B2B Marketing’s AI Future: Insights from Google Marketing Live 2024

Are you ready for a new era of online advertising on Google?

That’s what Google Marketing Live 2024 promised. The company announced changes that will reshape the way businesses reach and engage with their target audiences. From generative AI that streamlines creative production to immersive ad formats that captivate buyers, Google aims to revolutionise the way businesses connect with buyers.

While some commentators have expressed disappointment in the lack of B2B-specific announcements, the latest features and enhancements show Google marketing solutions’ trajectory. Even if it doesn’t seem relevant now, staying up to date will have a profound impact on your future advertising strategy.

In this article, we'll break down the most significant updates from Google Marketing Live 2024 and their potential impact on B2B advertising. By understanding the implications of these changes, you'll be better prepared and can start thinking about how to incorporate these updates into your marketing strategies.

Changes to Performance Max

The most significant Google advertising news for many B2B marketers is all about Performance Max, which is now the default campaign type for advertisers joining the platform. The updates announced at Google Marketing Live offer more control over your ads, along with increased transparency and greater scalability. 

AI-Powered Images

Google is leveraging generative AI technology in Performance Max so you can more quickly and efficiently create assets that align with your brand. According to Google, advertisers who improve their Performance Max Ad Strength to excellent see 6% more conversions, on average.

One of the common concerns about ad quality with AI is that they’ll be too generic. Besides offering enhanced brand tools, Google is attempting to remedy this problem by using performance data, including your industry, to train their AI tool. As a result, you can use a combination of your data and Google’s to generate images that are more suitable for your audience and market.

Performance Max will also provide you with recommended AI-generated images you can incorporate into your campaigns. If you create assets on an external platform like Canva or Smartly, their newly established partnerships with Google will make it easier for you to export them to Google Ads.  

Because AI makes asset creation faster, you can scale your marketing more successfully and produce quality campaigns more frequently. This ultimately helps you meet your marketing goals, extend your reach, and grow your business. 

Advanced Image Editing

After creating an image in Performance Max, you can change it to fit with the rest of your campaign or experiment with different visual elements. Google’s new editing options allow you to make large and small adjustments, including: 

• Adding and removing objects

• Extending backgrounds

• Adjusting image sizes and aspect ratios

• Changing image orientation

Editing capabilities are also vital for your campaign diversity. They make it easier for you to adapt assets for the different marketing channels you can control with Performance Max, including YouTube, Search, Discover, and Gmail.  

YouTube Ad Placements

Another essential update from Google Marketing Live is the updates they’re making to ad placements on YouTube. More specifically, they’ve changed their placement reporting that allow you to see specifically where your ads appear on the social media channel. This makes you more aware of whether your ads are reaching your target audience. 

If you’re unhappy with your ad placements, Google is offering exclusion options for YouTube. These give you the power to choose whether your ads appear in certain places on the site. By setting up an exclusion, you can stop your ads from showing up in locations where you feel they’re unlikely to generate engagement or have value. 

Additional Performance Insights

The other major developments in Performance Max revolve around understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns. They include: 

• Asset-level reporting, so you can analyse conversion metrics for individual assets

• Conversion lift studies for improved understanding of whether your campaigns are driving conversions or whether those conversions would have happened without them

• A revamped diagnostics experience to aid in troubleshooting various issues, including assets, conversion setup, and billing 

These features all aim to help you identify new opportunities to reach your prospects and achieve better outcomes from your Performance Max campaigns.

New Demand Gen Options

Performance Max took centre stage at Google Marketing Live, but that doesn’t mean that they ignored all the other campaign types. Google is also giving marketers new Demand Gen campaign options and lookalike segments. These additions help you achieve more with visual elements of your campaigns and maximise the value of your ads on YouTube, Shorts, Discover, and Gmail. 

Upgraded Access and Control

First, Google is making it easier to access and scale your Demand Gen campaigns by including them in Display & Vid and Search Ads 360. They’re also adding the option to pin video assets based on your preferences. You can control where your Demand Gen ads appear by sticking them to specific surfaces where you think they’re most likely to reach your audience and increase conversions. 

Lower Requirements for Lookalike Segments

For small B2B companies, one of the more exciting Demand Gen developments has to do with lookalike segments. Google is broadening the availability of this critical feature, which allows you to identify prospects that share characteristics with your existing customers or leads. The lookalike segments available through Demand Gen include: 

• Affinity and in-market categories

• Age

• Gender

• Geography

• Devices 

In the past, companies could only access this feature if they had a list size of 1,000 or more users. Google is lowering that threshold to only 100 users, opening the door to smaller organisations that want to explore insights about their lookalike segments,

AI Enhancements to Search Campaigns

The changes Google is making to Search and Shopping ads are some of the clearest indicators of the company’s direction of travel. While they’re currently of most interest to product-based businesses, B2B professionals should take note of Google’s approach to giving customers a more immersive experience that helps them fully explore their options. 

Personalised Recommendations

The era of hyper-personalised advertising comes closer with Google introducing AI-powered personalised recommendations. Although they’re currently in the testing phase, Google believes these experiences will improve the buyer's journey, especially for large or complex purchases. 

With this new tool, a user who enters a search term and clicks on an ad will enter a guided shopping experience. The AI will ask them questions and might give them the chance to provide a photo for context. It then reviews their responses and recommends a solution that seems to best meet their needs. The hope is that this experience will simplify the customer’s purchasing decision and help them connect with the right products or services. 

Ads in AI Overviews

If you’ve used Google lately, you might have noticed the “AI Overview” feature that now appears at the top of many users’ results pages. The overview, previously known as Search Generative Experience (SGE), summarises the results of the user’s query and tries to give them a quick response to their question. 

In the future, Google will integrate Search and Performance Max ads directly into these overviews. If your ad applies to the user’s query and the information provided by the SGE, it will have the chance to appear within the AI Overview. Google will label these ads as “Sponsored” to distinguish them from organic or AI-generated content. 

These ad placements are automatic, so you don’t have to go through any extra steps to put them into place. If your ad meets Google’s requirements and aligns with the AI Overview, this will serve as another opportunity for potential customers to learn about your brand and explore your offerings. 

Expanded Brand Tools

For B2B marketers focused on brand awareness, Google Marketing Live presented two solutions that could help spread the word about your company. The first is to take advantage of their new visual brand profile option. You can create a profile that tells your company’s story and shares images, videos, and promotions that you select. 

The second brand tool is the ability to upload your brand guidelines to Performance Max. When you do, Google’s AI tool will take your company’s specified colours, font, and other characteristics and use them to generate ads that more clearly reflect your brand. 

You’ll also have the option to upload example images to Google’s generative AI. It will use them as a reference and generate new images that carry through your visual style. This enables you to establish more brand consistency within your advertising.

Streamlined Data Management

Data is the heart of all your B2B marketing strategies, and Google Marketing Live addressed new ways to approach data management within the platform. Most importantly, they announced that Google Ads Data Manager is now available to everyone.

With Data Manager, you can use first-party data more effectively. Even better, you can connect it to other solutions like Salesforce, allowing you to get results from tools and features like enhanc and Customer Match. 

Sometimes, your potential customers are engaging with your business without you realising it. These prospects are valuable because they’ve already shown an interest in your business, and finding ways to re-engage them is crucial. To help you with that effort, Google is rolling out a new feature called Google-engaged audiences. 

This is a new data segment featuring the people who visited your website from the Google search results page or ads on Google surfaces. Identifying these key members of your target audience helps you draw them back to your site and encourages them to follow through with a purchase. 

Improved Insights and Analysis 

For some marketers, the most appealing aspects of Google Marketing Live were the ones that would empower them to make more informed decisions. The presenters shared details about their plans for deeper, more meaningful insights, including: 

• AI-generated insights: The generative AI technology within Google Ads will create insight cards that highlight trends and changes in your data. The cards will explain these points and make recommendations to help improve your performance. 

• Faster reports: Digging down into your data on Google Ads and Search Ads 360 takes time. Google is rolling out a new functionality that allows you to enter a simple prompt to filter your data and build reports more rapidly. 

• Measurement Diagnostics: The Measurement Diagnostics hub will include personalised recommendations for your measurement setup in Google Ads and Campaign Manager 360. You’ll be able to see your measurement durability and readiness, allowing you to build and activate first-party data. 

• Competitor benchmarking: With a new feature in Google Analytics 4, you can see how your marketing performance compares to similar businesses. With this information, you can think more strategically about your marketing strategies and ensure you spend your money and resources wisely. 

• Campaign Manager integration: Another change to Google Analytics 4 is the ability to integrate with any linked Campaign Manager 360 accounts. This will give you a deeper understanding of your performance across the funnel and help you bring non-Google campaign data into Analytics 4.

Gaining access to these different actionable data can ultimately improve your campaign performance across the Google ecosystem. 

Get Up to Speed With Google Marketing Live

Some marketers might feel discouraged by Google Marketing Live 2024 because of its lack of emphasis on B2B companies. It’s true that the event didn’t present any innovations that are specific to the B2B space, but don’t take that as a reason to tune them out. As the world’s largest search engine and ad platform, Google’s updates should always be of interest. 

Don’t let the ever-evolving world of Google Ads overwhelm you. If you want to maximise your online advertising potential, 1827 Marketing is here to help. Our team of B2B advertising experts will work with you to create a tailored strategy that leverages the latest Google Ads features and drives results. Book a demo to find out more.