What marketers can expect as Google rolls out conversational AI in search ads
Google today (Jan. 23) is rolling out a previously announced conversational experience powered by its Gemini AI model in Google Ads, per details shared with Marketing Dive. In early tests of the tool, advertisers have built higher quality search campaigns with less effort, increasing Ad Strength scores that measure relevance, quality and diversity of ad copy, per Google.
The conversational experience enables advertisers to generate relevant ad content, including creative and keywords, from a website URL. It was first announced last May during the company's Google Marketing Live event. Beta access is now fully available to English-language advertisers in the U.S. and U.K., with a global rollout to all English-language advertisers beginning in the next few weeks.
“I found the conversational experience very easy to use. It helped me create even more high-quality ads with ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’ Ad Strength, which has further improved the performance of my campaigns,” said Tom Foster of U.K. ad services company Page1, in a statement.
Small business advertisers that use the conversational experience in Google Ads are 42% more likely to publish search campaigns with "Good" or "Excellent" Ad Strength, while advertisers who improve ads from "Poor" to "Excellent" see 12% more conversions on average, according to Google data.
In response to advertiser concerns about creating images for campaigns, Google will add, over the coming months, a capability for the conversational experience to suggest images using generative AI and images from landing pages. All images created with generative AI in Google Ads will be invisibly watermarked with SynthID and will include metadata to indicate that it was generated with the technology, which still faces concerns about transparency.
The rollout of the conversational experience in Google Ads is the company's latest move to capitalize on growing interest in generative AI in advertising. The company in November rolled out AI features in its Performance Max ad product as a beta to all U.S. customers, before launching Gemini, which it has described as its "most capable and general [AI] model" yet.
The impact of generative AI on Google and the advertising market is expected to be significant. An estimated 84% of queries on Google Search will be boosted by generative AI, eventually impacting more than $40 billion per year in ad revenue, according to data that marketing platform BrightEdge shared with Marketing Dive. Healthcare, e-commerce and B2B technology industries are estimated to be impacted the most by the technology.
“Google’s AI-powered SGE is the biggest technological shift that our industry has seen to-date,” said Jim Yu, founder and executive chairman of BrightEdge, in a statement. “This moment in time marks an earth-shattering inflection point for the marketing industry in particular, which has relied on organic search strategies to reach customers and sell products since the invention of digital marketing. Understanding how a brand is exposed to SGE is not just a matter of curiosity for marketers — it’s one of survival.”
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