Artificial Intelligence

Google Ads Rolls Out a Useful AI Update for Brand Keyword Matching

Keyword Match Types and the logic that goes into matching them to Search Terms has been evolving and changing for years. The saying goes “Exact Match is no longer Exact”, with Google continuously trending toward less precise targeting, instead leaning on machine learning to widen the scope of keyword targeting to include longtail and new search terms that can’t be predicted.

The latest announcement from Google includes 4 key changes that will have PPC advertisers changing the way they work with their brand and the unique search terms in that sphere.

1. Mispelled search terms are becoming easier to manage! If you’ve ever struggled to add negatives of all the potential mispells of a brand term, this AI-driven update means advertisers need only add the core brand term. AI will ensure that mispells are included.
2. Brand Exclusions across ALL keywords and DSA campaigns are rolling out, expanding the Performance Max feature to core campaign types.
3. Additional suggestions for Brand keywords and search terms, which turns a Broad Match keyword into a wider brand “sphere” targeting-signal, allowing for “Brand Generic” keywords to filter through more often.
4. Previously un-trackable “Other” search terms will now start showing, giving advertisers more direct control over targeting and exclusions – this last one allows PPCers to “rein in” the expanded targeting that the expansion caters to.

All of this trends towards more consolidation in Google Ads campaign structure, encouraging less fragmentation between Brand and Non-Brand campaigns, joining them up to act as a “Messy Middle Search Campaign”.

Automatically Created Assets Are Coming To Performance Max

Google has started testing its automatically created assets feature on Performance Max campaigns

Performance Max is continuing to be Google’s favourite test-bed, with Google now testing “automatically created assets”. By using advanced AI generative process, this feature takes advertiser’s already-uploaded text & image assets to create something new.

If you’re familiar with Google’s Responsive Display Ads, or Discovery Ads, you’ll understand how this works: Google will “mix and match” text and visual assets together, in order to create visual ads (similar to Display ads) to increase visibility of your ads across networks outside of Search & Shopping. As usual with Performance Max, advertisers can choose to let “the machine” handle decision making here, although how closely these “auto-assets” will adhere to brand guidelines remains to be seen…

Search Generative Experience

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is finally here!

Well, kind of. On May 25th 2023 Google announced SGE, which added “AI” results to the top of some searches, which is powered by Google Gemini (formerly Bard).

The initial rollout was to users who had opted in and were signed into their Google accounts.

Google I/O Post-Game Update: The Latest Advancements In AI For Google Ads

This year’s Google I/O showcased how the latest advancements in AI can help “boost creativity”, and generally raise the bar for productivity. Google also reaffirmed their objective in building and deploying AI responsibly (we’ll let you decide what to make of that last bit).

Some new products and variants within the Google AI landscape were promoted, such as the new search generative experience (SGE) that will make search engines more of a conversational piece while connecting users to the information, services and products they desire, via “Bard” – this will expand and enhance new and existing apps such as Google Workplace, Maps, Lens and more .