lot of our behaviors online to copy and adapt. It's the third transformative event to fundamentally shift how people in the physical world interact with the digital world.

Searches with the words "Ideas for beginners" grew by over 100% and searches for "how to invest" have grown by over 70%

The 3 areas marketers should focus on from now to prepare for the future:

1. Privacy
2. Measurement
3. Automation 

Privacy

Privacy was a big topic today. For years in exchange for your personal data that let advertisers show them relevant advertising, people would receive free access to content. However, today 81% of people believe the risks of data collection outweigh the benefits. They are increasingly concerned about how they are being tracked when traveling across the internet. (Click here to see Gener8's pitch, an app that is helping people get paid for their digital data).

That's why earlier this year, Google announced that third-party cookies are phased out, and they will not build alternative identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, and they won't use these identifiers in their platforms - because it's simply can't be trusted on the long term.

Google revealed changes to how conversions will be tracked and a strategy to model consent-mode data to assist close monitoring gaps. Google Tag Manager will now have consent capabilities, according to the company. Businesses that use a consent solution can use GTM to integrate it. It also works in conjunction with Consent Mode, allowing you to manage tag behavior on a per-tag basis.

Transitioning to a world without cookies requires three things from our industry:

1. Properly use consented, first-party data
2. Be forward-looking and predictive - Automation and machine learning make forward-looking, predictive marketing possible by helping you identify key patterns and trends. With the right type of automation, effective, privacy-safe ad selection and measurement are possible.
3. Commit to new technologies that preserve privacy.

Future of measurement

To make every marketing dollar count, you need to understand consumer behavior. The key there steps for this are:

1. Build your measurement strategy on first-party data
2. Enable users to make choices about their data
3. Keep reporting actionable, and fill the gaps with model data

Conversion measurement it's a new way to measure results when cookies are not available. This allows your tags to use consented, hashed first-party data such as email addresses from wherever your conversions are tracked. 

Customer Match in Google Ads has also become more accessible, with practically all marketers now able to use it. Advertisers can use Customer Match to find new customers.

Google Analytics will introduce additional features later this year, including modelled behavioural reporting, which can provide insights even if cookies aren't available. In addition, a new advertising snapshot will provide quick access to data such as cross-channel performance, attribution model comparisons, and campaign recommendations.

Overall, this segment stressed the significance of respecting users' privacy preferences and using modeling technologies to fill in the gaps created by the absence of cookies.

Automation

Darshan Kantak, Vice President of Product Management for Search Ads and Google Ads Experiences, highlighted how your marketing know-how combined with automation delivers performance and maximizes your opportunities.

Automation drives results. You can follow a simple formula for growth that begins with a deep understanding of value.

Responsive search ads uses machine learning to help deliver relevant, valuable ads;

Broad match helps you find high performing queries and emerging trends;

Smart Bidding optimizes bids in real-time to hit your performance goals even as query volume and conversion value change.

Advertisers that adopt responsible search ads in campaigns that also uses broad match and smart bidding see an average of 20% more conversions at a similar cost per action

You can also use automation to deliver a better experience to your customer, driving better engagement by showing the right ad, at the right time, to the right person. Kantak recommends creating at least one excellent responsive search ad and enable four ad extensions- That's what it takes to the machine the flexibility it needs on the promise of automation.

It was announced that image extensions for your ads are out of beta and are now available worldwide. This exciting announcement means that all advertisers can now add engaging visuals to their search ads.

Another announcement concerned Google Ads' Insights page. This page currently contains data on shifting query trends that are relevant to your company. Google will soon add demand projections to this page, predicting changes in search behavior over the following 90 days.

It was also presented great insights about the future of Commerce (Including b2b, retail, Finance, auto and travel), but that's a topic for the next article.

I hope this content is helpful and insightful to your business!