AI Essentials and Creative Performance

As you’ve seen, the AI Essentials help you put the right foundations in place to supercharge your marketing with Google AI today. One important point is to: "Prioritize creative performance: aim for quality and quantity of inputs, utilize the AI Essentials to generate assets at scale, and then evaluate and optimize." This point is key because creative assets are more important to performance than ever.¹ According to NCS, your creative is responsible for 49% of the total sales impact of advertising. And customer expectations are also higher than ever. At every touch point, consumers expect highly relevant, personalized experiences from the brands they engage with.

AI-powered solutions can help deliver the creative at the speed, quality and quantity required to resonate with your customers today. 

Here’s a deep dive on that point, to ensure you’re driving creative performance at scale, with the AI Essentials.

Provide quality and quantity — Give Google a variety of inputs in order to find out what works. From a strong website, to image assets or your business logo, ensure you share a range of on-brand creative elements.

• Build a website with diverse, relevant landing pages that act as the source of truth for your brand. Search and Performance Max are able to pull information, such as your business logo and name², as well as visuals to build new creative assets. More than ever, outdated information can undermine your campaign—so it’s important the input is accurate, specific, and recent. Make sure to deprecate old websites and domains. And of course, you can choose not to use your websites as a source for AI-powered asset creation.
• Aim for quality and quantity: include a range of headlines and descriptions so Google AI can test different combinations and find what works best. This will help ensure each ad group in your Search campaign has at least one responsive search ad with 'Good' or 'Excellent' Ad Strength.³ 
• Add image assets⁴ to your Search ads to visually showcase your offerings, or enable dynamic image assets to let Google AI automatically select the most relevant images from your landing pages and append them to your ads.

Generate at scale — Google AI helps you build out better assets, faster, and at scale. Accelerate the creative process by partnering with Google AI-powered solutions.

Generate net new:

• Accelerate the creative process with the new asset generation capabilities in Performance Max. You can generate new headlines, descriptions, and lifestyle images that are relevant and unique to your business—all right in the Google Ads UI.

Augment existing assets:

• Enhance your existing product imagery with Product Studio, in Merchant Center Next. It’s an easy way for you to update your product images, making them relevant for a variety of customers, product offers, and a variety of ad formats. 

• Create a video in all orientations: at least one vertical, one horizontal, and one square.⁵ If you don't have any, you can make them in the video creation tool.⁶ Google AI intelligently flips your original video format and creates videos in new aspect ratios, and Trim video can create bumpers from longer clips.

• Enable automatically created assets in both Search and Performance Max to keep text ads fresh. Informed by the ads that are already performing well, automatically created assets will constantly generate new text ads to better match customers’ unique context and intent, while staying true to your business and offerings.

Evaluate and optimize — Understand your performance, iterate, and double down on what works. With the right insights, you can build a full understanding of which creative resonates with your audience.

• Share top performing content and asset audience insights with creative teams, to start strong. Both your creative teams, and Google AI, will use these to create new assets for testing.
• Combine your first-party data with Google AI to develop more powerful creative insights and improve the quality of your assets, which can lead to better performance. For example: your creative might perform better if they’re tailored to the stage of the purchase funnel your buyer is at, or even the region they see your ad in.
• Keep an eye on Ad Strength. Ad Strength helps you understand which of your assets are the best performing of that asset type, so you can swap out lower performers with new variations—make sure you’re aiming for both quality and quantity.⁷
• Experiment with your evergreen campaigns. Use the Insights page to understand new trends in performance and run experiments on new ideas, so your brand is putting its best foot forward at all times: with both evergreen and seasonal creative.

 

 

1. According to NCS, your creative contributes 49% of the total sales impact of advertising. Source: NCS Solutions, 5 Keys to Advertising Effectiveness, 2023.
2. Advertisers that show a business logo and name with their Search ads see an average of 8% more conversions at a similar cost per conversion. Source: Google internal data, Global, 3/9/2023 - 3/22/2023.
3. Advertisers who improve ad strength for their responsive search ads from 'Poor' to 'Excellent' see an average of 12% more clicks and conversions. Source: Google internal data. Impact will vary by advertiser, and Google cannot guarantee this or any other uplift. 
4. Advertisers can see a 6% increase in click-through rate on average when image assets show with their Search ads. Source: Google internal data, Global, 4/2/2023 – 4/29/2023. Impact will vary by advertiser, and Google cannot guarantee this or any other uplift.
5. Advertisers that included at least 1 video of each orientation (horizontal, vertical, and square) to their Performance Max Campaigns delivered 20% more conversions in YouTube compared to horizontal videos alone. Source: Google data, Global, November 2022.
6. Advertisers that included at least one video in their Performance Max campaigns saw an average increase of 12% in total conversions. Source: Google data, Global, November 2022.
7. Advertisers who improve Ad Strength for their responsive search ads from "Poor" to "Excellent" see 12% more conversions on average. Source: Google Internal Data. Date range: Feb 28, 2023 to Mar 1, 2023.