Growing Ecommerce – The Retail Growth Podcast
Feed your growth mindset. Ecommerce is growing, and so are the challenges and opportunities for online retailers. In the Growing Ecommerce podcast, Mike Ryan and other smec experts are joined by industry leaders in ecommerce, digital marketing, and data science. By sharing business trends, practical solutions, and best practices, this podcast helps online retailers solve the challenges of tomorrow.
Growing Ecommerce – The Retail Growth Podcast
Google Marketing Live Recap: AI Overviews, PMax reporting, AI Max, and more
Google is positioning AI at the center of its advertising ecosystem with substantial changes to search, shopping, and campaign management. The new "PowerPack" approach combines Performance Max, Demand Gen, and AI Max for search campaigns, though questions remain about how these components will work together without cannibalizing each other.
• AI Overviews and AI Mode represent massive shifts in search, with Google generating answers directly and using "query fanning" to search multiple queries behind the scenes
• Ads will be integrated directly into AI Overviews and AI Mode conversations, changing how users interact with advertising
• "Agentic" shopping experiences allow Google's AI to make purchases without users visiting websites, potentially transforming e-commerce
• Smart Bidding Exploration allows Google to miss ROAS targets by 10-30% to explore new queries, though the benefit to advertisers remains unclear
• New channel-level performance reporting for PMAX provides visibility into which channels and ad types drive results
• Enhanced New Customer Acquisition features offer more granular exclusion options for existing and warm traffic
• Asset Studio and Product Studio provide new creative tools for building and managing assets
• Commerce Media Suite introduces retail media network capabilities, allowing retailers to make first-party audiences available
• Three new AI Experts (Ads, Analytics, and Marketing Advisor) aim to provide conversational assistance for campaign management
Visit smarter-ecommerce.com to access resources like our State of PMax report, our brand versus non-brand PMax script, and our new PMax script to help understand channel performance reports.
Welcome to another episode of Growing Ecommerce. I am one of your hosts, mike Ryan, head of e-commerce insights here at Smarter Ecommerce. Our other host, chris, can't join us this week, but we'll both be back in the studio recording again next week. In the meanwhile, I'm going to take advantage of this opportunity and offer a deep dive into all the news from Google Marketing Live and Google IO. Well, I won't say all the news. Let's say a selection of the most interesting things, because it's already very ambitious what I want to get through. But let's see where we can go.
Speaker 1:The question sort of arises where to start with covering so many updates and pieces of information. I'm going to follow Google's lead a little bit here and divide this up into the way they divide things up. So get ready for this. It's a thrilling agenda. The sections here will be power pack If you don't know what the power pack is yet, you're so lucky, but unfortunately you still. You will know soon Followed by future of search we're going to spend a lot of time there Future of videos and apps, future of creative, future of data and measurement and, last but not least, certainly agentic experiences. I've been saying the word agentic for a while now and I still hate it every time. But yeah, let's get into the details here. Yeah, without further ado, let's jump in. So Google IO if you're not familiar with it, in case you're wondering what we're talking about with IO and GML. Google IO is their annual developer conference, tech conference very tech heavy and GML is their advertising conference. You know they call it Marketing Lab, but that's ads when you're talking about Google. And so these are their showcases of really what's coming, not only the rest of the year, but even the full 12 months ahead the direction of travel, the biggest trends, and this time these conferences had AI written all over them. Just to give you again the themes that were covered at Google Marketing Lab, they include AI data strength, ai content strength, ai performance strength and then, lastly, the word agentic, simply the word agentic. So these were their key themes for the for the year. Um, every single one of them hammering home this ai topic and also that word strength a lot. So let's dig into that.
Speaker 1:I actually I was invited to mountain View this year for Google Marketing Live. I had some other commitments so I couldn't attend, but you can. Therefore, you can count on me that I'm offering a fully neutral, third-party, unbiased perspective on all these topics. I'll tell you what I liked, I'll tell you what I didn't like, what I think is going to work, what's maybe not going to work. But hold on just one second here Bringing my notepad into clearer view.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I mentioned that IO is the technology or kind of developer conference and this year I felt like it was really intended by Google as a show of force, was caught flat-footed by the rollout of ChatGPT and that Bing was much faster to act very aggressive and Bing was in a position and Microsoft, to make Google kind of dance here a little bit. And a feeling that maybe innovation has stalled at Google or they should be the leaders here, in a front-runner position, and I think that they really want to show that they are fully up and running here, that they do have the best and deepest resources, that they are the most capable. So some of that show of force moments. They launched, or they're launching, a new video model. Yeah, vo3 or VEO3, I don't even remember how I'm supposed to pronounce that, but that's their big video model which will now include audio, and I've seen some of the outputs. It's incredibly realistic, it is quite impressive. Also, imogen4, their latest image generation model and DeepThink, a new reasoning model that they claim is state-of-the-art Really looking forward to trying that out. But it was really an assault on the AI senses across the board at IO. And then they carry that through the next day with Google Marketing Live, which is, you know, just kind of following it, um, everything that they're doing here with AI, um and, broadly speaking, the way their business is structured with these extended services like maps over here, um. So I think these two conferences they're two, they're very much two sides of the same coin. Um, io, really a broader offering across, uh, all sorts of different um, all sorts of different product lines, like maps and google office and, um, like this, this very broad portfolio of things that they have, um, which are monetized to different degrees. But then GML is really the core monetization side of this, because most of Google's revenue is ad-driven and ad-related and so in many ways that's kind of for investors, I think, where the rubber hits the road. The rest is certainly important from sort of a posture and a market position standpoint, but a lot of it represents in some ways more cost centers than revenue streams, and GML is where they show how they're going to actually make money off of these massive investments.
Speaker 1:So, without further ado, let's dig into the first of several themes here the PowerPack. So this replaces Google. Last year rolled out something called the PowerPair at Google Marketing Live and that was the combination of Performance Max technology and classic search campaigns with Broadmatch. This was kind of the thing that they were proposing as the way forward, um, and now they've they've changed that a bit. The power pair excuse me, the power pack is a performance max plus demand gen campaigns plus the new AI max for search campaigns technology. Um, uh, this feels really absurd saying all this stuff out loud. I, I admire their team for committing and going forward with power pack, um, and they even have these cool infographics and stuff to go with it. But the idea I'll, I'll. I'll let them speak for themselves because I would have a hard time describing this. They say that this kind of trinity or trio or trilogy of technology. They say this is built for the new era of search and multimodal experiences. When we talk about the future of search as Google envisions it, what they mean by that. But this should be an AI-compatible, forward-looking way of having this marketing campaign-type stack. So PMax I think we all know by now. It's been around for a few years, demandgen. We're getting increasingly comfortable with it's this mid-funnel equivalent to PMAX and AI Max for search. Maybe we'll spend a moment talking about that. This was previously known as Search Max. They decided that it needs to be called AI Max for whatever reason, but I think it is smart what they've built here.
Speaker 1:In the past I've talked about PMAXification, which is this kind of movement for Google to take all of their existing campaign types and roll them up into PMAX campaigns from an ad inventory perspective and even migrate those campaign types or replace those campaign types directly with PMAX. They've taken a different kind of strategy here with search. We know that they focus grouped the idea of migrating search campaigns to PMAX a couple of years ago. I think the results of that focus group and those surveys were very bad and I also think it represents a very large and complex task for Google to do a migration like that. I think it's a bit too risky for them. So it's very smart what they did instead. They have, instead of sending search to PMAX, they're bringing PMAX to search.
Speaker 1:So these features that we'll recognize from PMAX, like the keywordless technology and also the DSA, the dynamic search-like components and also the DSA, the dynamic search-like components, where they're doing final URL expansion. They're taking these little technologies or bits out of PMax and inserting them directly into search campaigns. So this strategy so far seems to be quite successful, because I'm not hearing a lot of criticism of it. People seem really open-minded to it. They like the amount of control that's in there. You can really, with a checkbox, select which of these technologies you're using and which not. It kind of works in parallel or on top of your existing search campaigns and it seems like people are pretty happy about this way of integrating the technology. So I think that's smart.
Speaker 1:My bigger concern about what's happening here with the PowerPack is that I just see a huge amount of overlap between these things, because if you have a PMAX campaign that is serving some, some search ads, and then you also turn on AI max in your search campaigns, this seems to me like I don't understand how that overlap or potential conflicts gets resolved. I don't understand how how these two things end up in a genuinely complementary manner with each other. I also think it's white. The demand gen has also become very similar to the asset part of PMAX. They're serving a very similar ad inventory, very similar placements Like demandandja now includes Google Display Network, which was previously in the domain of PMAX. They really serve on a high degree of overlapping inventory, and so I think Google needs to explain through documentation, through best practices. They just have a lot of explaining to do in terms of why should these campaigns not compete with each other? What is the appropriate use case? They're saying like it's the three amigos and everything's good, but I'm just not sure about that, because I just I can't see how these don't compete with each other or potentially cannibalize each other in certain situations, and we've talked about that in the past. We have a whole report that we mentioned on this podcast before, called the State of PMax Report, that looks at some of these interactions. To me, it's only getting more complicated with AI Max in the mix, but otherwise I also I think it's again. I think it's smart the way that they've integrated PMax tech into search, and a good strategy.
Speaker 1:Let's move on from the PowerPack to the future of search, and this hinges on two or new-ish, new and new-ish technologies from Google. One is called AI Overviews, which you've probably heard from by now, and the other one is called AI mode. And just to explain the difference between these. If you search for something in Google, I'm sure you've seen AI overviews a thousand million times by now. Depending on what the query is, google is going to just write a little answer for you at the top and it'll be cited. Query is google is going to just write a little answer for you at the top and it'll be cited um so uh. This is massively rolled out by now and it also seems like like not only just geographically and market wise, but also google seems to be covering more and more and more queries with overviews. They're offering overviews. In my experience maybe it's the way I use Google, but nearly all the time I mean almost everything I search gets one of these little overview answers. And AI mode is newer.
Speaker 1:That is much more like a search GPT or perplexity type experience where you're in more of a chat kind of scenario, but 10 blue links and they're not just at the bottom, they're gone. So you have the chance to do like follow-up kind of conversations. And the core underlying model here is something called query fanning, and what that means is that you will start with a single question or prompt or whatever and Google is going to fan out from there with an expansive set of queries. It could be dozens of different searches that they run and then they'll look at all these different SERPs for you so you don't have to. They'll read these websites for you so that you don't have to and they'll come back with that answer. And then there's even another layer called deep research or deep search I can't remember which, but it's familiar to you probably by now, also from OpenAI, perplexity, grok they all have these deep functions AI, perplexity, grok they all have these deep functions and that can issue. It also relies on query fanning and reasoning model and it will fan out across potentially hundreds of queries.
Speaker 1:A fundamental question or concern that I have about this I feel like back in the day I used to do query fanning myself manually, and so it's fine for me if that's being replaced a bit, but something that I observed from my manual approach to this, because what I would do I would issue, I'd type in a query in Google and I'd see the search results and the articles and whatever that I got there, and if it wasn't quite right, you know, I might do things back in the day like change the word order or substitute a word or just tweak that query a little bit or ask it as a question instead, or whatever I would. I would change the query and see what kind of SERP that delivered and you know, after a while I think you got like kind of a intuitive sense for what do I need to type in here to get the best possible SERP? And my feeling now as a user I bet I'm not alone on this, but I feel like it does it almost doesn't matter why I type into Google search anymore, like if I'm not satisfied with the SERP that I got and I try to kind of remix my search query a bit, I'm probably going to get a nearly identical SERP. It feels very homogenized, like they're not even that concerned with the exact particulars of my query. They're, like you know, they're looking at their assumption of the intent of that or they're kind of comparing it to other searches and you get this kind of samey search, no matter what search you do specifically. And that bugs me, because sometimes there is a meaningful difference in what I'm searching and Google's not recognizing it. And the other thing that I find is that often, due to years and years of SEO work being done out there, you get a lot of like this hub content where, like, I'll have a very specific query in mind and I would love to get an in-depth article about that thing and I would love to get an in-depth article about that thing, but instead there'll be all of this highly ranked hub content that talks about a million different things in there that are kind of and I'm glad in a way that I don't have to do all that anymore.
Speaker 1:I've been enjoying AI-based search. I definitely think AI mode for me as a user sounds right Like. I'm a little bit annoyed by the AI overview so far. They're very I don't really get the purpose of it. Like that's not. I don't go to Google to get this stupid little thing. I go to Google to visit websites or find information. But I think AI, ai mode is an alternative that to me, makes sense because it's more like I just use search, gpt or perplexity differently and I use it more like what AI mode is proposing. So I am looking forward to trying that out.
Speaker 1:But now that we've talked about that a bit, I mean, but now that we've talked about the difference there, what's important is that ads are coming into both of these different properties. So right now, if you see an AI overview. In a classic SERP, there can be ads below it or above it, somehow adjacent, but there will also start being ads inside of the overviews and, similarly, if you're using AI mode, there will be ads inside of your conversation in AI mode. And this is very important because you know there's a lot of questions about what's going on with Google strategy here that the zero-click phenomenon is increasing massively. Traffic is not going to websites anymore the way that it used to, and you could argue that this is pretty problematic, that the best or only way to get traffic out of there is to then have ads displayed. We'll have to see how users really interact with ads inside of overviews and AI mode. Google assures us that it's working just fine and, of course, that's what they say. Let's find out.
Speaker 1:I'm a little skeptical about that. I mean, I do think what's plausible is that someone who is going through this experience of talking with AI that they are more qualified and that they could have a higher conversion rate in the end. On the other hand, I think that when someone has been going through a browsing and interacting and decision-making format in an AI chat, normally that browsing and looking around behavior might be occurring on your website, and this would, of course, present you opportunities to gather analytical data and also to upsell and cross-sell that person I think someone landing on your website scorching hot. That's, on the one hand, attractive, but on the other hand, they might be very mission focused and they might not do any of those impulse buying or that kind of serendipity of browsing your website and seeing your catalog becoming familiar to your brand. It seems much more transactional. And this brings us to the next topic, which is that Google is trying to take direct ownership of that transaction. And this brings us to the next topic, which is that Google is trying to take direct ownership of that transaction, and this will be most problematic perhaps. I mean, we've talked about it on this podcast before.
Speaker 1:I've been saying for years that Google has everything in place needed to build an AI shopping assistant. I think what I didn't imagine a couple of years ago was the computer use side of this, the agentic side of this, as they like to call it. So Google has been working on this computer use model called Mariner for a while, and so these Mariner computer use capabilities are being integrated with AI mode, and there's a couple of use cases here In AI mode, you'll be able to agentically book a ticket or reserve a table at a restaurant. But more to the point for e-commerce is that they're also connecting this with the Google Shopping Graph and all of the structured product data that they have and all of the structured product data that they have, and there will be like a shopping mode inside of AI mode which will help you buy products without visiting websites, and even you can, in the future, say well, I have a price threshold, it's too expensive right now, but Google's agent should buy that for me automatically as soon as the price threshold is met.
Speaker 1:And I think there's different ways that this can play out. There's ways this can play out where people are potentially purchasing in chat, as we've seen, with Perplexity and the traffic never lands on your website at all. And there's also ways where Google can be sending a form of valid bot traffic to you in the form of these agents. And neither of these scenarios are very attractive to e-commerce businesses, of course, because, yeah, I mean you really want to spend time with that human and their attention. Yeah, I mean you really want to spend time with that human and their attention. Their attention is all happening in Google's owned and operated media, not in yours, and so that's definitely pretty concerning right now, but it's so hard to know exactly how this is all going to shake out. What will be the share of people using this? How aggressively will it be promoted by Google? All remains to be determined.
Speaker 1:I think the way they describe their imagined outcomes here is weird. Like, let me just tell you, ads and AIO AI overviews should accelerate the path from discovery to decision by placing your ads directly in responses that are driving higher user engagement and satisfaction. It's hard to just hear that sentence and wrap your head around it, in my opinion. But like accelerate the path from discovery to decision. Okay, like we're talking about the conversion funnel here, right, I don't know if it accelerates, if those ads accelerate that, let's see. But also they suggest that your ads will be placed in responses that are driving high engagement, high user satisfaction. Does that mean that ads won't be placed in others, and how would that be determined? I don't think that that's an accurate statement at all. I think that ads will just be placed in these AI overviews without regard to user engagement or satisfaction. I don't find it credible that there's this dimension to it, and maybe I'm misunderstanding what Google means there your ad as a logical and natural next action to consumers exploring any topic, any topic? I don't think so. But yeah, the idea is that these ads will be quite relevant and personalized and non-intrusive. That is the idea. I think that shopping ads are already, in my opinion, one of the least intrusive ad formats out there, but let's see if some new AI native formats will pop up. It's worth mentioning that your ads can appear in these placements, as far as I know, through standard shopping campaigns, standard search campaigns and PMAX, etc. So I don't think there's a restriction there. All right, that was a beast.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the next part, which is still under the future of search as Google imagines it. It's something called smart bidding, exploration. Search as google imagines it, it's something called smart bidding, exploration, um, and I don't like this feature at all. Um, but you tell me what you think. I'm happy to hear from you sometime about this. Google says that this is the biggest update to smart bidding in a decade, um, and I think that's not true at all. I mean, it depends whose perspective is being taken here, but for advertisers, I certainly don't think that's the case. Um, I think that profit bidding or new customer acquisition bidding. I think that these are much bigger updates to smart bidding than this. So what is it? Let's talk about it.
Speaker 1:They say that this is about increasing query diversity within a given ROAS tolerance. So what does that mean? When you have a search campaign that is optimized for a target ROAS, what will normally happen here is that Google is predicting a conversion likelihood, the conversion rate and the expected conversion value or the revenue. So when it combines these two things, it's able to estimate the value per click on a given query. It'll have X chance of converting with Y value, which an average will result in a certain value per click at a certain confidence interval, which is very important, the confidence interval. And then you know, given that expected value per click, google can bid with an appropriate cost per click, and then these two things will be in relation to each other at your ROAS target, and that's basically the idea.
Speaker 1:Now what happens with smart bidding? Exploration? I think I've talked about this on a previous episode of the podcast, but there's a challenge here, right? Google needs to be maximizing traffic and keywords or queries that are known to convert well, and they also need to be constantly exploring. This is what we talk about. It's exploitation, these kind of sweet spot known um queries, and they also need to be exploring new queries.
Speaker 1:Um, and when you have a rose target in place, um, it's going to have a certain level of conservatism in place because it needs to deliver that. So it needs to have a certain amount of kind of guaranteed quality stuff in there and then it can go around exploring and risking on other stuff. And if you would just lower your return on ad spend target, it wouldn't have the effect of changing that necessarily, because instead it would be looking at that ratio between the cost per click and the value per click. These parameters would just be different and it would be participating in different kinds of queries. But it would also a similar thing would happen between it's like okay, I was at a ROAS of five, I knew, I was sure about a certain amount of the traffic and I was unsure about some of it. At a ROAS of three, I'm sure about this different set of traffic and then I'm exploring over here. But so, like this is different than just changing your ROAS target.
Speaker 1:You have a ROAS target and you're telling Google that they can between 10 and 30%, they can be off. They're allowed to be off and they're not going to be shooting over. This is giving them permission to miss the ROAS target. Your ROAS performance will decrease when you activate this feature, but what will happen is that it can spend more of its attention on that exploration side or, to put it differently, it can spend more of your budget on the exploration side. It can just take more risk, and I guess the use case here is very unconvincing to me. If I'm going to accept 30% lower ROAS, I need to understand very precisely what I'm going to get in return for that, because these are basically queries that Google's just not sure about. They're probably low volume queries. The intent may or may not be high. Google can't model it. They don't have enough data about it. They're too unsure. Normally they would skip it over. So from Google's standpoint, it's very clear why they do this because these are probably low competition, low monetization queries, and now Google is able to monetize more queries by having advertisers opt into this standpoint.
Speaker 1:I don't know how desperate am I for those extra conversions. Is it really worth it? How many will there be? I think they need to make a very clear business case here about what's in it for us. Until that point, it's hard for me to recommend this. It just feels like they're asking us to carry the risk here and I don't really know what comes in return for that. I think to be generous about it like this could be supportive of bootstrapping the future of you know. If they want ads to show up in these AI mode and AI overview where potentially people are asking rather strange or long queries different from the queries we know of the past, google might not have a lot of data about all in AI mode and ads in AI overviews work. I think there is a biggest update to smart bidding in a decade and that framing drives me nuts and I'm a little frustrated to see people repeating it. But yeah, let's see. Also in future of search. Let's keep moving on here.
Speaker 1:There's channel level performance for PMAX. This is a huge one. Actually, I've been working on a script to help make this data even more useful than it is, but in a nutshell, it's really interesting. It shows you the amount of impressions, clicks and conversions that you get in all these different channel and ad type combinations in PMAX. So, for example, you can see the YouTube data, the display data, and not only that, but it'll be segmented by your ads that are feed-based or your ads that are asset-based. And if you read between the lines a little bit, you can figure out that your feed-based display ads well, that must be dynamic remarketing and maybe some dynamic prospecting as well. But you can finally see your dynamic remarketing share and your asset-based display ads well, that must be responsive display ads and, similarly, feed-based search ads. What are those? Oh, those are shopping ads, of course. So it's a little bit weird the way the report is labeled and I've got some problems about it with it, but I think it's a huge step forward for PMAX and for, yeah, it's building some advertiser trust in the channel and, as I mentioned, we're working on a script to help offer even better reporting for that. By the time this podcast airs, the script will be out, so visit our website and check it out.
Speaker 1:They also have some enhancements coming to new customer acquisition. This is a PMAX exclusive and these are cool features. You can, mostly in the form of exclusions, just helping what it means to be returning traffic or warm traffic, so you can exclude existing customers, of course, that was always the case, but you can also exclude people who have been searching for your brand. You can exclude users who have clicked on ads previously on Google or YouTube. You can exclude web visitors, exclude app users and more. So I like this feature a lot. I think it's one of the winners out there and it's very like a checkbox level thing. I'm really loving that Google is starting to roll out like checkbox functionality, checkbox control. That isn't just opting into some new black box, but rather having more control. I really like it, so that's a feature I'm excited about. New customer acquisition is coming to demand gen as well, I should mention, but it's in a more primitive form, like what we see in current campaign types. And one more thing I want to mention I told you just now that you could exclude brand searchers um from your, from your PMAX campaigns.
Speaker 1:Google is working hard to activate this, this uh new, this data point about users who have searched for your brand, um and another place that they're doing that. They're activating this. They're activating this. They're looking at people who have viewed your YouTube ads and they're connecting that with people who are searching for your brand and they're just helping you understand more about YouTube's impact on your brand search. Basically, youtube developing awareness for your brand. So there's a lot of interesting things that they're working on right now. I'm curious a bit how that stuff will work in Europe, because a lot of people in Europe have unlinked their services. So in principle, google is not allowed to let YouTube talk to Google ads talk to search history. But I think they're still doing something on the back end there. I think, yeah, but that's another topic. Let's keep moving on to the future of video and apps. This will be another rather quick one.
Speaker 1:Something I love from here I think is quite interesting at the very least it's coming to demand gen campaigns and PMAX campaigns, and this is interactive shopping or shoppable ads on connected TVs. So basically a QR code will pop up on the screen and you can scan that and see the ad that is featured on your TV. Excuse me, see the product that is featured on your TV on your phone and buy it, and so that's a very interesting technology. I've looked in the past and CTV is a very minor part of PMAX, but I wouldn't mind seeing more CTV on PMAX, especially through kind of innovative formats like this one. So I think that's a real positive.
Speaker 1:They also here's one I don't like quite as much. I'm trying to understand it, but they're rolling out video ads on search and shopping, or more Google surfaces as they call them. This is a PMAX feature, so if you have these video assets available in your PMAX campaign, there's just going to be more chances for these video ads to show in the search engine result page. The search engine result page and the way Google describes this one. They say you can drive discovery with new, brand forward brand discovery ads. I think they tried to fit the word discovery and brand in there a couple times too many. You can drive discovery with discovery ads. They're brand forward brand discovery ads. They're brand forward brand discovery ads.
Speaker 1:It's a little yeah, I don't know, that person was probably tired. I think these people had to write a ton of content around GML, but they can do a better job describing what is really the purpose of these ads. But I don't know. I also think it's a little bit of this sameness where properties are washing together, like YouTube is full of search ads, search is full of video ads. It's just quite interesting. The future of creative.
Speaker 1:I want to talk first and foremost about Asset Studio. This is an interesting new sort of one-stop shop inside Google Ads where you can import or generate assets, and you can also get recommendations on which assets are missing, which could then, of course, lead you to then import or generate those assets. So you know, you get a feeling for your ad strength and how you can improve that, and it looks like a nice little tool. I don't have anything really more to say about right now, cautiously optimistic about it. This reminds me, though, kind of hanging in the window out there a little bit, is a product studio, and I feel like you know product studio lives in merchant center, also a bit in ads. There's always a little bit of a tug of war between merchant center and ads, like what jobs are you supposed to do where? But something that I don't think was discussed at Google Marketing Live maybe you're hearing it here for the first time Product Studio. If you can just search Product Studio API in Google and you'll get a link to this. It's a new beta, closed beta, that they're working on and it looks really interesting. I don't know what features will be available in that API over time. Right now there's some stuff about product titles using AI, and the examples they give look super promising Product titles are hard to get right and also AI approaches to product titles are often not great either, but what they're showcasing, if it really works that way, it looks great.
Speaker 1:Now, yeah, I just mentioned that there's Asset Studio in Google Ads and there's also your brand profile in Google Merchant Center, and I mean, I predicted years back it was maybe a little too early on this, or I was wrong, I don't know, but but it's finally happening. Um, merchant center is expanding a bit to be not just about managing your products, but also managing your brand more broadly, and so this will let you um manage brand images and videos, um promotions, profiles and all this kind of stuff that when someone Google searches your brand, there'll be this little snippet thing over there. There's rich stuff over there which will feature all of this, and you can manage that now straight in Google Merchant Center, which I think is a really nice development as well. Um, straight in google merchant center, which I think is a really nice development as well.
Speaker 1:Um, the next section to talk about is the future of data and measurement. Um, there's a lot in here. I'm not going to talk about most of it. I'm actually the thing that jumped out to me the most, um is something called the commerce media suite and and what this looks like. It's a retail media network tool and basically retailers will be able to make available their first party audiences and also this closed loop measurement attribution that they have on site. And from the brand side, brands will be able to activate those. They'll be able to use a given retailer's audiences in Google Ads targeting and actually across the whole DV landscape, display and video landscape, everywhere in Google Ads, from what I can understand. So that to me is several years too late, but I'm happy to see it. It's here.
Speaker 1:I still think it's insane the degree to which Amazon and Google and everyone, microsoft, they ultimately slept on retail media and allowed Bredio or Croteo, whichever way you say it. They allowed this company on the brink of destruction from third-party cookie deprecation to absolutely own that space, at least for a period of time, and we'll see what happens next. But, um, amazon announced some, some similar activation stuff in the past and google is finally. As soon as amazon did it, then google wakes up, love it. Um, but yeah, this, this would have been super cool, like four years ago, but I'm also, it's super cool today too. Let's see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, like Meridian we've talked about on the show before. That's their marketing mix model that Google has built, and they're piggybacking on that with a scenario planner to help with forecasting or what should you do with your budgets based on your model mixes. There's also stuff going on with Data Manager. There's a new API coming to. Data. Manager Seems like Google is working on maybe a few different new APIs, which is exciting. Manager is all about activating your first party data, your customer mass match lists, all this kind of stuff, um, and they're even. We talked about ad strength a minute ago, which is based on, like, your asset coverage and your ability to serve many different kinds of formats and creatives, and there's a new data strength metric. So another another strength metric to watch, um.
Speaker 1:Last but not least cause I'm running out of time a bit here, I maybe talked a bit too much earlier agentic experiences. We talked a little bit earlier about the shopping agents on the consumer side, but also on the business, the advertiser side, google is working to bring computer use, ai computer use to the forefront as well, with what they call a series of AI experts, and so they're rolling out a portfolio of three AI experts. One is the ads expert, one is the analytics expert and, last but not least, is the marketing advisor, and so the idea is that you can ask when you're in Google Ads, you can ask this agent what is my top performing creative of the year, and it will report that back to you and your analytics expert, for example, this, this is defies belief. Uh, but hold on one sec. I'm not convinced that Google has figured out the use case for these things, or on what planet the people developing these live with. The people developing these live with.
Speaker 1:Not too much offense meant, but listen to this though. They imagine that a user is going to ask which marketing channels are driving the highest converting users, who also engage with our content for longer than five minutes and have been growing over the last four weeks. I don't know, maybe there's a CMO who gives a shit about that question and talks like that, but I don't think so. But the answer to that question is as follows it's a stunner. Over the past four weeks, get this paid search has been the leading channel for acquiring users who both convert at the highest rate and engage with content for over five minutes, and whose effectiveness has been increasing in value. I'm sorry, I'm having too much fun with this, but what are the odds that paid search is the best channel that fits exactly these very weird, very specific criteria that this user inquired about? I'd say the odds are pretty gosh darn high. They just couldn't resist the chance to make this a case study for paid search instead of.
Speaker 1:The reason that I'm making a deal out of this in case you're totally losing me is that I think there's an expectation that these agents need to be trustworthy and independent and neutral, and there's absolutely the opportunity that they are none of those things um, that they're just designed to promote. You know Google Opti score, or you know these auto applied recommendations or whatever else stuff and um, even in Google's case study for this they they provide like the least neutral example I've ever seen. Um, but yeah, I don't know. Let's see how this tech this technology to me is is very experimental Um, where at times I've felt like Google is dragging their feet and very slow to roll out stuff. At other times I feel like they're a little bit too quick. I guess maybe I'm just Goldilocks or whatever. You know, the porridge is too hot. No, the porridge is too cold. I don't know, but like I think about this.
Speaker 1:A couple years back they had or whenever that was, they had a Google Marketing Live. They made a big deal out of conversational campaign creation. Made a big deal out of conversational campaign creation, and I have never heard anyone talk about using that feature or enjoying it or finding value in it. Um, I felt like it was chasing a trend. It. It sounded amazing conversational campaign creation but actually you have a ui already that's well designed, kind of, and that you can click and um, but it's hard to say what's going to happen with these, with these agents and this automated computer use.
Speaker 1:Um, it just remains to be seen. Is it going to be the next clippy, like many people like to joke? Is it going to completely make, um, people's jobs obsolete? I guess it's going to be somewhere in the middle. But if I use, like, the AI features that are embedded in Google Workspace right now, well, I don't, because they're all useless for the most part. I mean, it'll be like summarize this folder for me and it says the most obvious and banal things that you could possibly come up with. So I don't want to be a hater on this, but yeah, sorry, and I missed one Marketing Advisor.
Speaker 1:This is quite an interesting one. It lives in the Chrome browser and it will like, if you're logged into ads and this and that, et cetera, it will kind of connect the dots across different things. So it can, for example, can trouble like, if you notice that you were expecting conversions and there are none, it can like jump in and troubleshoot your tag for you and stuff like that. I mean, it's incredibly promising technology and I think we just have to wait to see. I don't want to overhype or underhype this stuff. Um, I I just I come from sort of a baseline skeptic perspective here, but I also I'm I'm very willing for this to work and for it to be awesome too. Um, I just wonder if it will be so wanted to discuss.
Speaker 1:They're the ones that caught my attention most, and so, yeah, I mean DemandGen, pmax and AIMAX for search, and they insist that this kind of hack is the best possible way of addressing this new and opening up world of search, where search is being reimagined with AI overviews and AI mode. These things are enriched with agents and agentic capabilities, so automated computer use is coming into the mix to help you just search a thousand times instead of just once, and to make purchases and follow prices and stuff without ever having to actually do anything or pay any attention. And they also have some technologies that I'm skeptical of, like smart bidding, exploration, which I think is more designed to just backfill low competition inventory and just help monetize, but is maybe important for tapping these new kinds of of of queries that will start emerging. And yeah, they have some some really nice things going on in terms of interactivity with ads, also virtual try on which we didn't talk about. There's. There's a lot of cool and interesting stuff coming in here. I just think we need to just take the heat out of it a bit and wait and see what's really going to come of these things. It's so hard to predict right now. I think everything will look quite different once again in a year from now. But those are my thoughts.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. As I mentioned, we'll be back in studio me and Chris next week, and in the meanwhile, I encourage you to share this podcast with friends in your professional networks. Leave us a review. We really appreciate all that. The podcast is brought to you by Smarter eCommerce. You can learn more by visiting smarter-ecommercecom, where you can find resources like our State of PMax report, our brand versus non-brand PMax script, or our brand new PMax script, which will help you understand your channel performance report. So thanks again, see you next time.