My two cents on Google Marketing Live 2021

Google Marketing Live (GML) is a yearly event were Google announces its biggest updates and sheds light about updates to come. PPC specialist are always very excited about this event because during this event many new features are announced for the first time and many known features will come out of beta. This year was no other. Google announced a great deal of new features like new shopping annotations and attributes as well as new e-commerce and loyalty program integrations. Also, to no one's surprise many features came out of like image extensions or target ROAS for Discovery and video action campaigns.

GML 2021: first online GML

Last year the event was sadly canceled due to Covid19. This year the GML was held online for the first time. This has it's pros and cons. Normally if you are able to secure a ticket and fly, drive or crawl to San Francisco you have the unique opportunity to meet the engineers that work on all the great new features that Google Ads, Google Analytics and the Google Marketing Platform have to offer. For the non-PPC nerds the event is also superb for its food and music. I was able to secure a ticket in 2019 and spoke to many different engineers, like the team working on the (then) newly created Responsive Search Ads and the team working on the Performance Planner. On the pro side this GML reaches far more people than the "normal" offline event. You could watch the previous GML events online but only pieces of it and without the same online focus it has now. Having the ability to watch the presentations online makes it easy to re-watch and pause the videos were and whenever you wish.

Privacy

The big theme this year was privacy. Of course this has everything to do with the end of third party cookies. For those of you who have been living under a big rock. Google announced some time ago that its own browser (Chrome) will follow the other browsers in blocking third party cookies. In the digital eco-system Google has no other choice then to follow the other browsers and put its users first. If it doesn't then Google would lose its reputation which results in losing the attention of the user in the long run. If Google loses the attention of the user it can't sell it to its advertisers anymore which will have a big impact on Google's revenue and bottom line profit. I will not go in the technical details for this but the end of third party will have a major impact on both retargeting and conversion measurement.

The one presentation that stood out the me most was about preserving the future of measurement: 1. gather first party data, 2) enable users to make choices about their data and 3) fill in the gaps with modeled data. These three points give guidance on what we need to do as marketeers. For each step there are different strategies and tools of which Google can give you some. In light of this Google made three important updates: one was to lift some of the requirements of customer match, the second was consent mode going out of beta and the third is a data extrapolation ability in Google Analytics 4 to “fill in the blanks” when people did not opt-in to tracking.

Measurement & Insights

Do you want shiny new measurement features? Then start using Google Analytics 4. Most announcements when it came  to new measurement features were announced for GA 4, whereas Universal Analytics was hardly mentioned during the event. Google Analytics 4 has a tighter integration with Google Ads with the new Advertising Performance Center. In addition is has new ways of measuring media lift as well as cross channel attribution and Incrementality Modeling. With media lift you can measure the uplift of both YouTube and Google Display. With cross channel attribution you can tie back a conversion to the right channel (from Facebook to organic and from Google Ads to email). With incrementality modeling you can understand the actual uplift of media spend to understand what the difference is in performance compared to the baseline of no advertisements.

In Google Ads marketers will get new insights with the updated insights page. This includes three new types of insights: demand forecasts, consumer interest themes, and audience insights. 

E-commerce and automation

Slightly smaller themes but important themes as well were e-commerce and automation. Google is in strong competition with Amazon in getting the attention of the shopper. To fight Amazon Google is expanding e-commerce integrations with other platforms, will show more buying options to its user, added an integration with customer loyalty programs and shopping feeds with YouTube for action. In addition, Google announced new attributes and annotations for shopping.

Automation (a usual) suspect came in to play in various way. Google announced Target ROAS for Discovery and video action campaigns and a wider roll out for performance max campaigns.

For those of you who are looking for a quick list of the all the new features from this year, here it is:

- Wider roll out for Performance max campaigns;

- Expanded eligibility for customer match;

- Shopping feeds for YouTube for action;

- Target ROAS for Discovery and video action campaigns;

- Image extensions are now out of beta;

- More insights features (consumer interest insights);

- New cross channel and uplift measurement features;

- New Google shopping annotations (shipping & returns);

- New attribute tags like Black-owned business;

- More ways to show in store pick up (store / curbside / later);

- New ecommerce integrations (WooCommerce, GoDaddy and Square);

- Merchant loyalty program integration;

- Travel: Hotel booking extensions and vacation rentals.