Google’s annual marketing event, Google Marketing Live 2024, put a lot of emphasis on upcoming AI products and features, especially Search Generative Experience (SGE), which is now called AI Overviews.
Ads within AI Overviews are being tested in the US only on queries that it believes the answers generated will be useful to the user, Google said. This will primarily focus on business verticals and roll out to narrower categories such as insurance and fintech teams as the product emerges.
As AI Overviews expand more broadly, PPC advertisers must adapt their strategies to remain competitive in the evolving paid search landscape.
This article explores the impacts on advertisers and lays out key tactics for navigating this AI-driven future, including adopting broad match, value-based bidding, multi-channel measurement, and leveraging peak performance campaigns and demand generation.
How will AI Overviews affect advertisers?
The biggest concern for advertisers, arguably, is the expected drop in site traffic if customers no longer need to click through to a website for information.
Remarketing lists and audience groups will decrease. For publishers, advertising revenue will decrease if fewer people visit their pages.
1. Embrace the broad party
Once AI Overviews start incorporating ads, adopting broad match keywords is key to ensuring it’s effective for advertisers.
Broad matching and audience targeting will identify potential customers based on their search behavior and intent. Many have seen a decrease in the efficiency of phrase matching over the past year, and it seems that most of Google’s engineering resources are being poured into broad matching algorithms.
Many brands are still wary of this type of match due to its historical performance and the headaches that broad match and modified broad match have caused over the past 15 years.
However, Google has indicated that the phrase is no longer a priority and that scalability will only be possible through broad matching.
In most verticals, they should be rolling out slowly, testing in small batches and hardening negative lists.
Dig Deeper: Why it’s time to re-evaluate your match type and bid strategy
2. Adopt value-based offerings
To get the most out of AI overviews, you need to have the right bid in addition to broad match. Don’t get hung up on the idea of possible traffic loss on landing pages until you have data to back it up.
In many cases, a drop in site traffic will result in more engaged/qualified users coming to the site and completing an action due to the bid strategies set up.
Value-based bidding will use the most data to find the right users looking to take the intended action at the right time.
Dig Deeper: Value-based bidding: Why it’s key to boosting your Google ads
3. Take a triangulated measurement approach
Measuring success remains a top priority for advertisers. Leveraging multiple measurement sources (ideally three) is key to understanding performance, optimizing in real-time, and maximizing the efficiency of media plans and budgets.
Data-driven attribution, on-platform measurement testing (such as match testing, conversion lift or similar) and larger channel measurement (ie media mix models) should ‘use together to discern the effectiveness of campaigns.
One of the assumptions surrounding AI overviews is that click-through rates will be lower. Therefore, static impression share and measurement of paid media lift, especially in video or non-search placements, will be key to budget planning.
Dig Deeper: Overhauling Google’s attribution model: 3 solutions for advertisers
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4. Leverage Peak Performance and Demand Gen campaigns
Paid search status is no longer defined as text ads only. Paid search, as a category on Google, includes Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and anywhere in the Google ecosystem that someone can search.
Outside of Google, customers are searching more than ever on Amazon, retail media networks, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit and dozens of other places.
To remain competitive in the search landscape, Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns will be primary line items in most media plans.
The level of automation they offer and the strong algorithms that drive these campaigns will help find customers wherever they are online.
Combined with value-based bidding, these campaigns will feed AI Insights to match consumer queries with the best audience signals and conversion actions.
Dig Deeper: How to reach new audiences with cross-platform search advertising
5. Push for transparency
As advertisers, it will be our job to continue to advocate for deeper levels of reporting in both Performance Max and Demand Gen. This is crucial to push Google to be more transparent, but also so that brands can use multi-channel learning to do it smarter. decisions across all their advertising platforms.
Especially since Google’s AI Overviews continue to give dangerous or incorrect answers to queries, we should have full access to query reports to know where our ads are being served and how our content is appearing on our landing page. search destination.
Google must also publish deeper levels of peak performance and demand generation reporting to show where ads are being served to better understand performance and monitor search and video partner networks.
Preparing for AI overviews
The future of paid search is clearly shifting to embrace AI. It’s an exciting time to be in this space.
As Google is setting the parameters for success, navigating how to make value-based bidding, broad matching, peak performance and demand generation work specifically for your brand will be critical to success and also a long process.
Delaying any of the above steps will likely lead to poor performance, so it’s time to get on the train as it picks up speed.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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