With generative AI changing how people search the web, advertisers are rightfully concerns at the potential impacts on their ad placements, and how they’ll be able to maximize their ads within this new paradigm.
Google’s now offering a new option to cater to this, with “AI Max for Search campaigns,” which aims to help marketers better align with AI-guided queries, and place their promotions in relevant slots.
The process essentially seeks to automatically expand your search keyword matches to relevant terms related to your target queries. And as AI guides users towards these terms, that’ll help to ensure your promotions maintain relevance, even for expanded queries that you hadn’t thought of.
As explained by Google:
“You can power up your performance by expanding your reach into new queries that you weren’t accessing before – all while getting the granular controls and reporting transparency you need. The data already shows that advertisers that activate AI Max in Search campaigns will typically see 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS. For campaigns that are still mostly using exact and phrase keywords, the typical uplift is even higher at 27%.”
So, the process essentially enables Google’s AI targeting systems to expand your keywords to relevant terms related to your business and offerings. And as AI-guided search advances, it’ll also continue to match your terms as guided by user search trends.
“For example, imagine you own an apparel brand and want to promote a new summer line. If someone searches for “colorful midi dresses for spring and summer”, your campaign with only exact match keywords like “red midi dress” would’ve missed them. And even if you had it as a broad match keyword, AI Max can ensure your ad stays relevant by intelligently adapting your ad content to match the query.”
It’s a good solution, though it doesn’t cater for the loss of web traffic that sites are likely to see due to Google’s in-stream search AI overviews, which summarize answers based on data scraped from websites. That’s clearly going to tank a lot of websites’ traffic, but for promotions, this new, automated solution, which uses data from Google search trends, could offer an alternative to keep your placements more relevant.
In addition to this, Google’s also looking to offer AI customizations for your promotions, so they better match the context of each placement.
“Under the “asset optimization” panel in AI Max for Search campaigns, text customization – formerly known as “automatically created assets” – helps you easily generate new text assets, like headlines and descriptions, based on your landing page, ads, and keywords. And our ability to generate assets that feature clear calls-to-action and unique selling points has improved. Pair this with final URL expansion to send users to the most relevant pages on your website.”
So now, you’ll be able to get your promotions into evolving search trends, and match each query with more relevant descriptions, without you having to do anything more than upload your original assets.
Which is another step towards fully-automated ad campaigns, which Meta is also exploring, using smarter matching based on AI to customize and refine your ad process.
That still feels a little uncertain, putting the trust of your branding efforts into the hands of machines. But given the way that AI tools work, by ingesting vast masses of data, then translating them into relevant content, it should, at least theoretically, deliver better results.
So long as it all works as it should, and Google is clearly confident that it will provide a better user and advertiser experience in many cases.
In addition to this, Google’s also adding new geographic controls for AI Max campaigns, as well as brand controls, at both the campaign and ad group level, so can specify the exact brands you want your ads to be associated with.
Google’s also adding a new URL parameter, which will provide more visibility into search terms across all match types, while it’s also rolling out reporting improvements to both Search and Performance Max over the next few weeks.
“Headlines and URLs in the search terms report give you a clearer view into customer ad journeys. And improved asset reports show you how your assets are performing against KPIs like spend and conversions, not just impressions.”
Some handy, technical improvements to Google’s ad offerings, and as AI discovery becomes more commonplace, options like these will become more common, and more valuable, as a means to keep your promotions relevant.