Google Marketing Live 2024: Key updates to Google Ads focused on AI

This year, Google introduced 30 product updates for Google Ads. Although not all of them were mentioned during the presentation, there was one main theme of the updates: artificial intelligence (AI). Most product updates can be categorized by the main components of Google Ads: creative, media and measurement.

After the event, I had time to digest these platform announcements and really think about how to use them as an advertiser, or at least what these updates could mean in a broader marketing context.

🚀 Here are my top product updates I'm looking forward to in 2024.

On the creative front, Google announced several updates specifically related to ad creatives and functionality for advertisers. These include: AI-powered image editing, new standard brand guidelines, animated promotional images for Demand Gen campaigns and integrations with creative platforms.

In terms of timing, not everything that has been announced is available immediately. According to Google, the new standard brand guidelines will be rolled out in the coming months.

• 📌 During the live broadcast, Philipp Schindler's demo with generative AI technology was one of the most exciting moments. It pushed the imagination around non-traditional ways of searching and interacting to find new information.

🚀 Some major media ads within Google Ads include: shopping ads that will appear in Google Lens and Circle to Search, search and shopping ads that will appear in AI Overviews, creating conversational campaigns and new loyalty promotions.

Similar to creative ads, not all of them go live right away. Shopping ads and loyalty promotions will be rolling out over the next few months in visual search results.

• 📌 On the measurement side, I thought there would be more hype around the measurement improvements, but there was only one brief mention of more detailed reporting on Performance Max campaigns.

🚀 More detailed measurement announcements include: asset-level reporting in Performance Max, Performance Insights in Merchant Center Next, new audience signals in App campaigns, new measurement diagnostics hub, and attribution of marketing mix models.